I could buy a car with 3 star crash ratings, and people would be fine with that. I could get in a taxi with a mediocre driver, and people would be fine with that.
Why does the comparison have to be to me driving, in a car like this?
When I'm shopping for a car, it makes sense.
But for public policy discussions, what matters is how the safety ranks against the general population.
The question is whether "Autopilot" is safer than "No Autopilot" ceteris paribus, because if it isn't, then a trivial regulation to make the roads safer with zero downside is to just ban Autopilot.
You can't determine whether Autopilot makes driving safer by comparing miles driven only on highways by Teslas to miles driven across the whole vehicle fleet.
> then a trivial regulation to make the roads safer with zero downside is to just ban Autopilot
That assume almost everyone using autopilot will replace that with manual driving in the same car. Some of them might get cheaper cars or take uber and end up less safe.
And even then, there's lots of stuff you can do to a car that makes it less safe that we don't ban, as long as it's still sufficiently safe.
If anything, increase safety standards. If you want to do something that won't cost extra money then do something to ban oversized cars at the same time...
I get where you’re coming from, and I agree there the needs of public safety policy and self interest don’t always align.
What I mean to say is, when car considering the safety data of any vehicle, it is insufficient to know that the vehicle performs better than whole-fleet.
It’s also necessary to know whether any particular vehicle outperforms others in its class.
One of those without the other is necessary but not sufficient.
More data is almost always better, but I disagree on what's sufficient. If a specific use case ranks moderately high vs. the entire US fleet, then that single piece of data is sufficient.
The driver that's above average but could be more above average isn't where we need to be fixing things. Not when there are millions of drivers that are either hyper-aggressive or senile still on the roads.
A more fair comparison would be: other drivers of similar demography driving other vehicles of similar age and specifications.