This Tesla Robotaxi demo video is a mess.
Watch as the car makes a left turn from the wrong lane, ignoring a red light. The safety operator steps in, and the car comes to a stop… right in the middle of the intersection.
Eventually, it completes the illegal turn after blocking traffic for 45 seconds, which raises the question, what exactly is the safety operator there for?
They also have very few cars. There’s like 10 or so of these robotaxis. If you grab 10 human taxi drivers and follow them around for a few months, you’d also expect them to have on average 0 accidents.
I’m not talking about just Tesla. There are quite a few companies that have been operating driverless cars. I think waymo has been doing it for years at this point.
If it were just Tesla I dont think they’d be safer than a human driver.
Any car with an automatic emergency stop feature is safer than an “average human driver”.
That’s a big problem with all these self-driving car statistics: Self driving cars are usually very new and outfitted with top-of-the-line features, while the “human driver” they are compared to drives a much older and cheaper car, often without many of the security features that new cars are required to have and often not even maintained properly. Doesn’t really say much about the driving capabilities of a self-driving car.
Sadly, actually comparable statistics are impossible to find, since accident statistics aren’t usually collected on a per-car-type-and-age basis.