This is completely absurd and backwards. Violence on planes (at least, phsycial, weapon-assisted) is basically exclusively the purview of organized ideological groups, it's not like crime in the streets. While I'm not aware of any Sikh group who has ever attempted to hijack a plane, the extremely well established general pattern is exactly that extremist sincere believers in a religion or cause are the most dangerous people on a plain.
Not a hijacking, but also maybe a reason not to give all Sikhs a pass on airport security.
> The bombing of Air India Flight 182 is the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history and was the world's deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001. It remains the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Air India, and the deadliest no-survivor hull loss of a single Boeing 747
I think you misunderstood me. That's exactly what I'm saying. And I'm saying that Sikhs with or without ceremonial blades are no more of a threat than Mormons wearing special underwear.
[edit]
To be more specific: An individual with an extreme belief about anything is as dangerous as an extremist member of a group with extreme beliefs. So the smart thing is to look at the beliefs and extramicy of each person. If you find someone trying to board an aircraft who doesn't care if they make it to the end of their flight, that is a security problem.
I think the best and easiest idea is to prevent people from carrying weapons on airplanes. Taking over an airplane with special underwear is not a realistic threat.
In contrast, trying to interview and run background checks on every person boarding a plane to figure out if they are an extremist on a mission or not is (a) much more invasive, and (b) much less likely to work out. Especially when you actually don't want to prevent fundamentalists from flying on planes (I don't think preventing some major evangelical church leader or some radical rabbi from flying would even be constitutional, and clearly not a popular move if attempted).
Note that I am not at all advocating for extra security targeting of Sikhs or any other such religious or ethnic targeting. I am just saying that no one should be allowed to carry a weapon on board a commercial airplane, for any reason.
Notably in India, there have been a few times where Sikhs have been at the head of violent revolts - and a few times where they have been targeted by violent purges/genocides.
They’re generally pretty chill, but they aren’t pacifists.
Indeed, I didn't know about this incident, thanks for sharing it.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that Sikhs are more or less likely than any other group to be pacifist. I was saying we shouldn't even be having this discussion, and simply scan people for weapons, and use things like actual random screening to help as needed. And that religious reasons for carrying weapons are not a valid excuse.
I'd say that incident falls under political extremism, not religious extremism. Which is all the more reason to check people's individual beliefs rather than their race or ethnicity. Anyone from any background can be radicalized; some formatting is more prone to it than others. Sikhs, as you say, are pretty chill. Not being pacifist doesn't mean you want to go out and kill anyone.
scuse me, is there another major religion in modern times whose popular leaders sanctify taking the lives of disbelievers to get to heaven? I'm waiting, I'd love to hear about another one.
@defrost: I apparently can't respond directly to you. It's a mistake to ascribe a singular focus to someone you don't know. There may be one out of ten thousand people in any group who might want to cause chaos or violence, and they may very well have their own reasons. It would be absurd, though, to not acknowledge that there are some "gospels", if you will take that term in the broadest sense possible, or sub-religions, which preach that violence is a path to salvation, and which tend to recruit people for the purpose of violence. There are also some political movements which fill the same vacuum for an aimless, angry human soul without religion.
It is not that I have a singular focus on one religion nor one political movement, so much as that the evidence suggests that, currently, some movements have more violent offshoots and a more violent profile. There are a handful of political and religious ideologies in the world that lead to more suicide bombings and hijackings per year than, say, the total number done by believers in Zoroastrianism, Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Libertarians, Democratic Socialists, Freemasons and Christians combined.
If you had, for instance, Jim Jones's cult or the Aum Shinrikyo boarding airplanes and blowing them up on a regular basis, and your response was that a person had to be a single-minded bigot to notice the fact that most airplane bombings originated with this particular ideology, then I'd say you were ignoring facts or willfully making excuses for ideologies which brainwashed people into doing those things. Possibly for reasons related to disliking your own society, which is perfectly fair, but certainly not neutral or scientific.
No, not at all. I was simply combating the idea that the kinds of reasons that lead to people being less likely to become regular criminals (a religious reason to carry a weapon, being licensed and trained with a weapon) would apply to their risk profile on airplanes.
That's not really true. There are huge discrepancies in human human driver accident data across different countries, which shows that there are clear practices one could deploy to significantly reduce driving incidents - people just choose to not implement them.
The human data estimate they compare to to get the 3x number also includes this type of incident - even if of course no one reports it, you can get some idea of the number of such incidents based on service and paint shop data.
In general, any robot that has servos powerful enough to be any of use is surprisingly dangerous to be around. While it's much easier to apply various limiters, the raw power in those engines will always pose a significant level of risk if anything goes wrong. If you're hovering above a human who sits up suddenly, you might get your nose broken. If it's a robot instead, it will have the strength and mass to easily mutilate you in the same kind of accident.
An article about a counterfactual (how many people would have survived had aid continued as before) can only be based on estimates, not real world data, yes, by its very nature. You can say the estimates are wrong, or that the source isn't trustworthy, maybe. But providing estimates for counterfactuals is not in any way illegitimate.
All of your arguments are expounded upon in the article itself, and their conclusions still hold, based on the publicly available data.
The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses.
The denominator problem is made up. Tesla Robotaxi has only been launched in one location, Austin, and only since July (well, 28th June, so maybe there is a few days discrepancy?). So the crash data and the miles data can only refer to this same period. Furthermore, if the miles driven are actually based on some additional length of time, then the picture gets even worse for Tesla, as the denominator for those 9 incidents gets smaller.
The analysis indeed doesn't distinguish between the types of accidents, but this is irrelevant. The human driver estimates for miles driven without incident also don't distinguish between the types of incidents, so the comparison is still very fair (unless you believe people intentionally tried to get the Tesla cars to crash, which makes little sense).
The comparison to Waymo is also done based on incidents reported by both companies under the same reporting requirements, to the same federal agency. The crash definitions and reporting practices are already harmonized, at least to a good extent, through this.
Overall there is no way to look at this data and draw a conclusion that is significantly different from the article: Tesla is bad at autonomous driving, and has a long way to go until it can be considered safe on public roads. We should also remember that robotaxis are not even autonomous, in fact! Each car has a human safety monitor that is ready to step in and take control of the vehicle at any time to avoid incidents - so the real incident rate, if the safety monitor weren't there, would certainly be even worse than this.
I'd also mention that 5 months of data is not that small a sample size, despite you trying to make it sound so (only 9 crashes).
Statistically 9 crashes is enough to draw reasonable inferences from. If they had the expected human rate of 3 over the period in question, the chance that they would actually get into 9 accidents is about 0.4%. And mind you, that’s with a safety driver. It would probably be much worse without one.
I agree with most of your points and your conclusion, but to be fair OP was asserting that human drivers under-report incidents, which I believe. Super minor bumps where the drivers get out, determine there’s barely a scratch, and go on. Or solo low speed collisions with walls in garage or trees.
I don’t think it invalidates the conclusion, but it seems like one fair point in an otherwise off-target defense.
Sure, but the 3x comparison is not based on reported incidents, it's based on estimates of incidents that occur. I think it's fair to assume such estimates are based on data about repairs and other such market stats, that don't necessarily depend on reporting. We also have no reason a priori to believe the Tesla reports include every single incident either, especially given their history from FSD incident disclosures.
> The 3x figure in the title is based on a comparison of the Tesla reports with estimated average human driver miles without an incident, not based on police report data. The comparison with police-report data would lead to a 9x figure instead, which the article presents but quickly dismisses.
I think OP's point still stands here. Who are people reporting minor incidents to that would be publicly available that isn't the police? This data had to come from somewhere and police reports is the only thing that makes sense to me.
If I bump my car into a post, I'm not telling any government office about it.
I don't know, since they unfortunately don't cite a source for that number, but I can imagine some sources of data - insurers, vehicle repair and paint shops. Since average miles driven without incident seems plausible to be an important factor for insurance companies to know (even minor incidents will typically incur some repair costs), it seems likely that people have studied this and care about the accuracy of the numbers.
Of course, I fully admit that for all I know it's possible the article entirely made up these numbers, I haven't tried to look for an alternative source or anything.
The article lists the crashes right at the top. One of 9 involved hitting a fixed object. The rest involved collisions with people, cars, animals, or injuries.
So, let's exclude hitting fixed objects as you suggest (though the incident we'd be excluding might have been anything from a totaled car and huge fire to zero damage), and also assume that humans fail to report injury / serious property damage accidents more often than not (as the article assumes).
That gets the crash rate down from an unbiased 9x to a lowball 2.66x higher than human drivers. That's with human monitors supervising the cars.
2.66x is still so poor they should be pulled of the streets IMO.
> So, let's exclude hitting fixed objects as you suggest (though the incident we'd be excluding might have been anything from a totaled car and huge fire to zero damage)
I don't know what data is available but what I really care about more than anything is incidents where a human could be killed or harmed, followed by animals, then other property and finally, the car itself. So I'm not arguing to exclude hitting fixed objects, I'm arguing that severity of incident is much more important than total incidents.
Even when comparing it to human drivers, if Tesla autopilot gets into 200 fender benders and 0 fatal crashes I'd prefer that over a human driver getting into 190 fender benders and 10 fatal crashes. Directionally though, I suspect the numbers would probably go the other direction, more major incidents from automated cars because, when are successful, they usually handle situations perfectly and when they fail, they just don't see that stopped car in front of you and hit it at full speed.
> That gets the crash rate down from an unbiased 9x to a lowball 2.66x higher than human drivers. That's with human monitors supervising the cars.
> 2.66x is still so poor they should be pulled of the streets IMO.
I'm really not here to argue they are safe or anything like that. It just seems clear to me that every assumption in this article is made in the direction that makes Tesla look worse.
>> However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin.
Probably 200K on my part--probably a bit more. Some minor damage but no insurance claims or police reports. <touch wood> But some dings of various degrees.
I can't be certain about auto insurers, but healthcare insurers just straight up sell the insurance claims data. I would be surprised if auto insurers haven't found that same "innovation."
That's a fair point, but I'll note that the one time I hit an inanimate object with my car I wasn't about to needlessly involve anyone. Fixed the damage to the vehicle myself and got on with life.
So I think it's reasonable to wonder about the accuracy of estimates for humans. We (ie society) could really use a rigorous dataset for this.
Tesla could just share their datasets with researchers and NHTSA and the researchers can do all the variable controls necessary to make it apples to apples.
Was going to say the same thing. I've had three of these sorts of "crashes": once was my fault, but no damage, so I apologized and we shook hands and drove away; once was their fault, but same result; third was unambiguously his fault, but I laughed and told him it was his lucky day that the scratch down the side of my car was only maybe the third worst on the beater I was driving at the time. That guy's bumper was all but ripped off, but (though we exchanged details) I never heard anything more about it, so I'm damn sure he never went to insurance. If you count only the (my fault) first of those I'm well ahead of the once every 200k miles average someone proposed up-thread - though if you count the time I ripped off the underlip of my bumper parking in front of a too-high curb, I'm probably back at par.
To add to this, more data from more regions means the estimate of average human miles without an incident is more accurate, simply because it is estimated from a larger sample, so more likely to be representative.
Tesla Robotaxi service is also available in the San Francisco Bay Area, with an area serviced greater than Waymo. Since at least September, 2025, but probably earlier.
While the title is slightly biased, it's completely fair to analyze all of the public data a company provides about a very public problem (how safe their autonomous cars are), and show what the risks are. If Tesla wants us to believe their robotaxis are safe (which they implicitly do by putting these on public roads), it's entirely on them to publish data that supports that claim. If the data they themselves publish suggests that they are much worse than human drivers, then I want journalists to report on that.
It's also extremely implausible that Tesla has data that their cars are very safe, but choose to instead publish vague data that makes them seem much worse. It's for example much more likely that these 9 incidents reported are just the bad incidents that they think they won't be able to hide, rather than assuming these are all or mostly minor incidents like lightly bumping into a static object.
Seriously what is up with all the Electrical n apologists?
Dude's a nazi. Weaseled his way into everything digitally related to the American government and should be treated like foreign intelligence agent. He has oversold and under-delivered everything he has bought from other people to claim for himself.
Weird he's got so many dickriders on HN.
The point is this: the article writer did what research they could do given the available public data. It's true that their title would be much more accurate if it said something like "Tesla's Robotaxi data suggests crash rate may be up to 3x worse than human drivers". It's then 100% up to Tesla to come up with cleaner data to help dispel this.
But so far, if all the data we have points in this direction, even if the certainty is low, it's fair to point this out.
reply