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307 points MBCook | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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bunderbunder ◴[] No.42151125[source]
I'd love to see some sort of multiple regression or ANOVA on this, instead of singling out a single variable. Is car brand really the best independent predictor? Or is it specific design decisions you tend to see in certain brands?

(Like, say, maximizing driver distraction by consolidating a bunch of essential controls and information displays into a touchscreen display that's really difficult to operate when it's sunny outside. Just to pick something at random, of course.)

Somewhat related, I was recently shopping for refrigerators, and fell down a data rabbit hole. If you just look at the overall style of fridge, French doors look like a terrible option from a reliability perspective. But then, digging in a bit more, it turns out that's kind of a spurious correlation. Actually it's the presence of bells and whistles like through-door ice dispensers that kill a refrigerator's reliability. And then perhaps on top of that the amount of extra Rube Goldberg machine you need to make a chest height ice dispenser work in a bottom-freezer French door refrigerator creates even more moving parts to break. But a those problems don't apply to a model that doesn't have that feature.

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1. daft_pink ◴[] No.42176234[source]
While I think that a single variable isn't always very useful, when something is an outlier and people are moving from other luxury brands with much lower rates to a new brand and experiencing high rates, there is definitely something wrong.

I'm guessing that while the total accident rate declines with automation, that the serious accident rate is increasing, because a human driver drives in a risk adjusted way and takes less care to avoid minor accidents and more care to avoid serious accidents, but when a robot find itself unable to drive the errors are more evenly distributed or even more likely to result in a serious accident, because its doing things idiotically with no sense of self preservation.