Comment by ffk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ffk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

These haven't just sprung into existence. They have been worked on consistently for at least two decades. Carnegie Mellon has research dating back to the mid 1980s on this topic.

Self driving cars have been driven up and down various parts of the SF bay region for several years now. Google's self driving cars have driven over 1 million miless. They report that their vehicles have been involved in 12 accidents, none of which are the fault of the vehicle's self driving capabilities.

The only reason they will appear to 'pop' into the consumer market overnight is because this technology is politically charged and simultaneously so important to society that it is being overengineered to improve success and safety. The moment self driving cars has its first accident after being released to consumers, the media will likely flip, ignoring mountains of data demonstrating how much more safe these vehicles are to provide a sensationalized report on the dangers of self driving cars. The safer they are and the more data backing this up, the less likely this will derail the technology.

1 million miles: https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/iMHEMH9crJb

12 accidents: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-cars-20150603-s...

CMU ALV: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/index.html

Serious question:

What do these cars (with no steering wheel) do, if involved in an accident?

How would the owner / police move the car to the side of the road?

They have an "urgent stop" button, which passengers can use. Presumably that's unnecessary, though, as I'd expect the vehicle can detect an accident and will stop. Tow trucks could take over, at that point.

Emergency steering wheel app.

And who pays for the insurance? And who is blamed for the accident? I'd be surprised if Google is accepting these costs.

In accidents involving self driving, it could be easier to go to the root cause of accident, as these cars shall have lots of data for that incident and environment (like a black box).

With a tow truck.

Some places have laws requiring you to move the vehicle off the road if it steerable. There has to be some way to move the vehicle manually.

Exactly this. Minor collisions should move to the side of the road ASAP.

Agreed. I saw most of the technology pretty matured in Japanese automotive almost 10 years ago.

wow 12 accidents per 1 mio miles.

2009, humans in US:

185 crashes per 100 million VMT

1.13 deaths per 100 million VMT

all weather, incl. intoxication, bad luck, etc.

current google car tech relies on brute forcing visual mapping, breaks down in snow.

self-driving cars are controlled by software, written by humans, riddled with bugs. see Nest on how awesome this works for physical stuff. the aircraft industry has the correct coding practices, NONE of which are being applied by the current research teams. multi-redundant systems in play, with even more training for the operator. competing with human drivers is really hard. a shit ton of signal processing, etc. going on. all this techy-BS is belittling the awesomeness of the human brain and central nervous system.

Technically, crashes caused by Google's self driving car is not "12 per 1 million," it is "0 per 1 million." which is significantly better than "1.85 per million" for humans. Inversely, crashes caused by humans involving a self driving car is 12 per 1 million. Not a good record for humans. :)

It's also important to take note where the driving is. In densely populated regions, you are more likely to have minor accidents such as fender benders than on the open road. However, the open road is more likely to get you killed if you are involved in an accident due to speed.

All this "techy-BS" is not belittling humans by creating self driving cars. I strongly believe the opposite is true, humans are amazing because we can build artificial intelligent systems to handle these kinds of tasks for us and let us focus on bigger and better problems than steering a car. Your same argument falls flat with other technologies. Why have a computer add numbers when we have a wonderful brain that can do the same? I argue that it is because we build systems to augment and work around our deficiencies. One of those deficiencies is our driving skill. Over 30,000 in the US alone die due to auto accidents. Self driving cars has the potential to eliminate most of these deaths. Ideally, we'll get to a point where a death on the road makes national news because of its rarity.

Interesting stats, and gives a good estimate but it's off by at least an order of magnitude.

1. Autonomous google crashes have been entirely small rear end fender benders. It might be 10x or more safer when accounting for this. You must look at the speeds and types of crashes and account for this in the safety calculation.

2. For safety it's less relevant but for insurance purposes Google has yet to (technically/legally) cause a crash so already it's cheaper for your wallet than a human driver. Progress =)

As far as I was aware, in none of the 12 accidents Google's autonomous vehicles have been involved in has the autonomous system been in control. They've all been manually operated at the time of collision.

Do you have any other information?

how are they off? straight out of a car and driver report, google it.

but i guess even this will get downvoted, rather than PROVEN wrong. why even bother debating anything on HN anymore?

Oh I meant its off in that its not an apples to apples safety comparison. Not all crashes are created equal. As of yet atonomous cars have only had specific types of (safer) crashes.

This should be included in the safety comparison as looking at raw crash number is not enough.

You're underestimating the awesomeness of the human brain to tackle big problems. I want to be drunk, watching movies, pleasuring myself in the backseat of an autonomous Uber during my two-hour commute in and out of the city. Open your mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com