Elon Musk says Tesla’s autopilot is already “probably” better than human drivers
washingtonpost.com
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As someone who has had family cars run into 3 times in 1 year at stop lights, by folks looking down at their cell phones. I'm sure that Tesla's autopilot is already better than human drivers.
Considering in 2014 there were 32,675 motor vehicle deaths, 2,300,000 motor vehicle related injuries and 6,100,000 reported accidents in general (which means a likely higher number of accidents though not sure by how much) [1] it would not surprise me that even buggy software could do a better job than humans who tend to become distracted with almost anything. Though I'm not sure about extreme conditions like snow, heavy fog and rain, etc.
As much as I love driving (and I really do) I can't wait for autonomous vehicles. Considering it's a, if I remember correctly, a 1.7% chance in your lifetime that you'll be killed in an auto accident in the United States (and higher of a chance that you'll known someone killed) that's just way to high of a number for me (especially being a Dad).
From the worst in 1937 (29.357 per 100K pop) to today (10.345 per 100K pop), and falling by on average 2%/year since 1996 (was 15.8599 in 1996).
Without trying to sound melodramatic, cars built in the 1990s are "death traps" by 2015 standards (and the same is true of 19980s cars by 1990s standards). The reason we're seeing it fall slowly is as the late 1990s vehicles gradually disappear.
I suspect we'll see a massive drop again in the next ten years even without fully automatic cars as systems like Eyesight auto-break to slow collision speeds.
One thing which will get interesting when we do have completely automatic vehicles is: current drink driving laws (in particular in the US) aren't compatible with them. In many US states falling asleep in a parked vehicle with the keys is enough to get someone for "drink driving" (even without the driving part), so falling asleep in an automatic car could still get someone a DUI.
One change you can see on the road: the new looong Jeeps. That's so the gas tank can be ahead of and protected in a crash by the rear axle, a safety improvement.
Great question.
- Electronic stability control (ESC) (required from 2009).
- Anti-lock braking system (ABS) (in most cars from 2004 due to EU regs, although not required in the US until 2011).
- From 2003 the IIHS started rating vehicles for: rollover risk, side impact, and frontal offset impact. So car manufacturers started improving their designs to score better in these tests. The whole "top safety pick" thing is an IIHS rating.
- From 2009 the NHTSA required a greater roof-crush load (3x the vehicle's weight, from 1.5x).
- Safety Cell improvements: Crumple zones are less likely to trap in the driver or front passenger's legs/feet during impact.
- Anti-intrusion bars: Are more standard. The IIHS tests kind of pushed them into mainstream.
- Additional air bags (side impact).
- Whiplash reduction seats and headrests.
Overall regulations aren't why cars are safer in 2016, consumer demand is. People decided they didn't want to compromise on safety, so as a safer and safer vehicles became available consumers flocked to them. Manufacturers had a financial interest in not only be safe but the absolute safest in the road, and that competition pushed vehicle safety forward.
Just for clarity, they did "frontal offset impact" tests a long time ago, small overlap however was a recent addition, you can see the difference between the two here[0].
So even in the early 2000s vehicles did improve for frontal offset impacts, they just improved further in the last couple of years with the small overlap tests.
[0] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/frontal-crash-...
This is important because so many of the "human factor" mistakes cited by autodrive proponents actually begin with alcohol/drug use. If the human really cannot be trusted, the car has to take away his authority.
I like the concept but what if the sensor fails? Suddenly you're stuck who knows where...
I believe Chevrolet has a "teenage driver mode" which allows you to disable the radio, AC, and for it to bug you if you drive without a seat belt. I like that concept far more since it doesn't leave you stranded because the seat belt failed to be detected. It also allows you to set a maximum speed, a maximum radio volume, and for parents to get a report later if they wish.
I never drive without a seat belt. I just don't want to add more points of failure to a car than it absolutely needs.
When a regular car brakes down there is normally something you can do. The vehicle is still movable. An autodrive car with a blown lidar unit is probably bricked.
I'm sure glad you have the data to back this up.
> When a regular car brakes down there is normally something you can do. The vehicle is still movable. An autodrive car with a blown lidar unit is probably bricked.
You can still put it on the back of a truck or tow it, the same way you would for a car which has actually broken down. You can do the same for the theoretically broken replacement car.
(2) If you need a truck to move it, I call that bricked. Normal cars, when they loose various systems, are still mobile. A normal car can still be rolled even without any electrical system working. Steering and brakes can be are completely controllable via muscles alone, even on electric cars. An autodrive car could be a total unknown. Some don't even have a manual (non-electic) steering wheel.
Fair enough and I completely agree it's just not falling fast and far enough for me :)
Yet, the statistic is still twice to thrice as high as for other car-heavy nations like Germany or the UK, no matter whether you go by incidents per pop, incidents per vehicles or incidence per miles driven.
There's a lot of room for improvement outside technical gadgets.
Musk has a habit of going off half cocked, and I think this is one of those cases. Auto pilot is great, but you cannot say much difinitively about it because it hasn't got enough miles or road conditions under its belt.
That all being said, I myself have invested in this type of technology (Subaru's Eyesight) but auto pilot claims to be able to do much more than the more stabilised technology found on mass market vehicles.
Call me when automatic vehicles get tested in a blizzard, sandstorm, or anything else that isn't an idealised Californian test track.
PS - And this is someone who owns an auto-braking system vehicle, and I know first hand that it turns off when weather goes too bad.
Does that mean that they analyze the miles driven using autopilot or the miles driven by the human driver or both?
It would seem that using data from human driven miles would give them good insight into how human drivers would react in weird and non-standard situations.
Also, with as many cars as Tesla has out on the road, I wonder if the amount of data they have to feed into their self-driving systems is more than Google or other players in the space.
"With the “summon” feature, a driver can tell her Tesla to park itself or pull out from a parking spot or garage."
A car that can drop you off and pick you up from work means parking can be moved away from the office, or even out of a city.
You could also have parking garages with a much higher capacity per sq. foot if all the cars were smart and could work together. (Or even sections designed for this) Instead of single or double car rows, you could have them 4 or five cars deep, and self-rearranging to let each other out.
2. And anyway, from my point of view 'better than humans' doesn't necessarily mean 'causes fewer accidents'. If that was the goal then an auto-pilot that kept the car still (or drove very very slowly) would win.