On Google's self-driving car acident rates
ideas.4brad.com
ideas.4brad.com
Auto-pilot is most useful in two situations. 1) long cross country legs where there is not much flying to do (just maintain heading and altitude), so A/P frees the pilot up to manage other systems, enjoy the view, etc, and alleviates fatigue, 2) flying a precision instrument approach, reducing the risk that the pilot will succumb to spatial disorientation in the setup for (usually manual) landing.
With cars, auto-drive capability will be useful in reducing accidents in two modes: 1) long duration highway driving where fatigue is a big issue, 2) intervening to prevent a distracted driver from causing an accident (rear end collision etc).
I'd be perfectly happy with a car that can drive itself in cruise mode on the interstate, but requires an alert driver on local roads (with the added bonus that if I am about to slam into something, it will brake to avoid or lessen the impact).
Something for the liability crowd to consider, self driving cars won't be able to avoid every potential mishap, but they will be able to reduce their severity. A car that can automatically brake to reduce its speed by 25% just before impact, will reduce its kinetic energy by roughly half, and the potential for injury by more still.
This is even against the hacker spirit. We loathe IDEs and cherish emacs/vi close to our hearths because what we want from automation is augmentation of human capabilities, not self mutilation + prostaethics. How can people not accept that the same formula can work best for cars?
If I could get from NY to Florida in less than a day in my driverless car, and at sub-$2-gas, who would want to do the security check-in, luggage ripoff, flight delay thing when going less than 1000 miles?
I think the evolution of self-driving cars will be through the gradual improvement of auto-pilot cars until the human just has to sit there and do nothing 99% of the time (but still be legally in control).
The emotional response to these accidents is not going to be entirely irrational either. If I have a minor accident with my traditional truck, I'm going to probably have a good understanding of what went wrong and how I can prevent future collisions. With an autonomous vehicle... software upgrade? I'd rather take responsibility for my own safety if that's the case.
I suspect that if the attitude towards autonomous vehicle accidents is similar to that of aircraft accidents, they will become extremely safe very quickly.
And yet a subset of them are probably terrified of flying. Because flying, in a way, is scary. Unlike birds we are not wired to fly. But that's fine: autonomous cars won't be flying. If train/subways/tramway/bus can be successful, so can autonomous cars.
On the other hand, if every autonomous vehicle accident is investigated to the same standard as every aircraft accident, it appears likely that the entire system will become so overloaded and cost-ineffective that it is completely impractical to operate before we get over the hurdle and achieve any consistently safer performance that might otherwise be available.
But by similar attitude, I was mostly thinking about the rigorous and systematic efforts to find root causes of accidents, rather than the toxic attitude of attempting to deflect blame (and liability) that is so pervasive in other industries.
Safety starts with the culture: it's not an add-on or an afterthought. If Google starts to not fixing problems with its cars to avoid acknowledging a problem (and the liabilities that go with it), then we have a problem...
From this point on, you might become less accident-prone than your previous self, but you established that you're more likely to get into accidents than the average 0-accident driver.
But all the insurance company cares about is revenue vs. expenses across the entire pool. If they can charge one customer more, it allows them to charge another customer less--like, by advertising a low fee for new signups.
> Premiums go up after an accident because it is more likely that you are a poor driver and likely to have another accident.
No, premiums go up in that situation when the insurance company thinks they can do so and not lose too many customers. As you point out, not every insurance company operates this way.
An insurance company only cares about managing risk and revenue across the entire pool. They plan to pay out a certain number of claims, so any given accident might simply be fulfilling the actuarial expectations and not altering their risk calculations at all.
Will it? Think about the recent Toyota brake pedals that didn't work or the GM faulty ignitions. Both of these caused a number of deaths, and the Toyota one was especially scary because it didn't even need accident-like events to cause a problem, your brakes would just stop working.
It'll hit the news (like Tesla battery fires vastly disproportionately reported on over other, much more common auto fires), but it's not clear at all that it will cause some massive panic or backlash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle...
If this was true, then the self-driving car may have prevented the accidents. If it was really a software problem, then fix the software. It may be much more easy to fix the software rather than to fix human behaviors.
NASA didn't find a software defect, this is not the same as NASA finding that there is no software defect.
Toyota absolutely built and sold dangerous vehicles with software and hardware defects. This was not only a matter of gas pedals sticking to floor mats.
Importantly in this context Toyota did not put customer safety first and decided to suppress the truth of the problem rather than own the solution. This is cause for concern as we move toward self-driving systems which have to be perceived to work in order for the product to remain economically viable.
>NASA didn't find a software defect, this is not the same as NASA finding that there is no software defect.
Read my post carefully. I haven't claimed such a thing and I offered two possibilities.
>Toyota absolutely built and sold dangerous vehicles with software and hardware defects.
You have to be careful with this. The Barr Group team haven't proven the relationship between the accident, and the software defect which they claim to found of.
The important thing is that software, hardware, system, and the whole design for car safety can improve significantly better than the current situation, which is much more better than just relying on human drivings.
Thus, hopefully, both humans and self-driving cars should have improving records [although I don't have any data to back this up].
The human driving experience will become more and more augmented by technology, with auto-braking, lane-assist, smart cruise control and (eventually) auto-navigation until we have almost-self-driving cars which are still legally required to have a qualified human in the driver's seat. Many of the these features already exist in high-end cars.
People will be much happier to hit the 'auto' button and climb into the back seat when they've already had several years of 'almost-auto' driving.
I think the safety level just has to exceed that of an average teenage driver for widespread adoption by a certain segment of the car-buying population: parents.
EDIT: Teen drivers are 3x more likely per mile to be involved in an accident than adults - http://www.cdc.gov/MotorVehicleSafety/Teen_Drivers/teendrive...
785 miles between anomalous events that require manual control is bad enough. 5300 is worse! That honestly needs to be 0 events (impossible as that might be) or only events for which advanced notice can be provided to be market-acceptable.
It's the TSA screening problem all over again: 13-88 hours of mind-numbing normal operation, with a single incident of something potentially exploding that you have to catch.
Well, would it be better if it had a random chance of (artificially) needing human intervention, at on average every 785 miles? (Not exactly, because that would make it too easy to predict, and therefore might not make the person attentive when a real problem happens)
That doesn't seem like it would be too hard to add, if it was better by keeping people on their toes.
But, I doubt the problems get monotonically worse when the average distance between events increases? I would expect at some point, increasing distance doesn't significantly reduce attention , so the safety would increase a bit. Maybe not more than for some shorter distance, but I think for some slightly different distance.
That's a really low bar.
Take a look at Google Maps in San Diego when it rains. Accidents everywhere. A self-driving car won't get into stupid accidents because it's following too closely, driving too fast, hydroplaning, etc.
Toss in the people who are distracted, tired, or drugged out on medication, and your numbers are even worse.
We're looking at the end of humans driving cars within 10 years.
You might be right about that, I just don't see why it should be the case. Humans are not very good at driving safely, it seems like an easy bar for robots to clear. Even if robots are "only" twice as safe, we should all jump at the opportunity to halve injuries and deaths from auto accidents.
It can't just be 2X or even 10X safer than humans if the manufacturer is liable for the accident. That would EXPLODE the cost of these cars and bankrupt companies -- even if just a small fraction of today's fatal accidents due to driver error became Google's liability.
Consider that even single-vehicle accidents, which today might be the driver's fault, could result in a manufacturer lawsuit.
This is why I think fully autonomous without any human to intervene is a pipe dream, because the safety level required for that is pretty close to perfectly bugfree in an almost infinitely complex world of roads and conditions. Just for liability reasons.
These test cars of course have human copilots. But it remains to be seen if that really will grant manufacturers immunity for accidents. If the car is perfect 99.999% of the time, wouldn't that train the human to trust it and not pay as close attention? And then miss that 0.001% of the time when it hurts someone? Would a judge find it reasonable for a human to stay vigilant and responsible for that fatal corner case bug that cropped up after two years of perfect autonomous driving?
Liability is The. Critical. Question.
And in return for the modest price increase you get a self-driving car!
Also consider that there are more people who can sue per accident, because humans aren't responsible anymore. Today if you're driving the car and get in a accident and it's your fault, you can't sue anyone. Now you can. That's one more party per accident, and a whole category of single-vehicle accidents than now result in lawsuits.
And you're forgetting that, to the extent that such injuries can be laid at the food of manufacturers' defects, manufacturers are already liable for them, and since plaintiffs are unlikely to be able to fully collect from drivers, will often be sued now, so self-driving cars don't actually change things that much.
> Also consider that there are more people who can sue per accident, because humans aren't responsible anymore.
Incorrect.
> Today if you're driving the car and get in a accident and it's your fault, you can't sue anyone.
Incorrect. If you get in an accident and suffer damages and you allege that this is due to a manufacturer's defect, this is a basis for suit against the manufacturer. Now, you won't win if the manufacturer can show by a preponderance of the evidence that the accident was your fault rather than theirs. [0]
Similarly, quite likely, in a self-driving car regime, if your car crashes you can sue the manufacturer and claim a defect was responsible, but if they can prove its the fault of something else (such as your own failure to properly maintain the vehicle), they won't be liable to you.
[0] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/product-liability-cla...
>"If you get in an accident and suffer damages and you allege that this is due to a manufacturer's defect, this is a basis for suit against the manufacturer."
Right now, this is an edge case. The self driving car may cause it to become common.
Yes, because exactly those cases where the driver (as operator, as distinct from the -- often the same person's role as -- owner-as-maintainer) is responsible now become the manufacturer's responsibility. But, again, that's exactly what insurance covers.
But, again, we know the cost of that liability is -- its the cost of driver's insurance.
A major corporation does not have the same practical ability to cap their damages. I am not convinced it's a straight comparable cost as you keep saying. The two risks are not exactly comparable, thus I would not expect the insurance costs to be the same.
Umm... That's pretty much exactly what liability insurance covers. Even with maximums, insurance companies frequently have to pay the whole amount regardless of what the policy says.
Anyone who is collectible (i.e, who can't just declare bankruptcy in the case of a multi-million dollar settlement) should carry umbrella coverage, though, because the insurance company may try to come back to you to collect.
It's cheap compared to car insurance, and it can cover into the millions.
>and a whole category of single-vehicle accidents than now result in lawsuits.
If you're talking about single-vehicle accidents where the human is at fault, then I wouldn't be surprised if those dropped to almost zero for self-driving cars. The place where self-driving cars have the most trouble is in complex situations involving multiple moving objects; most situations where the car just runs into something, harming its occupants, would rightfully be considered a defect.
And as others have mentioned, manufacturers already factor in the cost of defects into the total cost of producing a car.
I have $2 million liability coverage (in BC Canada) and it's not that unusual or that expensive - is that very uncommon in the US?
Edit: And I rent, so I bought an explicit $2mm umbrella policy, it's $267/year. That's a lot less than my car insurance, and a bit more than my renter's insurance.
1. Airplanes have highly trained trained human pilots who are highly vigilant and often in semi-manual control during takeoff and landing. Not a valid comparison.
2. Typical auto insurance policies have liability limits of around $100K. In cases of serious injury or death, tort damages often exceed that tremendously and bankrupt the responsible person. The solution is to get the legislature to cap tort damages for killing someone at ~$100K? Not going to happen.
I do agree with you that until the manufacturers liability is solved there won’t be autonomous cars sold.
Except juries invariably award much larger damages against companies then against individuals; particularly when the individual is dead or permanently disabled by the accident. People will be reluctant to levy a multi-million dollar award against a reckless driver's widow, but will be perfectly happy to award it against a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Not true--consumer auto insurance premiums do not encompass the cost of consumer lawsuits against manufacturers, because of course manufacturers do not buy consumer auto insurance.
For example Toyota settled their unintended acceleration lawsuits for $1.2 billion dollars or so. GM's ignition switch problems cost them $900 million to settle. How much will Volkswagon's diesel fraud cost them?
None of these costs are covered by consumer auto insurance. Instead they're covered by the capital of the corporation, which ultimately comes from investors or customers.
Now imagine a self-driving world in which every accident opens up the possibility of such class action settlements. In the absence of legislation to cap damages, companies would have to set aside huge pools of money to defend and settle such lawsuits. That means less investment, lower returns, or higher prices--any of which tend to hurt the long-term viability of a company.
They encompass the cost of the liability that would be transferred from drivers to manufacturers if all liability that drivers have now was transferred. They don't cover the liabilities manufacturers already have, but those liabilities are an existing part of the cost of doing business in the auto industry, not something new with automated vehicles.
You've written this in several posts and I think it's wrong. Consumer class actions are typically done on contingency, or with 3rd party financing, which means that cases must be somewhat likely to win before they even get filed.
Thus while it's true in theory that anyone can sue an auto manufacturer in any given accident, most accidents do not result in such suits. Consider that the GM ignition switch problem caused a number of deaths over the course of years before a suit was even filed on it. Auto manufacturers self-insure based on the expected rate of such lawsuits, and they obviously have very good data about that, as the movie Fight Club so memorably illustrated.
In a fully autonomous car a driver is not making any decisions at all, so how can they be liable? The balance would certainly shift toward more suits against manufacturers.
In a fully autonomous car, the owner is making decisions about maintenance, and in almost any case of claimed manufacturer's defect, distinguishing whether the cause is, in fact, a manufacturer's defect rather than a failure of maintenance will be important.
> The balance would certainly shift toward more suits against manufacturers.
Sure, because exactly the things that drivers-as-operators (rather than owners-as-maintainers) are now liable for would usually be the responsibility of the manufacturer. The amount of liability that represents is, to a close approximation, the cost of insurance coverage for the vehicle, so its essentially transferring the cost of drivers insurance to the manufacturer (who will roll it into the purchase price.)
(1) Maintaining a self-driving car is more than maintaining software,
(2) Even in the case of software, an owner might have responsibilities with regard to maintenance (not in the sense of "maintaining software" in the programming sense, but in the sense of ensuring that, e.g., updates released by the manufacturer are downloaded and installed -- even if this is an automated, the owner may be responsible for making sure the vehicle is kept where that process can successfully complete and not interfering with it.)
> And it is the software that is the distinguishing characteristic of a fully autonomous self-driving car.
The "distinguishing characteristic" of a self-driving car is not the only thing relevant to liability.
There are a lot of ways the manufacturer can increase safety that might have negative consequences. For example, what happens if a manufacturer decides that all models over 10 years old are too risky? How do you separate their legitimate desire to ensure safety in their own self interest from their desire to sell more cars?
You might need to bring a lawyer when buying a car in the future.
In cars today only certain problems rise to the level of class action suits. Let's say a driver thinks there's a cat in the road and swerves and hits a tree. No lawyer is going to sue a manufacturer on contingency for that accident.
Now let's say a self-driving car does the same thing. Yes, a lawyer will take that case.
If the owner/operator bears no liability and all liability is on the manufacturer, it transfers the liability cost onto the manufacturer, but even if it is as safe (not 2× or 10× as safe), that just means the manufacturer rolls the cost to (self-, likely) insure for that liability into the purchase price (but the purchaser doesn't need to get their own insurance, so the total cost of operation to the purchaser is unaffected.)
And, of course, if a company like Google is both the manufacturer and the owner/operator (e.g., using the vehicles in an Uber-like service tied in with Google Maps and Google Now, or using them for Google Express delivery vehicles with smaller robots onboard to deliver packages to the door, or using them for Google Street View camera vehicles, etc.), operator vs. manufacturer liability makes no difference.
2. Making air bags mandatory hasn't caused manufacturers of cars or of air bags to go bankrupt.
3. If self-driving cars cause deaths, but on balance save lives, the situation is directly analogous.
4. There will be a way to make self-driving cars work. Q.E.D.
I seem to remember that laws exist to grant immunity to manufacturers of airbags, at least if they were functioning properly. A quick Google finds lots of ambulance-chasers who talk about "defective airbags," so manufacturers aren't immune to liability if they screwed up.
Similarly, you could imagine that No Fault laws could be passed for self-driving cars that were operating within reasonable parameters. A gross error on the part of a self-driving car could still leave manufacturers liable, but as history has shown, car companies are willing to write off even gross negligence claims rather than voluntarily add safety devices to cars, calculating cost-to-fix vs cost-to-pay-off-family tradeoffs. [1]
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that, any company that doesn't offer self-driving cars in the next 15 years may as well plan to shut down or be acquired. This is going to be a must-have feature. They will figure out how to make it work for manufacturers.
The liability question will be solved. They wouldn't even let car companies go bankrupt when they (arguably) deserved to; they certainly won't let them get into a situation that kills them, and as others have rightfully pointed out, the numbers aren't even that prohibitive if they needed to self-insure.
[1] http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1...
The manufacturer liability exposure for fully autonomous driving is literally several orders of magnitude greater than for airbags.
That is the Takata airbag case - they manufactured defective airbag with malfunctioning ammonium nitrate inflators which exploded supersonically instead of inflating, killing 8 people. They were fined $200m just recently and have to recall and replace 400,000 airbags.
This case might actually be analogous to self-driving car issues - it was a case of a defect potentially caused through negligence in engineering, rather than airbags working as intended.
...
Nah, I'm dreaming, it's far more likely that insurance companies will set up a wide insurance program ala taxi services than it is that we'll learn to stop being litigious.
Exactly my thoughts. You typically have very little to go on if a company did something to you and they were not in neglect. At least in Europe/The Netherlands, I don't really know about the US. (The stories we hear is that in the US, neglect means not warning that coffee is indeed hot, or that you should not put pets in a microwave to warm them up... I don't believe that really so I'll just assume it's similar to here.)
More fundamentally we should not assume that the people working on this at Google are idiots. They already know all of this and I am sure they are working with insurance companies and governments to solve this problem. Compared to the technical difficulty of making a reliable and safe autonomous vehicle this is an easy problem.
That's such an amazingly American thing to say. Do you really think that the uptake of autonomous vehicles is going to be hindered to any significant degree by what are largely U.S.-specific legal issues?
Can you imagine a world in 2060 where the U.S. decides to leave something like 10-20% of GDP on the table because of the liability aspects of their legal environment? It might hinder uptake a bit but I don't see it stopping it in the long run.
In any case regardless of what the U.S. does at that time the rest of the world is going to be driving autonomous vehicles.
So if your autonomous car kill someone you could just say "yes, shit happens, we'll fix it, but look at how the death toll from vehicles has gone down drastically due to this technology, maybe the courts shouldn't sue us out of existence when the alternative is a drunk/distracted/incompetent human behind the wheel?".
The OP is suggesting that that's going to happen in the U.S., maybe it will, but that's not the reality in many other countries.
The U.S. has around 25% of the world's personal vehicles, what it does is certainly going to play a big part, but if it does something crazy to restrict the technology it's just going to be developed elsewhere.
So there.
At first, self-driving cars will probably be leased on operating leases, with maintenance and insurance bundled into the payments. Or maybe you own the vehicle, but there's a maintenance and insurance contract required to enable self-driving.
cost of damages = # of accidents * cost per accident
- Self driving cars should reduce the number of accidents
- Cost per accident seems independent of the kind of car you drive. If a human driven taxi hits me, I can sue the taxi company. If a self driven taxi hits me, I can sue Google. I should be able to sue for the same amount in either case.
Right now, the insurance company is liable for the accident followed by the consumer. It'll just shift the insurance market towards manufacturers buying it [or likely self-insuring] and the cost of insuring a car will be baked into the price instead of bought aftermarket.
Actually, the driver is liable, but in most states (in order to be legally permitted to drive on public roads) must either have purchased insurance to cover some minimum amount of that liability or have posted a liability bond. But the insurer's obligation to pay is triggered by the driver's liability, not ahead of the driver's liability.
Or maybe just add self driving for the highway , especially if it's possible for the driver to get off the vehicle before entering the highway , and hop on another car entering the city ?
The VTI driving study[1] equipped 100 cars with sensors and was therefore able to measure all crashes experienced. It directly measured 1 crash per 24000 miles. If we extrapolate based on the 17.4% police report rate, that suggests 1 per 87000 miles.
[1]http://www.nhtsa.gov/DOT/NHTSA/NRD/Multimedia/PDFs/Crash%20A...
Note the narrow demographic data and geographic data.
Why not test with cars that look "normal" (think early 2000s Corolla). Wouldn't this further decrease the chance of possible accidents?
I guess what I'm saying is, who's decision was it to make it look like a toy car and not just an actual regular car that doesn't divert my attention off the road?
*edit for better readability
My sense is, prove it's safe first, then mass produce something that IS safe in the design you want.
After all, once something is mass produced then people adopting it would be quick. No?
But the fundamental principle behind Google has always been engineering and especially for something as crucial as safety, they should have stuck with something bland and nonchalant imo.
I don't know if you've noticed but cars tend not to have noticeable front bumpers these days. Some cars also now have deformable bonnets, or bonnets that pop up if they detect somebody rolling on to them. (If you want to know how this works, you'll have to ask somebody else. I have no idea.) This is all to limit the damage cars cause to people when they hit them.
Euro NCAP has a section in its current ratings where they assess how good the car is at hitting people without injuring them too much, giving manufacturers of vehicles in many sectors an incentive to design with this in mind. See http://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-explai....
Supposedly the Dacia Duster's rather poor Euro NCAP rating was predominantly due to its ropey score on the car-hitting-person section: http://www.euroncap.com/en/results/dacia/duster/10968
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031342/top-car-designers-critiq...
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-major-design-flaws-in-googl...
> the username is drupal and the database server is localhost
I'm sure this isn't a huge information leak, but it still seems kind of silly to me.
Pregenerating most of your pages a-la Jeckyll is just so much better that I don't know why anyone ever thought generating all of their pages with PHP was a good idea.
I remember thinking it was a good idea, to be honest. But at this point I look back and see how mistaken I was.
Thanks for the clarification.
[1](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...)
Aren't accidents only reported to police if there is a hit & run, or some other criminal activity?
Seems like the wrong metric for comparison, given the way they define the self-driving "accidents" and that the majority of human fender benders are not reported.
But the lack of police reports is why the article mentions that insurance companies believe the accident rate is higher than the 'official' number.
Anecdotally, the number of times that someone has hit my car, and then asked me not to report it in exchange for cash is non-zero.
Safety. Period.
The equation to get to safety is sensors + computing + map / map geometry.
The sensor differentiation will matter for a while, some OEMs will do very well, but ultimately it will just boil down to the software.
So how is the future of this space not just "everybody licenses Google's platform"?
If life/death safety is the differentiator (and measurable) I feel like the writing is on the wall. Google is going to dominate this.
Maybe Musk sneaks in there with his brash approach of using his drivers as test subjects but his position as a competing auto manufacturer seems less compelling than supporting an "Android-like" effort from Google.
I feel like what we've already seen in the DARPA grand challenge and in the self driving car research world will be what happens in the future: trailblazing is really hard work, but once others can see it can be done, even without a lot of details of how it was done, doing the same thing is usually much easier, or at least more obviously viable and so worth the investment.
Not to mention all the published research, suppliers with established manufacturing, and experienced engineers looking for other jobs that would now be out there.
Starting a self driving car company ten years from now, say, still would not be remotely easy, but you won't need anywhere near twenty years to catch up.
- Very high barrier to entry. You need $X of development costs, and $Y on traffic/mapping data. Anyone with money can get those. - Self driving cars have limited economies of scale.
* Self driving taxis get better (less wait time) as their density goes up, to a point. Today Uber and Lyft are both dense enough in SF for me to not care which one I use.
* Self driving cars get safer as you collect more driving data. Safer self driving cars are better up to a point. Safety matters a lot now, since cars are unsafe. On the other hand I don't care if Boeings are 2x as safe as Airbuses, both are safe enough for me. If you can make your self driving car safe enough, I'll buy it. To make your self driving car safe enough, you need to spend $X on developement and testing and $Y on really good maps.The equation to get to safety is actually what you mentioned + roads where 100% of vehicles are tied in to a common network orchestrating each vehicle's movement in relation to the others and the environment. Without that, differentiation in software is likely to lead to unanticipated dangerous scenarios, just as the HFT market is susceptible to flash crashes... except on the road, they will be real crashes with the potential to be more destructive than human-caused accidents.
Hopefully when that network becomes a reality, we can build it on top of some kind of open, distributed platform (perhaps related to blockchain technology) that no single entity can abuse.
I agree that the baseline should be independent, autonomous, safe operation of each vehicle without any network/cooperation, but in time it's going to go beyond that. I have no doubt that it will happen.
Once independent operation is proven to be reasonably safe and dependable for everyday use, it will have achieved a certain degree of safety and efficiency - significantly better (at least in safety) than humans, but still prone to occasional accidents (regardless of who/what is at fault), especially when human drivers are still allowed to drive on the same roads.
At that point, people will demand even higher levels of safety (similar to the nines of high availability), and greater efficiency (i.e., speed). Unfortunately, with human drivers sharing the same road, those two demands are at odds with each other; greater efficiency inherently reduces safety. At some point though, the demand will be great enough that we'll have to adopt something better - something with a higher level of coordination between vehicles, and where only computer-controlled vehicles can participate.
It certainly won't be pushed or adopted universally in one step, and it'll likely never cover all road infrastructure. It will be adopted first on high throughput routes, much like you have private toll roads today. Instead of paying a toll (or perhaps in addition), your car will enter the roadway by joining the network. Without network compatibility, you'll be unable to use the road.
Once you've joined the network, however, your vehicle can literally drive at breakneck speeds, avoiding other traffic by incredibly small margins, and all with significantly higher safety than non-networked roads.
Of course having a single network controlling vehicles opens up a possibility for attacks, just as modern commercial aircraft can be vulnerable to attack. It will be an issue, but not one without reasonable mitigation strategies and best practices. The "network" in question may not even be centralized in nature, but rather a decentralized, local mesh network with safeguards in place for each vehicle to detect and respond appropriately to situations where the network seems to be guiding vehicles outside safe bounds. There are a lot of ways that it could be implemented, but it'll be important (at least to me) that it's not all controlled by one government/corporation/entity, but instead rolled out as a set of interoperable industry standards.
[EDIT:] What if a moose crosses the road?
I'd rather support Musk; this is core to his product. For Google, its just another moonshot.
Tesla also has the advantage that Tesla owners drive 40 million miles/month. That's far and beyond what Google's autonomous vehicles are covering (<75K miles/month).
[0] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...
For the population to truly embrace this trend, it's going to be a long road of incremental steps. Lane assists have started to become commonplace, as have tools to automatically brake to prevent collisions. As these technologies become commonplace, people will accept them. Eventually, fully autonomous driving won't be much of a stretch.
Also there is the argument that driver assist can lure drivers into a false sense of security where they don't pay attention when they should be. The worry is that driver assist systems could cause accidents by seeming safer than they actually are. I really like Tesla though and hope for everyone sake that that doesn't happen.
Maybe they're right, but so far the driver-assistance angle seems to be advancing quite a bit faster and is certainly doing more to improve safety in the real world.
If you watch the TED talk you'll see that Google's cars today are responding to situations far beyond what Tesla's current offerings are designed to do. Construction flaggers, school busses which must not be passed, bicycles blowing through red lights in intersections, cars randomly pulling into the middle of traffic, bicycles hand-signaling a turn, a woman in a wheelchair chasing a duck, Google's cars are negotiating these situations without driver intervention. It's a totally different class of problem than lane tracking, emergency braking, auto-park, etc.
So, I'm sitting here watching this, and nothing he's saying is particularly a solid logical argument. He's pointing out that a always-running self-driving car has to make more decisions or actions than a driver assistance device, but that's irrelevant: 99% of the time, the car's basically just moving forwards. And arguably, lane assist devices make decisions or corrections just as often as an autonomous car, same for automatic breaking. They constantly need to check the conditions on the road and decide whether or not to adjust. I'm not seeing any real reasoning driver assistance and fully autonomous are so shockingly different... short of the fact that this guy is marketing a Google product.
If anything, it seems Urmson is heavily pidgeon-holing what a "driver assistance system" is, so that he can discredit the way all of their competitors are developing the same types of technology. Nothing particularly special about what Google is tracking that couldn't be similarly developed as part of a driver assistance system.
In actuality, his final argument is the most ludicrous of them all... that gradually developing the technology through driver assistance is too slow. That this needs to be rushed out the door in the next couple years.
I do disagree with your first point, that an always-running self-driving car having to make more decisions is irrelevant because a car spends the majority of its time moving forward. I think the point is that a driver assistance system basically only handles that moving forward case. It may cover 99% of the time, but it only covers a small fraction of the decisions and actions the car has to take. It's the other 1% (probably higher than 1% actually, but it doesn't matter) that's the tricky part, and it is difficult to iterate from handling the special (if very common) case of basically just moving forward, to handling all the other situations a car can find itself in. You would quickly lose any easily-understood distinction between what situations the car is and is not able to handle, making it difficult for the human driver to know when their input will be required.
I could see driver assistance eventually move to a point where it's tracking and simulating just as much as a fully autonomous vehicle, but allowing the driver to remain in control until it believes a collision is imminent, or that the user is making an unsafe judgment call.
Things like the automatic emergency braking feature will eventually learn how to detect different types of objects as well. Say, to avoid slamming on the brakes because a plastic bag was pushed by the wind past a camera or sensor.
Presumably, these currently independent assistance features will converge over time, into your car simply being aware of it's surroundings and intervening to protect you. And then someday it'll just drive itself.
All of this can (and probably will) be done gradually, but it sounds like that isn't fast enough for Urmson's son to reach driving age.
And none of us will be overly shocked.
The consequences for a manufacturer of failing to deploy a critical update for self-driving cars is substantially different than failing to deploy a critical update to a mobile handset. So even with a similar set of formal, contractual requirements, there are reasons to expect that the resulting behavior could be quite different.
Well I certainly can't see that situation going wrong at all.
At this rate how long until Google re-brands itself as Omni Consumer Products and turns Mountain View into a nation state?
You mean like Alphabet? I only lived in Mountain View for a few months last summer, but I gathered at the time that the city of Mountain View is already fighting tooth and nail to avoid becoming Google City.
That means they actively fight projects that might actually be good for the city, like building high density housing on the eastern side of 101.
We should also strongly consider the merits of open source with many vendors contributing and a good governance model. Ideally there'd be some sort of foundation (or government-sponsored group) in charge of such an effort.
The last thing we need is to have our screaming metal death traps buzzing around controlled by black box software by a single developer.
It's getting worse... the phone, blue tooth, the dashboard computer, traffic, impatient drivers. etc...
I for one can't wait these self driving cars, they have got to better than distracted drivers we have now.
And the dude between them is busy staring at his neighboring drivers rather than the road!
Snow and ice I think would provide a challenge for self-driving cars.
Cache. Its down for me.
I would say that's going to be a societal decision rather than an engineering decision.
An interesting point is that the introduction of the private automobile itself was an imposition on the social space of that time which basically was wildly unsafe with automobile accidents still being on of the leading causes of death in this country.
If it's determined that self-driving cars will be allowed, ordinary drivers will be forced to adjust to their presence and will have to learn their quirks.
Certainly, cellular phones realistically are being used by a significant fraction of drivers today and if the accident rate has gone up at worst only slightly due to that (not enough to counter-weight other safety measure), it's because non-cell users have adapted to the presence of the cell-user, however annoying that might be.
I'd argue that self driving cars just don't have to be safer than average drivers. They should be safer than average drivers with computer driving assistance. It's already happening, but we can take the self driving programs and use them with human drivers. To get a best of both worlds scenario. Of course we'd have to mandate all new cars come with computer driving assistance.
The counter argument is that we accept the risk of cars now, why not let self driving cars have the same level of risk. My answer is that the risk of cars is so great we either shouldn't be accepting it or are only accepting it because there isn't an easy alternative. A lot of Americans die on the roads.
A convenient advantage of regulating for self-driving vehicles is that we can put minimum safety standards into law quite easily, and enforce them meaningfully - because the prize for reaching and adhering to those standards is so great for the players involved, and because we have a relatively clean regulatory slate because of the clear step-change in the technology.
As well as the most important factor, safety, it could also be possible to step back and consider the other disadvantageous side-effects of the current status quo with cars, particularly in cities - noise, traffic congestion, wide roads with thin pavements/sidewalks for pedestrians, indeed a general culture of cars having priority over pedestrians in various situations where the number of pedestrians is much greater than the number of people in the cars.
These are all things which, depending on the city and the culture, can be really significant problems and which I'm sure would never be tolerated had they not crept up on us over decades. Regulating both for and with the capabilities of self-driving vehicles might give us opportunity to vastly improve the status quo in these areas, too, in a relatively short period of time.
It could be quite important to take advantage of the opportunity to realise such optimistic targets now, starting green field, as it can only get more difficult and become much slower to implement after the first set of regulations has been put into effect.
If we chose the former we are probably arbitrarily limiting our safety in order to save the ego of a human driver. If we chose the latter we will reach a point where we won't have a steering wheel for a driver to potentially become a hazard rather than a help.
These vehicles (I would hope) are designed to drive around people in different circumstances. They're software for use by people and until we have realistic tests with different kinds of people, ages, driving experience levels, etc. it's all academic.
I'm somewhat wondering if all the self driving car stuff by Google and Tesla is primarily a vehicle (no pun intended) for marketing rather than actual tech that will yield a real product.
The one that I remember is that they have started driving in Austin and came across a very local species of vehicle with a unique habit: the hipster fixie rider with his stand-stop motion at red lights. Committed bikers do not have free wheels and stay standing in place not by putting their feet down but rocking back and forth; that motion was new and not interpreted clearly by the car, that hesitated to see it as a false start. It’s since been fixed. The article didn’t specify if the shirt pattern had any meaningful weight in the interpretation.
Or you can just crack ahead and try them with users like Tesla.
In a world of massive un- and under- employment, mechanical turk and massive connectivity, increasing income inequality, and generationally declining standards of living, a handful of millionaires will sit in their unimaginably expensive self driving car, and five mechanical turk remote drivers will cooperate on a 3 of 5 vote basis to drive the millionaire.
Most brainpower is underutilized, the quantity is increasing, and its manufactured by unskilled labor. There eventually comes a peak-automation point where its better and cheaper for the economy and culture to just hire a dude to do it.
The world of the future is only ivy league grads will have real jobs and they'll have all the money, whats so inherently awful about someone in the favelas getting a job as a driver, especially if its cheaper and safer?
Also why would you want someone remote-controlling your car instead of sitting in the drivers seat? Wireless connectivity is way too flaky. Tunnels block the signal, rural areas have poor coverage, and equipment breaks and requires maintenance. It would be insanity to bet your life on a cellular signal.