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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

Well, this bug took down the entire system. What happens when self-driving software hits a similar bug? I don't think that there is any precedent for that sort of thing with manually driven cars. The scale could easily be larger than 100-car pile-ups due to poor weather conditions.

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>I don't think that there is any precedent for that sort of thing with manually driven cars.

A stroke or heart attack while driving?

That would only affect the person who had a stroke or heart attack and their close vicinity. The parent is suggesting a scenario where the manual driving equivalent would be every single driver getting a stroke or heart attack at the same time.

A stroke or heart attack while driving has (possibly) nationwide or worldwide reach? I somehow don't think you understand what I'm getting at.

A "Perfect Storm" of bugs could cause a systemic failure that has the possibility to affect all cars everywhere (well, probably limited to a single car-maker / model / etc). This has the possibility to affect millions. Claiming that a stroke or heart attack while driving has the possibility of a similar scope / reach doesn't make sense.

AFAIK, because most new cars today are pretty close to drive-by-wire anyway, there's little if anything that exists today that precludes such a perfect storm scenario from occurring with the ECUs in human driven vehicles today other than whatever internal processes manufacturers happen to have in place to avoid ECU bugs.

So in that respect, the introduction of self-driving-cars won't necessarily make such events more likely.

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