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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

The problem is Google's most bragged about statistic, miles driven, ignores the frequency at which test drivers intervened to prevent accidents. Google reports yearly to the California DMV how many disengages the system had, both due to driver intervention and due to system failure on the part of the self-driving system. They also report how many accidents would've occurred if test drivers hadn't intervened.

Those numbers are staggering, if you read the reports, and it's incredible that people believe these vehicles are anywhere near as safe as human drivers. We are nowhere near the point where you could remove the steering wheel... something Google has begged legislators to let them do. The important statistics about self-driving car safety are NOT the statistics Google is telling Congress or the media about their cars.

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Average US in the US is 10,000 to ~15,000 miles per year with over 65 drivers averaging under 7,000. Overall an accident is reported to insurance very ~17.5 years. Fender benders are often not reported and disengagements could default to simply hitting the breaks. Two of those 13 likely accidents would have hit traffic cones, which is below the insurance threshold making the numbers hard to directly compare.

Still, ~1 accident every 250,000 miles is likely significantly better than human norms and Google is getting close to that level.

PS: People talk about bad weather, but surprisingly that's not nearly as important as you might think. Integrate weather reports and trucks could get off the road hours before a storm alternatively hand off to human drivers 30 minutes before expected bad weather.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

269 disengages over their entire fleet per year and perhaps 13 hypothetical accidents of unknown magnitude (but some quite minor: "2 of these involved simulated contact with traffic cones") if they hadn't disengaged is 'staggering'?

A disengage should be understood to probably be an accident, given that it's a failure of the self-driving system without warning, and given that Google's argument is that the steering wheel should be removed. Contact with a traffic cone means the car could just as easily make contact with a baby in the street, you can not just say "since it hit something cheap, it doesn't count".

282 failures of their system across 434,000 miles is 1,539 miles between incidents. That's a system that fails more often than even old school cars need to change their oil.

Suffice to say, Google's claim that they're ready to remove the steering wheel and it's only the law holding them up, which is the argument they made on the floor of Congress... they're liars.

EDIT: Since I'm rate limited, my response to Retric below: False. The system disengages when the system has an error and has conflicting data about the state of the world around it. It isn't overabundance of caution, it's overabundance of confusion.

Google was really conservative because peoples lives where at stake. Disengage was not a system crash where the car had no idea what was going on, the car noticing a potential issue well ahead of time and handing it off to a driver which is a slow process and not capable of preventing an imminent crash.

PS: If they just wanted to add miles they would have operated on highways not the far more accident prone city streets.

> A disengage should be understood to probably be an accident

I don't think it should. A disengage is simply a precaution. Whether it would have been an accident if the self-driving car had continued on is a question of counterfactuals, and they examine it with the recorded data and simulations of the car software to see what would happen; and they report that of the 269 disengages, only 13 probably would've led to an accident with physical contact with something it shouldn't've, and at least 2 of those are trivial. You claim to have read the report in detail, so I'm not sure why I have to explain this.

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