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Comment by trackofalljades | Hacker News Reader

TLDR for every piece written about this, it's still safer than a human driving alone, period. When used properly, it's vastly safer, and when used improperly, it's probably still safer but only just...the thing to consider is the kind of driver who's selfish and dumb enough to misuse this kind of thing is a high risk driver without it and would probably still be worse.

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On what basis? That computer plus human has to be safer than the sum of the parts, if both parts are working as intended?

There's no logical reason to believe that must be so. The sum of two things can be less safe than either one individually.

If Autopilot suddenly decides to veer into a railing, as it did in Montana, then a human operator may not even be capable of responding quickly enough even if they were totally paying attention.

Not disagreeing, but is there any hard, independent third-party research to back up this claim? As an engineer, I tend to lean this way. As a father of two, I want to see some numbers to back up statements like "still safer than a human driving alone, period."

Hard to find current statistics. This [1] seems pretty believable. Not sure if it's "good" or not, but there you go. It's interesting that, just eyeballing it, mass seems to be the dominating factor. The crown vic is discontinued, but was fairly inexpensive, looks like it was originally $25-30,000. Compared to a C Class, $30-35,000, which had more fatalities.

Of course, this is all 5 years old, so maybe there are better safety features available now.

There are a couple of things that may or may not be believable. Maybe it's possible for one or a few drivers to greatly improve the global traffic system [2]. I believe it, but i can't find a real study that proves it. I do think a handful of self driving cars can smooth out those compression waves, just by driving sanely.

Finally, purely anecdotally, a friend of mine is a truck driver. We get to catch up over dinner every few months. He sees people doing crazy things multiple times a day. He sees the helicopter ambulances on a weekly basis, passing by wrecks in either direction. His assertion, if people would just stay calm and consistent, a lot fewer people would die. It's either someone not paying attention, or being super aggressive.

I, also, would like to see a study. I would bet quite a bit of money, that a highway with only autopilot drivers would have zero wrecks.

I guess the real question is, does sensor failure (device failure, snow, things like that) dominate wrecks? or is it interaction with unpredictable (aggressive, inattentive) drivers?

[1] (pdf) http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/Driver_DeathRates_sr5001_e...

[2] http://trafficwaves.org/

The evidence so far is looking like it's more dangerous than a human driving alone. There may be one fatality per 94 m miles for normal driving overall but the rate is no doubt much less for mature drivers on open freeway driving normally. Also humans paying attention don't drive straight into trucks across the road and similar failings.

I'm all for letting people use risky technology - I ride around asia on a clapped out motorcycle at times for example - but it's best to be realistic about it.

And that's based on what, things like the discounting of collisions caused by the driver having to brake hard because the autopilot was about to happily slam into another vehicle/object/person? Tesla's summation of those is that they were not a failing of Autopilot, because it was not active at the moment of impact. That's ... disingenuous ... at best.

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