Comment by knz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knz | Hacker News Reader

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It's a false comparison though.

1) Society tolerates a small amount of alcohol for most drivers.

2) Driving while drunk impairs your physical and mental ability to drive safely and only gets worse as you drink more. Obviously a manual driver has slower reaction times than an autonomous system but they are within a level that society tolerates and far better than someone who is drunk.

There are also risks with autonomous vehicles - the potential for equipment/sensor failure, software being unable to adequately handle bad weather, the potential for exploitation by hackers etc.

I'm currently in the process of buying a new vehicle and have been test driving vehicles with various sensors designed to prevent accidents (specifically the Subaru eyesight system). One of my first thoughts was that it would be easy to become reliant on the technology and have a serious accident when a sensor fails (particularly for blind spot detection). I'm still likely going to buy a vehicle with that functionality but am not sure how much I will trust it.

> easy to become reliant on the technology and have a serious accident when a sensor fails (particularly for blind spot detection)

Recently realized this myself when the blind spot detector light went out in our SUV. It's gotten me thinking about how manufacturers would approach a situation like that without forcing the user to undergo (or more accurately ignore) safety tests like a walk-around prior to driving or something similar. Or perhaps the intended use of these sensors should be stated as supplementary - ie "do not rely on them without verifying it's safe to merge yourself"? People would ignore that too. It's an issue I haven't really seen a solution to anywhere.

The dealer was very specific that they are supplementary sensors.

The only practical solution is probably sensor redundancy. Of course that doesn't mitigate all of the risks.

> they are within a level that society tolerates

For now, because there are no alternatives so we've all gotten used to ~31,000 annual US motor vehicle deaths. If self-driving tech drastically cuts down on that, society's tolerance will change.

How many of those are attributable to factors that could be mitigated through augmented systems (a cap on how fast a vehicle could travel, collision avoidance systems, HUD's etc) though? Those could probably be implemented much more easily and affordably. To me the appeal of truly autonomous vehicles (in additional to some safety improvements) is being able to reclaim my commute time.

> One of my first thoughts was that it would be easy to become reliant on the technology and have a serious accident when a sensor fails (particularly for blind spot detection).

I fear that we are presently in an unfortunate middle ground where driver-assist functionality is good enough to train most people to pay less attention to the road but not good enough to actually let them pay less attention.

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