Hacker News Reader

Driving has resulted in innumerable deaths. In most cases the auto-pilot feature increases safety. In a very small number it decreases it. Life's about trade-offs.

View on HN

I agree that autonomous doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than humans (by how much we will leave to regulators) but it's not clear that the actual safety of these systems has kept up with the marketing around them. I would love to see the evidence.

> it just has to be better than humans

I really don't see this being approved with just that notion. Its most certainly a rational argument, but people aren't good at making rational decisions. So the standard would have to be much much better, if this is to be approved.

This particular failure of the autopilot system will be addressed in some capacity. The resulting patch will be pushed out to all Tesla cars. Every single driver using autopilot will benefit from this incident.

The same is absolutely not true with human drivers.

NHTSA’s full final investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investig...

Here's the evidence.

The systems that steer the car should be evaluated independently of the emergency braking features, or else the benefits of the latter could mask deficiencies of the former.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com