Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet. They should be testing at GoMentum Station, which is the former Concord Naval Weapons Station north of Oakland. That place was built to store battleship ammo; if anything bad happens there, there's nobody close enough to get hurt.

Google/Waymo's California DMV disengagement report for 2016 reports 0.20 disengagements per 1000 miles, or one disengagement per 5000 miles.[1] Google's cars drove 635,868 miles autonomously in 2016, so there's enough driving behind this for that number to be meaningful. This is 4x better than 2015, incidentally. CA DMV accident and disengagement reports are worth reading, since they're one of the few objective data sources available on automatic driving. So far, nobody has been willing to turn a self-driving car over to Top Gear or Road and Track.

Google/Waymo is thus three orders of magnitude better than Uber, and about two orders of magnitude better than anybody else who tests in California.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...

> Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet.

No kidding! Yet somehow I'm not surprised, as it has always been pretty obvious that these jackasses didn't know what they were doing. This just adds to the many reasons why I am fully 100% behind getting them and other amateur-hour efforts (like geohot's comma.ai) off the road right now, and keeping them off until they can prove they are safe enough to be out on the public streets mixed with human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. I live and work in San Francisco and walk pretty much everywhere I go. I don't need to be watching out for some shitty "self driving" car that has to have a person take over every 0.8 miles whenever I'm trying to cross the street. Fuck that. If they keep this up, someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed.

This just represents how much corporate DNA can affect outcomes down the road.

Uber grew up on saying fuck you to government regulations. And it worked for them, because the only real losers were taxi cartels, and as much as I hate Uber, taxis were ten thousand times worse (in SF), which is more or less widely agreed on AFAICT. But it fails at dealing with the problem of autonomous vehicles, which is an existential threat to Uber. This is why Uber won't exist a decade from now.

Google grew up and succeeded through throwing lots of engineers at problems and building close, incestuous alliances with the government and academia, to avoid undue negative attention. This has plenty of downsides, but it's definitely the only plausible winning approach for getting autonomous cars actually on the road.

The self driving car feature known as "cruise control" has been around for 40+ years. Legally, Uber's level 2 cars are no different from that self driving feature as well as other self driving features like lane assist.

The driver is fully liable, in the same way that you are liable if you hit a car with cruise control enable.

Existing selfdriving features are tested on the real road all the time. We've had this technology for 40 years. Its called "cruise control".

Uber is level 2 self driving. That means that, legally, it is no different from the already on the road cruise control self driving feature. AKA, "The driver is legally liable at all times".

Being legal isn't the only consideration, there's still room to question whether they are acting responsibly.

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