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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

googles cars have gotten in a few fender benders and side swipes

people have died using teslas autopilot

There was only one accident I'm aware of in which the Waymo vehicle was at fault; the vast majority have been humans doing stupid things like rear-ending them at stop lights and t-boning by running a red light.

(Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)

"At fault" is one relevant metric, but not the only one. An autonomous vehicle should at least meet, and ideally surpass, human-driven ones in avoiding accidents for which they're not at fault as well.

I'd be curious to know if Waymo vehicles experience more, less, or the same number of not-at-fault accidents per mile driven as human-driven ones.

That's a tricky one. Avoiding an accident for which you are not at fault could easily cause an accident for which you are at fault. Human drivers have a pretty bad record with that particular situation.

Also, there are some network effects at play here, the higher the percentage of self driving cars the more rare that situation should become.

I agree that there's a tricky calculus involved in some scenarios, but I think there's a much wider domain of not-at-fault scenarios where autonomous vehicles should be able to surpass humans unambiguously. Example: an autonomous car being tailgated by a human-driven car, with a stop sign or light up ahead. Different braking patterns have different likelihoods of causing an accident.

Autonomous cars really have to be able to handle these scenarios at least as good as, and ideally better than, humans: there's not a complicated split-second balancing act to worry about.

Tesla have stats saying their autopilot, for all its limitations, is already much safer than a human driver: https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh...

Humans will do stupid things. A self-driving car has to drive safely in spite of them.

How do you avoid being rear ended at a stoplight?

There may be ways to avoid some of the other types of accidents, but those ones (which have happened several times) are difficult to escape.

The real question is what's the safety threshold - safer than median human? 90th percentile? 99th?

> "How do you avoid being rear ended at a stoplight?"

The same way defensive (human) drivers have been doing for a long time: leave room between you and the car in front of you. Gauge cars coming up behind you and roll forward if they need extra room to stop.

Does not prevent 100% of rear-endings, but a large portion of them. Most rear-enders are not cars plowing full-speed into you, it's someone misjudging their braking and not being fully at-rest when they needed to be. Leaving some margin for this kind of error helps avoid the whole incident.

Change lanes, allow the other driver to overtake, start braking a little earlier and more gently, touch the brakes to flash brakelights let the driver behind know that you are stopping soon. All ways i deal with tailgaters in different situations - it's a judgement call though.

Don't google cars drive on a limited number of preplanned routes with a very low speed ceiling?

That is more cautious, but that doesn't, on its own, suggest better tech. That is that the Google cars are actually safer, more advanced, etc.

> with a very low speed ceiling

Those are the Koala cars. Before those, there were the Lexus which went in highways too.

That also could be because autopilot is only usable on highways (IIRC) and the fatality rate per accident on highways is much higher than standard town/city driving.

Either way there's not nearly enough data to draw conclusions from.

Autopilot won't stop at stop signs or stop lights, so it is not as useful when not on highways.

Just to clarify the downvotes.

Highway driving is safer.

Google's self-driving cars started on highways (easier problem to tackle) before moving on to city streets.

There's a lot more tesla cars than google cars. And I don't think there was a single death directly because of autopilot (not 100% sure though). Also, autopilot is safer, so it actually _saved_ lives.

If downvoters don't believe autopilot is safer, here's article about NHTSA report: http://bgr.com/2017/01/19/tesla-autopilot-crash-safety-stati...

I'd guess the downvotes are more for this part:

> I don't think there was a single death directly because of autopilot (not 100% sure though).

There was a death, and it was very prominent.

Yes, I know about that white truck death. By 'directly' I meant situation when autopilot 'went crazy' because of some bug and sent your car in a spin on a highway etc. Probably should have used different wording.

I imagined as much. Even so, "autopilot sent your car in a spin" vs "autopilot ran into a truck" is a distinction without a difference for the people inside the car.

Tesla warned that driver still should be alert, they implemented warning so driver would keep hands on the wheel etc. NHTSA reported that driver had 7 seconds to react on the truck. In a spin situation because of some bug autopilot would create the problematic situation itself, even if driver will be paying attention to the road.

Yeah, the problem was letting people get the expectation that it was an autopilot when it wasn't. Decades of Human Factors research in aviation had already established that people can't maintain focus on a sufficiently-monotonous task.

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