[1] http://autoweek.com/article/autonomous-cars/tesla-model-s-au...
Does autopilot actually meet the qualifications for a level 2 system? AFAIK since autopilot is basically lane following and adaptive cruise control and braking wouldn't that be considered level 1?
Lots of human caused accidents were driving into obvious things too. I don't drive drunk or sleepy, so maybe I'm above average, but my only standard for safety for a self driving car is that it's safer than me driving.
Source: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1106613_how-safe-is-tesl...
Stats are on low page 2 and high page 3.
TLDR: Tesla compared their numbers to a statistic that includes much more dangerous forms of transport(bike, 18-wheelers, whatever). The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety did a study on just driver fatalities in passenger vehicles(cars and light trucks) and came up with 1 fatality / 438 million miles driven. Versus the Tesla figure of 1 / 130 million miles.
Whole article is worth reading as it goes into more detail on statistical issues with Tesla's safety statistic claims.
I'll add that human driving ability is not uniformly distributed. Most accidents are due to particular demographic groups: people that drink and drive, teenagers. It's entirely possible for a self-driving car to be worse at driving than most humans, while still better than the average. In that scenario getting really bad drivers into self-driving cars would improve average accident numbers, but getting non-bad drivers(aka the majority of drivers) into self-driving cars would make average accident numbers worse.
Or airplanes - autopilot in planes has contributed tremendously to improving flying safety, but every time there is a crash under autopilot both Boeing and Airbus will ground every single plane of the same type to figure out the cause, they don't just go "oh well, it's still safer than flying manually so it's good for us".
I really don't understand this notion that an autonomous car merely needs to be "better than average driver" to be allowed on the road. Absolutely disagree here.
Traffic kills so many people annually, that even a slight increase in safety is going to save more lives that are lost to aircraft accidents, radiotheraphy machine failure and such.
Who'd want an autonomous car that's merely better than the _average_ driver, when every driver knows they're above average :)
This is not to say that current autonomous vehicles actually are much safer than the human equivalent. Indeed, everything I've seen so far suggests that they have a long way to go before crossing that threshold, so personally I'm a sceptic about claims that we will see viable fully autonomous vehicles any time in the next few years. But this doesn't seem to be your argument here.
Regardless of the OP's position on this, I do think the reality is that in practice it's difficult to sell or legalize anything that isn't significantly better than 'the average driver'. Whether it makes sense or not, we seem to demand any 'AI-powered' system to be better than the average human. I personally wish this wasn't the case, but it appears to be so.
For example, I personally marvel at the abilities of Siri and Google Now, at the very least when it comes to understanding what I'm saying. It's quite possible, in fact, that both are often objectively better at understanding me than most people around me: more than once I said something to Siri where I immediately realized that it was mumbly enough for any real human in my vicinity to ask 'what?' (often only to right away act on what I said, indicating that they did manage to interpret what I'd said). And yet Siri or Google Now actually transcribed what I'd said.
Being as good as the people around me would not be good enough, because every time Siri fails it makes me shake my fist at the whole concept of 'personal assistants' on my iDevices, rather than sigh at the umpteenth person around me saying 'what?' and then obviously acting on what I'd said, which is much more common.
I've not studied this properly, so I might be wrong. But I get the impression that I hold my AI to a much higher standard than I would my human interactions.
Most of the safety of AI comes from it being implemented in vehicles that are already far safer than average.
Having a traffic pattern that requires a right turn (or left for certain countries) across a different lane of traffic is shitty and when a better solution shows up it will probably be implemented.
Let's take airbags as an example. Do you understand why airbags are allowed, or do you also find it obvious that airbags shouldn't be certified as safe to use? Airbags provide increased passenger safety on a statistical basis, as they mostly provide a cushion for impact. However there are plenty of edge cases where if you sit too close to an airbag, or let your small child sit next to an airbag, then that airbag will actually cause significant damage that wouldn't happen without the airbag.
Autonomous driving can be viewed from the same safety perspective as airbags. Sure there are new edge cases that can cause harm, but on a statistical basis if the AI is even just slightly safer than a human, then at the end of the day there will be fewer accidents and fewer deaths.
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Your airplane example is a straw man argument. Nobody has claimed that we should stop advancing AI driving tech once we slightly surpass human skills. That's just the point where it makes sense to allow it on public roads.
The worst case is better and the average case is better because you've eliminated some outliers. However,the median is far worse. The group is effectively being punished to reduce the effect of the worst performing members.
An AI that drives into a partial lane obstruction is only better than no AI for a very small number of cases.
(Do you feel lucky?)
So now, almost two years later, if you're on a highway with clear markings and good weather, though the car is programmed to nag you every ~5 minutes no matter what to basically just nudge the wheel, the car is better then a human at driving. Theoretically if Audi does get ready to release this they could simply remove the nags and have a much better system for the use case Audi is describing (Tesla supports up to 90mph). Again, for highway driving the nags are basically there for Tesla to cover their you know what. Off highway you can use it but it's more of a gimmick still as you have to very closely babysit it on most roads.
Hope that makes things more clear.
[Quick Edit: One other thing the nags are good for is just in case there is a scenario that they haven't accounted for they can say that they told the driver to put their hands on the wheel and they ignored the nag. Tesla has two years of an entire fleet of cars using and proving the system. Audi will be releasing it theoretically w/o this in place and telling drivers no hands needed right away.. I'd be skeptical on that vs what Tesla has already been proving]
You can only take your eyes off the road when you can be sure that the car can detect unexpected circumstances. Teslas are apparently bad at detecting stationary obstacles, so you can‘t take your eyes off the road (and calling the system „Autopilot“ is really not a good idea)