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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

How so you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? Or do you really think the litigation system (where currently car manufactures almost are never liable) is properly tuned to minimize the time until that is achieved?

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How do you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed?

I'd say, let's ban using your phone while driving and drinking before driving like many other countries did 10 and 20 years ago. That could save 15k of those people right away.

I’m pretty sure we have laws for that everywhere in the US

Over the past decades, phone usage has surged while deaths have fallen or stayed flat (modulo the miniscule uptick that was all over the news). Distracted driving is dangerous, but phones aren't contributing nearly that much (and it's mostly illegal).

Drunk driving is super deadly, but it's already illegal. More importantly, self-driving cars will be vastly more effective at getting drunk drivers out from behind the wheel than all the legistlative in the world.

Driving while using a phone is illegal in most areas, but still very common, just like speeding -- it clearly isn't being addressed very seriously. And standards for "drunk driving" vary a lot; sometimes you're allowed two or even three drinks before driving.

Another commenter here linked to an excellent NYT article exploring this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/america-is-now-an...

The US had one of the world's lowest rates of driving deaths in 1990, but since then other countries have pulled ahead significantly. Why is that?

I could imagine a million reasons. Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents but deaths have fallen earlier because we implement sophisticated safety tech earlier. But once safety tech reaches diminishing returns, other countries pass us.

Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents

Natural?? Roads and cars are all human-made! Are you saying the "deaths per road mile travelled" metric is wrong or biased somehow?

"Natural" in this context is just shorthand for "at fixed level of safety tech". You can substitute "baseline" if you want.

Why would the US have roughly the same baseline safety as everywhere else in 1990, but be 2x worse today?

The idea is that the US leads in safety tech adoption (which I believe is just an empirical fact) but that safety tech is reaching diminishing returns (conjecture), so that as time goes by it's tech lead helps less and less at lowering deaths per accident (relative to other countries), while it's accident rate remains higher.

This is really not that important. My point is that there are a million ways to explain the data besides the one you are suggesting.

Did you read the article? It picks out specific differences, like the rate of seat belt usage -- higher in other countries than in the US, even though self belts are mandatory just about everywhere.

"The US has laxer laws and doesn't enforce them as strictly" is a very simple explanation that fits the data well. It matches what I personally have seen in the US and UK, though of course that's just anecdotal.

I'm not sure if the US is ahead of the curve at all in safety tech -- things like ABS and airbags, right? The US is definitely behind the curve in adoption of traffic circles / roundabouts rather than 4-way stops.

You're correct that there could be some other reason why the US could have a higher "baseline" rate of traffic accidents; but what could that reason be? Any suggestions?

Possibly the US has a higher proportion of young drivers?

One way to roll out the tech is to do a hybrid system. Instead of selling self-driving tech as a convenience, the tech could be used to backup human driving. If the car sees I missed a stop sign, it could stop.

The goal shouldn't be a self driving car better than humans, but a self driving car better than a human driven car with automated safeguards.

This is the case with a lot of implementations, and it’s really lot a good idea if you want people to actually use it that way. Ignoring the effect that kind of system has had on pilots, in the automotive industry it’s just going to put poor systems into use under the guise of “well you shouldn’t be counting on it anyways”

Either something works well enough to be used throughout an entire use case with less failure than a human (driving on a stretch of highway, switching lanes, getting off at an exit, etc) or it isn’t

This all hinges on the unknowable of how safe the competing system will be. And how long it will take to roll out - a decade at absolute best before 50% of journeys are done with no human attention.

Launching unsafe self-driving cars will delay the rollout as soon as the first big accident happens.

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