Put Driverless Cars Back in the Slow Lane

The article was written by Ross Marchand who is "the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance."

I was curious about who TPA was. According to http://www.energyandpolicy.org/renewable-energy-state-policy..., "The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is an advocacy front group that is part of the Koch political network, and is largely funded by money funneled through the Koch-connected Americans for Job Security, Center to Protect Patient Rights (now called American Encore), and Freedom Partners."

So take that into account when reading the article.

This is not journalism or an opinion from an expert. It's a policy piece written by a Koch funded front group. See Media Matters here: https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2015/07/31/media-discl...

Please read this piece critically and consider that there may be considerable astroturfing and or FUD in the comments on that site, here, and around this issue in general.

Driverless cars are apparently on someone's radar (or should that be lidar) who has cash to try and discredit them.

This was a strange article. These days, it's hard to tell what is (a) genuine journalism from a concerned source (b) some kind of intentional negative press funded by an adversary, and (c) clickbaity journalism that tries to collect enough smoke to convince you there's a fire so you'll click and share.

In particular, the part about disengagements due to reckless driving on the part of other vehicles was strange: the author assumes that this was due to there being less reckless driving by other vehicles, rather than an improvement in the ability of Waymo's vehicles to deal with it. (I have no idea either, but it seems like an important question.)

This part near the end was funny:

“Buying large tracts of land in hilly areas, building test roads, and hiring “extras” to serve as pedestrians would go a long way toward transparently proving efficacy.”

It's almost like the author of this article read The Atlantic article on Waymo's test village. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...

The 2 sets of numbers to decide if the article is accurate are:

The rate of technology failures has fallen by more than 90 percent (from .64 to .06), unsafe driving rates decreased by 25 percent (from .16 to .12). The ability of cars to analyze situations on the road and respond has barely shown improvement since the beginning of 2016. In key categories, like “incorrect behavior prediction” and “unwanted maneuver of the vehicle,” Waymo vehicles actually did worse in 2017 than in 2016.

Waymo estimated “simulated contacts,” or the number of disengagements that would have likely led to crashes. Based on these data, last reported in 2015, Google/Waymo vehicles would’ve crashed .02 times per 1,000 miles driven without testers.

Department of Transportation data show that Americans get into around 6 million crashes a year and drive around 3 trillion miles each year, implying that Waymo vehicles are 4–5 times more dangerous than human drivers.

There's nothing wrong with pumping the brakes on this a little and letting the hype bubble dissipate.

As the article states, driverless cars are involved in 4-5 times more accidents. The companies promoting these cars say that it's ok, since the driverless cars were in most cases not legally responsible for the accidents, but that misses the point that driverless cars perform unorthodox manuevers in certain situations, at least by current driving conventions, and that more people are getting hurt.

If we could identify a human behavior that was causing some people to be involved in 4-5 times more accidents, there would likely be interest in doing something about that.

It's more a case that the laws are currently designed to counter inappropriate human drivers, not inappropriate machine drivers. We don't even know what inappropriate activity by machine drivers is at this point.

This seems like a straight up hit piece that is twisting facts for their benefit. I couldn't find much information on the 'Taxpayers Protection Alliance' but they are listed as a beneficiary of the Koch brothers. https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/koch

What does it mean to "put driverless cars back in the slow lane"?

If it means to slow down investment, research and development, that strikes me as foolishly shortsighted. I don't think I've talked to anyone with even a modest understanding of the relevant technologies who doesn't think most driving will eventually be done by robots. Having a financial stake in those robots is reasonably likely to pay off.

If it means that robots should have to pass a driving test before being allowed on the road without adult supervision, I don't think many people would argue against that.

Written by the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

They have a "reverse" doomsday clock on their homepage celebrating the repeal of title 2 by the FCC.

Kinda tells you everything you need to know about them.

>But the ability of cars to analyze situations on the road and respond has barely shown improvement since the beginning of 2016. In key categories, like “incorrect behavior prediction” and “unwanted maneuver of the vehicle,” Waymo vehicles actually did worse in 2017 than in 2016.

Ouch. That doesn't bode well at all for the future of driverless cars.

Edit : -1 points: don't question the silicon valley hive mind, people ;)

Why are people here doing ad hominems when the core of the article is a discussion of new and interesting data as reported by GM and Waymo? If you don't like the data, attack GM and Waymo.