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Comment by sauravt | Hacker News Reader

Loss of even 1 life is far greater than the convenience gain for all other passengers combined. Current autopilot technology just isn't ready for the roads yet (some of them like this one in the video constructed with gross incompetence). This and many such future accidents to follow cannot be fixed by simple software glitches, instead, auto driving car manufacturers should be required to construct magnetic road white stripes for major highways and routes.

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It's not just convenience. Human drivers make mistakes and die all the time. If every car in the US had autopilot and half the rate of fatal crashes (not perfect!), you'd save 18,000 lives each year.

If the fatal crashes are prevented with automatic emergency breaking, why drag in rest of autopilot? AEB is a simple assistance technology that's standard on most new vehicles

There's no evidence that autopilot has that good of a safety effect yet.

How would that help? The car followed the left stripe (into the divider), what difference would it make if it were magnetic?

> Current autopilot technology just isn't ready for the roads yet (some of them like this one in the video constructed with gross incompetence)

I disagree. AP is ready for very common situations and acts faster/better than a human driver there (e.g. rear-end collisions). It's not as capable of judging some extreme situations as a good human driver yet. We'll have to fix roads in some situations, but we'll also all benefit from having at least collision avoidance assistance in the cars.

That is not AP, is lane assist and collision detection, other cars also have this tech, the problem with Tesla is that they market it as AP, the driver should always keep his hand on the wheel and eyes on the road with this systems.

AP will not be ready for many years, and it will get a bad reputation because of companies like Tesla or Uber that push things that are not ready.

Are you sure? Your argument reduces to absurdity, because if a single life is never an acceptable trade-off for convenience, we should set a global speed limit of 5mph.

And some people will still probably die at 5mph!

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