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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

I would not be surprised if Musk coldly responded that this is a known problem with no solution, but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average. In other words, for the proponents it's a trade-off.

And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers. Which of course will snowball when reliance on automation keeps making drivers worse than better, and at some point you're past the point of no return.

Whether that's right data must show.

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A high rate of road deaths isn't a fait accompli. Musk would have us believe that technology is the only answer.

The UK has the 2nd-lowest rate of road deaths in the world (after Sweden).

The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them.

However, the UK has strict driver education programme. It is not easy to pass the driving test, with some people failing multiple times. It means that people only get a license when they are ready for it. Drink-driving will also get you a prison sentence and a driving ban.

> The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them.

Actually, paradoxically that means they are actually safer. People drive slower on narrower roads, which means that accidents are within the safe energy envelope that modern cars can absorb.

Very, very few people will ever die as a passenger or driver in a car accident at 25 mph / 40 kph. At 65mph / 100kph, the story is completely different.

You say that but people will happily drive at 50+ down a narrow country road. I think the "narrow = slower" only works for a limited period of time before people get normalised to it.

Had to thread a van through a temporary concrete width restriction the other day - when it's that narrow, even the Uber behind me wasn't giving me grief for going that slowly!

The country roads one has always dumbfounded me though - why some of those have national speed limits I will never know.

As far as I'm aware, they're national speed limits because they don't have the resource to work out the limit, or police them. I learnt on country roads and my instructor was very clear that although I could go at 60mph, I should drive to the conditions of the road.

Growing up driving in country roads in the UK you learn some tricks (dumb tricks you shouldn't do). One example is at night time you can take corners more quickly by driving on the wrong side of the road. If you can't see another cars headlights, then there are none coming.

The thought of doing this now scares me and I don't do this and suggest that no one else does either. But I know many people still drive like this.

> The country roads one has always dumbfounded me though - why some of those have national speed limits I will never know.

Why not? Even roads with lower speed limits you're required to drive at a speed appropriate for the road, the conditions, and your vehicle; the speed limit merely sets an upper-bound, and it's not really relevant whether it's achievable. Just look at the Isle of Man where there is no national speed limits: most roads outside of towns have no speed limit, regardless of whether they're a narrow single-lane road or one of the largest roads on the island.

If you set a limit, some people will drive it regardless. Even if you're supposed to drive to the road and conditions, there are enough utter morons out there who'll take a blind narrow corner at 60.

The UK also has a lot of roundabouts for road junctions. It means less 'run red light' collisions.

As someone that has been caught speeding, it's also worth mentioning that one of the big reasons why the UK has improved its road safety statistics is a reasonably new initiative where you get an option on your first offence to either take the points on your license or to attend a safety workshop.

IIRC, the workshop was about three hours, but it was surprisingly useful. The instructors treated you like adults and not children or criminals, and they gave fairly useful tips on driving and looking out for things like lights suddenly changing, ensuring you are in the right gear, how you're supposed to react if an emergency vehicle wants you to go forward when you're by a set of traffic lights with a camera, etc.

However, on the drink driving front, given the news with Ant from Ant and Dec I think it's safe to assume that not everyone gets a prison sentence for drink driving.

> However, on the drink driving front, given the news with Ant from Ant and Dec I think it's safe to assume that not everyone gets a prison sentence for drink driving.

Has he been sentenced?

Nope, I think his court case has been moved back. The court wouldn't say why, but it's believed to be because they want him to ensure he gets the most out of his time back in rehab.

It's not too common to head to prison for a single DD incident. It's also worth noting that England&Wales and Scotland have different drink driving laws.

In Scotland, the BAC limit is lower than in England and the punishment is a 12 month driving ban and fine for being over the limit - no grey areas or points or getting away with it.

In England a fine and penalty points are common, repeat offenders can be suspended and jailed. The severity of the punishment can often depend on how far over the limit you are and other factors.

Other innovations include an off road "hazard perception test" I'd be pleasantly surprised if derivatives of self driving software could reliably pass.

Drink driving rarely attracts a prison sentence. In the vast majority of cases it attracts a driving ban along with a significant fine. The sentencing guidelines have imprisonment as an option for blowing over 120 where the limit is 35 (in England and Wales, it is lower in Scotland now).

The UK went through a major cultural change relating to drink driving several decades ago, it isn't viewed as acceptable, the police get tip offs on a regular basis.

https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/item/excess-al...

Out of curiosity, how are you supposed to react if an emergency vehicle wants you to go forward when you're by a set of traffic lights with a camera?

I would think to look carefully at all directions and, if visibility allows, pass the red light, then contest the fine with an "emergrncy vehicle passing through" defence. But what is the official position?

It's illegal to cross through a red light, even if there is an emergency vehicle behind you that wants to get through.

Yep, that's what we were told. It doesn't matter if you're doing the right thing by getting out of someone's way, you'll get a fine/points if you cross the line.

Although, if you are at a set of traffic lights and an emergency vehicle tries to get you to cross the line, what you should do is write down the registration plate and contact the relevant service to report the driver. The instructor on this course was ex-police, and according to him police, paramedics, and firefighters in the UK are taught to not do this under any circumstance, and if they are caught trying to persuade someone to cross a red traffic light then they can get in a lot of trouble.

AFAIK:

The only case that trumps a red traffic light is when given a signal by an authorised person (e.g., police officers, traffic officers, etc).

I think under a literal interpretation of the law you are obliged to commit an offence if you are beckoned on across a stop line at a red traffic light; you can either refuse the instruction to be beckoned on (an offence) or you can cross the stop line (an offence). That said, there's plenty of habit of the beckoning taking precedent over the lights.

Basically the only time you see any police officer instructing traffic from a vehicle is when on a motorbike, typically when they're part of an escort.

I am not sure the UK has traffic light cameras, but they do some places in Germany. And the official position in Germany, and in most of Europe I think, is that emergency vehicle decisions trumps everything else. If a police officer directs you to do something that would break the law, then you should do it, as a police officer's decision trumps regular traffic laws.

At least, that's how it works in Germany and Denmark. But I don't think Denmark has traffic light cameras. I've never seen them anyway. But I've seen them in Germany.

Of course, this is assuming you don't actually cross the entire junction, but rather just moves out into the junction, so the emergency vehicle can get through.

That's the way I think it works - I had to do that on a set of lights I thought had a camera (turns out it mustn't have been on as nothing came of it), but quickly weighed it up in my head of "several hours of BS arguing it for me" vs "someone might die".

Police cars will have dash cams, not sure on ambulances or fire engines.

That being said, scariest thing I did on the road was going through a red light to let an ambulance through at a motorway off-ramp. You better hope everyone else has heard those sirens.

Just a note. Switzerland ranks better than the UK. By inhabitants: Switzerland (2.6), Sweden (2.8) and UK (2.9). By motor vehicles: Switzerland (3.6), Finland (4.4), Sweden (4.7) and UK (5.1). By number of kilometres driven: Sweden (3.5), Switzerland (3.6) and UK (3.6).

I'd also note that most European countries are hot on the heels of the UK, Sweden and Switzerland by the above measures. By comparison, the US numbers are 10.6, 12.9 and 7.1, respectively. Most European countries are well below those numbers.

Particularly in Western European and Nordic countries, the driving tests are very strict. Even for all the stereotypes, France's numbers of 5.1, 7.6 and 5.8 are quite good, and they are moving in the right direction.

Sources:

* http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_st...

* https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/transport/road-safety-annual-r...

Notes:

I use death rate, not incidents/accidents rate.

I ignored "smaller" countries for the above listing, such as San Marino and Kiribati.

All numbers are from 2015, and they are also presented in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

> It is not easy to pass the driving test, with some people failing multiple times. It means that people only get a license when they are ready for it.

And that's the way it should be. The driving test may not be easy, but it's not any more difficult than driving is. People should be held to a high standard when controlling high speed hunks of metal.

At the moment Tesla haven't shown that auto-pilot does lower the death rate. They've only released statistics about auto-pilot enabled cars rather than statistics for when auto-pilot was in control.

Any statistics released by Tesla should be compared against similar statistics from say modern Audis with lane-assist and collision detection.

Also, the cohort that purchases Tesla vehicles may be a lower-risk group of drivers than average.

This could happen because Tesla vehicles are more expensive than comparable conventional vehicles, less attractive to those with risky lifestyles, inconvenient for people who don't have regular driving patterns that allow charging to be planned, or more attractive to older consumers who wish to signal different markers of status than the young go-fast crowd.

You'd possibly want to compare versus non-auto-pilot Tesla drivers on the same roads in similar conditions, but the problem remains that the situations where auto-pilot is engaged may be different from those when the driver maintains control.

In sum, it's hard to mitigate the potential confounding variables.

> Also, the cohort that purchases Tesla vehicles may be a lower-risk group of drivers than average.

Yes - that's why I suggest comparing it to modern Audi drivers. Basically any of the BMW/Mercedes/Audi drivers are where Tesla is getting most of its customers. Those companies all have similar albeit less extensive safety systems.

Thats because all autopilot enabled cars, have the safety part enabled by default. Automatic Emergency Brakeing. Side collision avoidance, Lane detection etc.

Those systems are the great ones at the moment. But almost all modern cars have those.

They're brilliant because they augment humans by leaving humans to do all the driving and staying focused on that but then taking over when the driver gets distracted and is about to hit something.

Auto-pilot does it the opposite way round. It does the driving but not as well as the human but then the human can't stay as alert as the car so isn't ready to take over.

Actually despite your skepticism Tesla's PR spin has already beaten you.

"but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average"

That's not what they said, they said the death rate was lower than the average. And yet you can't help hearing that it lowered the death rate. I think it's very likely turning on autopilot massively increases the rate of death for Tesla drivers, but they've managed to deflect from that so skilfully.

I don't get it. These two are the same thing.

The comment above you supposes that people who drive teslas have fewer accidents on average, even without autopilot. Saying that autopilot "lowers the average" would mean that autopilot lowers the amount of accidents for tesla drivers, while "lower than average" could mean that while a tesla with autopilot is safer than the average, it is less safe than a tesla without autopilot. Pretty complicated

I don't think that's the correct answer. Flight autopilots have lowered accident rates tenfold, but every time there is a crash while on autopilot Boeing/Airbus will ground every single plane of that type and won't allow them to fly until the problem is found and fixed. If I know that my car's autopilot is statistically less likely to kill me than I am to kill myself, I would still much much rather drive myself.

If Tesla were to respond in a similar vein - that is turn off auto-pilot each time there was a fatal crash until the cause was fully investigated and fixed then I'd feel a lot more comfortable.

From the videos in the article it's clear that auto-pilot should be disabled when there is bright low-light sunshine. Tesla should be prepared to tell customers there's certain times of the day when the reliability of the software is not high enough and turn it off.

These are all 'beta' testers after all so they shouldn't complain too much.

> Tesla should be prepared to tell customers there's certain times of the day when the reliability of the software is not high enough and turn it off.

Imho, they should detect that situation (by using cameras and/or the current time + GPS) and not allow you to switch it on. You should not give drivers the choice between safety and lazy (from which I assume that auto-pilot driving when currently feasible it SAFER than manual -- which I assumes, but read elsewhere in the thread is not yet properly demonstrated).

That's really not how it works in aviation. Aircraft manufacturers and the FAA don't automatically ground every plane when a crash occurs when autopilot was in use. They conduct an investigation first. And even if the investigation finds an autopilot fault they're likely to just issue an airworthiness directive warning pilots about the failure mode rather than immediately grounding everything.

> but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average.

I think the question of using self driving vehicles comes down to this. Do you want to be part of a statistics that you can control, or do you want to be part of one that you cannot?

When we go in trains or planes, we are already being part of statistics that we cannot control. But those things also are extremely reliable.

So there seems to be a threshold, where someone should opt for being part of a statistics that you cannot control.

The people who are pushing SDV's, by some sleight of hand, seem to hide this aspect, and have successfully showcased raw, (projected) statistics that implicitly assumes the rate of progress with SDV's, also assume that SDV ll continue to progress until they reach that capability.....

>And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers.

But there is always are risk of catastrophic regressions [1] with each update, right?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference

> be part of a statistics that you can control

well, even if you are in control with your hands on the wheel, you can still get heart (and even die) in a car accident where you have no responsibility at all. Sure you can control your car, but you cannot control others'...

(this is even more obvious from a cyclist point of view)

Also people vastly overestimate their driving competence.

That is certainly not the norm. People does not "vastly" overestimate their driving competence..

Discussions of driving among lay people are generally useless and interminable, due largely to the supercharged Dunning-Kruger effect that driving for whatever reason produces. No matter where you are or who's talking, the speaker is always a good, careful driver, other drivers are reckless morons, and the city in which they all live has the worst drivers in the country.

Everyone everywhere says the same thing. It's information-free discourse.

I am Sorry. Not having control of a lot of stuff that happen in the world does not mean that you don't have some influence on if you will be in an accident or not, if you are driving the car yourself?

With half baked self driving tech, you have absolutely no control..

> And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers. Which of course will snowball when reliance on automation keeps making drivers worse than better, and at some point you're past the point of no return.

I really hope it does get to the point were all drivers are automatic and interconnected. Cars could cooperate to a much higher extent and traffic could potentially be much more efficient and safe.

> all drivers are automatic and interconnected. Cars could cooperate

Say, like computers on the Internet (information highway)?

Rings a bell.

"Hello, fellow robot car, I am also a robot car, not a wifi pineapple notatall nooosir, and all lanes ahead are blocked. But hey, there's a shortcut, just turn sharp to the right. Yes, your map says you're on a bridge, but don't worry, I have just driven through there, trust me." Nothing could possibly go wrong and the idea of evil actors in such a network is absurd - right? Your idea reminds me of the 1990s Internet - cf today's, where every other node is potentially malicious.

There's no reason such a system would have to be engineered to be totally trusting. The car, in that situation, would likely be set up to say "nope, my sensors say that's not safe" and hand off to the driver or reject the input.

Use it just for additional input to err on the side of safety. If the car ahead says "hey, I'm braking at maximum" and my car's sensors show it's starting to slow down, I can apply more immediate braking power than if I'd just detected the initial slight slowdown.

Or, "I'm a car, don't hit me!" pings might help where my car thinks it's a radar artifact, like the Tesla crash last year where it hit the semi crossing the highway.

>The car, in that situation, would likely be set up to say "nope, my sensors say that's not safe" and hand off to the driver or reject the input.

You realize you say that in a thread about a car's sensors failing to understand it was in an unsafe condition (again), right?

You realize that the comments in a thread may head off in a related but distinct direction, right?

We're discussing car-to-car mesh networks being used to provide self-driving cars with more decision-making input.

That last part is actually scariest: blame the victim, yay. Unless they can prove they had a functional, powered, up to date, compatible I'm-a-car responder, it's their own damn fault for being invisible to the SDV. How about "I'm a human, don't hit me"? Does that also sound like a good idea (RIP Elaine Herzberg)?

In other words, "all other road users should accommodate my needs just to make life a bit easier for me" is a terrible idea.

I think that's a needlessly uncharitable interpretation.

Having cars communicate information to each other has the potential to be an additional safety measure. It's like adding reflectors to bikes - adding them wasn't victim blaming, it was just an additional thing that could be added to reduce accidents.

Sure, I understand that you're proposing it as an improvement , and it would even be an improvement - but using this for scapegoating will happen, as long as there are multiple parties to any accident; we have seen this in the last Uber crash ("find anything pointing anywhere but at Uber"), or in any bike crash ("yeah, the truck has smashed into him at 60 MPH and spread him over two city blocks, but he's at fault for not wearing a helmet - it would have saved him!!!").

Also, what's to stop evil actors right now? There is a road near me with the bridge out. Anybody could just go remove the warning signs. Why don't they?

Obvious to casual observers, non-targettable, hard to set up/tear down quickly.

>I really hope it does get to the point were all drivers are automatic and interconnected. Cars could cooperate to a much higher extent and traffic could potentially be much more efficient and safe.

I think you can make some conclusions from the current software industry and see how many defects are deployed daily, I see Tesla and Uber have same defects as any SV startup and not as NASA, having this starups controlling all the cars on the road sounds a terrible idea.

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