So we can A) accept higher fatalities for convenience, B) demand much better performance from self-driving vehicles than we expect of humans, or C) wait.
Anecdotally, I've heard people make the point that public transit is infeasible in the states because the population density is too low, and people are too spread out.
I'm not sure that it is -- the US Census Bureau stats show the share of Americans living in urban areas growing steadily throughout the history of the country, with 80% of the population currently hailing from urban areas.
We are and have been urbanizing since the birth of the country, I reckon if were smart about building infra now, we can remove the problem SDVs are trying to solve in approximately as long as it would take for them to become ubiquitous were we to take no action.
I think part of the problem is that self-driving vehicles is marketed as a life-saving technology, when it is the novelty and futurism people are attracted to. (It is indeed an impressive and challenging problem.) The furthest mainstream press release I can recall making the case for autonomous vehicles was Google's efforts. This makes me wonder if they had a solution in search of a problem, so they took road deaths in the U.S to sell the idea. Maybe they were chasing the next iteration of intense computing application, e.g. Deep Blue -> Watson -> self-driving cars.
The 40k+ fatalities per year is a solvable problem without autonomous vehicles: (1) promote equity in other methods of transportation, (2) enhance driver-assistance technology, (3) design roads to be built for safety rather than convenience/speed [0]
Regarding point 2 above, note that Chevrolet has "teen-driver technology" which can set a maximum speed, and provide visual and audible warnings if the (teen) driver exceeds the speed limit [1]. Presumably the vehicle has cameras to read speed limit signs. Why isn't this being applied to all drivers? It seems to be the classic case of "let's blame teens for everyone's bad driving" (juvenoia).
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/25/speed-kills-so... [1] https://www.chevrolet.com/teen-driver-technology
Edit: I don’t mind the downvotes, but I wish they came with a rebuttal rather than radio silence.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2018/02/01/479262...
The latest disengagement report showed that Waymo vehicles, in tests conducted from December 2016 through November 2017, on average logged 5,596 miles without Waymo’s safety drivers disengaging the system and retaking the wheel. Its next closest contender was Cruise, owned by General Motors Co, at 1,214 miles on average between disengagements.
And later
Waymo, for example, drove 352,545 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements. Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements.
The third best performance came from Nissan Motor Co , which drove 5,007 miles and had 24 disengagements, meaning that its vehicles had disengagements on average every 208 miles.
The numbers fall off sharply after Nissan, with Baidu Inc at an average rate of every 41 miles, chipmaker Nvidia Corp at 4.6 miles on average, and Mercedes, with disengagements every 1.3 miles on average.
Some further discussion and context:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-autonomous-ca...
Between mistakes a human wouldn’t make unless impaired, such as accelerating into a crash barrier or into a fire truck, and the high rate of human intervention, compared to the rate of fatal accidents per x miles humans have (1.27 per 100 million miles even including drunks, the elderly and new drivers) the argument for “safer than humans” seems utterly insupportable at this time.
Personally (again, anecdote, but still) I've seen many, many people who, when brought to a new situation while driving, will begin to panic and ultimately stop in the middle of traffic... Often during rush hour. I can imagine that the systems driving these cars could be put in to a similar position (remember the bicyclist and the Waymo car?) and need human intervention to continue.
It's the same argument as "what is AI" which inevitably devolves to "must be demonstrably smarter than humans in every way before we consider it to actually be intelligent."