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Comment by iabacu | Hacker News Reader

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true.

The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong.

There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

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Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled.

Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?

No one is talking about reducing anything to zero — that’s a straw argument.

It you really want a fair comparison, one can start by controlling statistical variables by car price point, car age and driver demographics.

It’s not hard to spot blatant data fudging by companies that are big on marketing.

Note that the 3000 daily deaths is worldwide, not just the US. The daily US total is about 100. I do agree that any improvement on those numbers with AI should be applauded.

> Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents

Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally?

Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US.

When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]. We can and should fix this first and foremost.

With over 3.1 Trillion miles driven annually in the US, that's about 0.001 fatalities per 100,000 miles driven, or about 1 fatality per 80,000,000 miles driven. Driving is pretty safe - although I agree we can make it safer.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht...

[3] https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatali...

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...

[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...

Hey, you know what would fix the drunk driving problem?

Autonomous cars.

Cars don’t cause drunk driving.

Drunk drivers cause drunk driving.

Yeah but you can make all the PSAs and laws you like and some people will still drink and drive.

That's not a concern with a robot car.

Cars are an essential ingredient of drunk driving. You can't drive drunk if you don't have a car to drive.

Autonomous cars is a solution that is flashy and sexy, and has its appeal with some audience.

However, being pragmatic, to avoiding drunk driving, I'd rather go with non-autonomous sober drivers that are already available today.

You know, traditional Uber, Lyft, taxi, etc.

What makes you think drunk people will have the clarity of mind to configure and engage their autonomous system?

These cars will still have steering wheels... drunk people already don't have the clarity of mind to recognize they're too drunk to drive safely...

Yes you're right, I misspoke, 3000 a day worldwide.

Agreed that we're doing pretty well as far as deaths and injuries worldwide, but there's a lot of room to improve.

Unfair? Why should a technology touted as the future be half-measured to something as "50%", as just "good enough"? When you have the human element at play, fault is easy to judge, as is blame easy to lay. When, say, a drunk driver is involved, it's clear what the problem is, and the state can fund enforcement against drunk driving and take other measures to reduce accidents. But with driverless cars, who does the victim and/or the victims family blame? What can the state and law enforcement do when there's nothing to prosecute besides some corporate entity (and possible laws that protect it) and a faulty algorithm or similar? The human element is no longer at play, and instead there's a car manufacture, protected by decades of lobbying, deciding what is safe enough to unleash on the populace. It's pure negligence to release driverless vehicles onto the roads simply because some statistics show it's "50% safer, thus safe enough".

Waymo have driven 8 million miles and had one minor accident that was the cars fault where it thought a bus would give way and a dent resulted.

I've driven about 200,000 miles and done considerably worse including two cars written off, though no injuries. I'd say Waymo seems safer than me. And judging from my insurance premiums which are low, I'd be safer than the average human driver.

Waymo alone is fine, but when you take into account fatalities caused by others like uber, right now I think self driving cars are worse than humans by a pretty large amount.

Isn’t it already true that autonomous driving has saved lives?

I’m not sure what you’re waiting for.

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