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Comment by gsich | Hacker News Reader

And yet, 7 years after there are still similar problems with self-driving cars. Don't get too hang up on dates.

There are, for the self-driving car program in question which developed over that 7 years of progres? Can you name a similar incident in the past year of a Waymo car boxing in another car on a highway and sending people to the hospital?

It took 7 years for this particular incident to come to light. Until I learned about it, I thought that Google/Waymo was pretty good about disclosures, but now I have to wonder what present-day incidents we will only be finding out about 7 years from now.

Uber sent a woman to the grave. Don't know if that counts for you.

No, it doesn't, because their program sucked from the start, worse than most, and even if they were the best self-driving car program, Uber's has only been around for a few years and so is not a valid counterexample to the claim '7 years won't make a difference'. It sure does seem to've for Waymo.

The same person (Levandowski) worked at Uber. So all his knowledge went to Uber too, obviously. They didn't start at point zero.

Ah yeah just so you know there is a lot more to building a self driving car system than the general knowledge held in the head of the lead engineer. It is unlikely that he would have known even a tenth of the systems involved in the waymo program at a level of detail required to quickly replicate them.

You mean the person who was fired almost as soon as he got there and which the trial showed had near-zero contribution?

All I get from this is that Levandowski and his actions are dangerous for humans.

And several people died in human-caused wrecks while you were typing that sentence. Nobody seems too hung up on that. Not scary enough, I guess, and you can't blame one or two large monolithic corporations for it.

Self-driving cars are one of those instances where painstaking adherence to the precautionary principle is going to get a lot of people killed due to poor risk modeling. This article is a great example, where the reporter has engaged in elaborate rhetorical gymnastics to paint an incident arising from a human driver's poor judgement as the fault of a "rogue engineer."

> And several people died in human-caused wrecks while you were typing that sentence.

According to [0] 1.24 million people die in automobile related accidents annually. This works out to 0.04 per second. Unless parent is a very slow typist your number overstates the real toll several times.

[0] http://www.progressive-economy.org/trade_facts/traffic-accid...

Seems to be a mix of 2010 and 2014 data, but broadly speaking close enough.

There's no evidence thus far that self-driving cars will improve road safety. None whatsoever. For the interested, here is an excellent overview of the quality of evidence necessary to prove same: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...

Agreed, that looks like an interesting report and I'll definitely spend some time with it.

However, the whole idea behind the report is that the reason we don't have the necessary evidence to draw a conclusion is that the cars simply haven't been on the road long enough yet. It accomplishes nothing to pound your desk and proclaim loftily that "There's no evidence whatsoever."

I don't see why AVs can't outperform human drivers, and further, I don't see why they need to be built with NASA-level software and hardware quality to meet that goal, as many suggest. That will only increase costs and delay benefits. "Move fast and break things" is a perfectly valid strategy if it results in fatality numbers that spike temporarily and then plunge rapidly, which is what I personally suspect is going to happen.

Nobody seems too hung up on that.

I don't think that's true. A lot of people campaign for better road safety.

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