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Comment by kpU8efre7r | Hacker News Reader

Could be saying that to defeat competition. Don't bother trying it's decades away! And Ford is notoriously behind the rest of the pack so I'd believe even less of what they say as well. I don't listen to executives with a stake in the game regardless of which side they are playing.

The barriers to this seem mosly man made. Regulations, restrictions, taxi lobby, trucker unions, etc. A lot of it depends on where the line is drawn for safety or versatility. Does one vehicle need to operate in all climates with 0 accidents a year? Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there.

I'd be happy to even see more and more driver assist to the point where you can't crash even if you jerk the wheel and try to.

I think the bar has been set incredibly high, almost impossibly out of reach, by people interested in things staying the same.

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You need to stop listening to Elon Musk. Almost everything you said is wrong.

> Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there.

Seriously?

Just Waymo was driving over 1 million miles a month in 2018. How many people have they killed? The fact that an autonomous vehicle or Tesla "autopilot" fatality makes national news is telling. It's not commonplace.

It's not sufficient for these systems to just be "better" than humans in terms of accidents/mile/vehicle, they have to be FAR BETTER than humans.

Today, when accidents occur, blame and liability goes to the responsible parties. We're talking about millions of accidents and millions of drivers.

If you suddenly have a car that drives, the blame and liability for all accidents then gets focused like a giant magnifying glass onto ONE (or a few) companies which have made the self-driving car.

I don't know how many accidents/mile/vehicle is the "magic number" but I expect it is going to have to be far far far lower than what it is now. Otherwise, these self-driving car vendors won't be able to survive the legal onslaught.

Why can't we accept a little better now and keep striving for far better? Seems stupid to have an all or nothing approach, especially when plenty of luxury vehicles have pieces of automated driving in them already. Liability is for insurance leeches to figure out

If the added liability of "a little better" self driving car is too much to make a self driving car profitable, companies won't build them.

Because the proper comparison isn't X accidents vs Y accidents. It's X accidents and Z billion dollars spent vs Y accidents, where that Z billion dollars could have gone to other efforts. If the delta between X and Y is minor, Z is wasted.

This isn't as hard of a problem as you make it seem.

The people who pay for accidents will be the same people who pay for them now. It will be the insurance companies.

I am sure that insurance companies will jump at the chance to save money, by insuring statistically safer vehicles.

Not really. The cars only need to be safe enough to get over the potential fear of users to activate them. This may even be less safe than human drivers, we just don't know until they are deployed. For example, it could turn out that present day autopilot in Tesla cars is less safe than human drivers, but yet people still use it. Humans aren't strictly rational based upon risk when it comes to transportation. If autocars are convenient, and in every day experience work successfully, people will use them (especially those who are young, who have the marginal cost of having to instead learn how to drive, and may just opt-out of learning to drive altogether if they can get through their daily lives by using autonomous vehicles.)

The legal issue you mention seems secondary to the human factors one. If people get addicted to self-driving, and some are dependent upon it, the laws will bend to the culture not the other way around, as they always do. Look at the current regime for an example of this: we gloss over the 30k fatalities that happen regularly due to cars, and hand out licenses to drive these death machines to people who really should have no right to do so given their poor driving skills or physical impediments -- we do so because to deny someone the ability to drive is so averse to culture and freedom that we err on the side of enabling more people to drive despite the fact that it surely increases the risk for everyone on the road.

A million miles is not a lot. For comparison, the people of LA drove a million miles by 5a this morning. The drivers in SoCal will drive over 100 million miles just today.

The fact that many accidents involving human drivers still make the news is telling. It's not commonplace.

This is a weird hill to want to die on. Self-driving is currently statistically safer than human driving. Yes, caveats, for only the domains on which self-driving has been well-trained.

Remove accidents caused by humans who were driving recklessly intentionally and I am not sure how the statistics will look.

Namely roaming around the meticulously mapped out streets of Mountain View and Sunnyvale at 25 miles an hour in daylight in good weather.

Meticulously mapped - the location of curbs and the like are known within an inch or so.

So, self-driving is safer for those specific circumstances where self-driving is safer? Well, sure. Not much surprise there. That's not very persuasive about self-driving being (or ever being) safer than humans at real world driving in general conditions.

One could even argue that adding FSD to the mix for those ideal conditions will "condition", as it were, humans to suck even more at driving exactly when human input will be required.

Can you cite these statistics? Has any fsd car driven 1 million miles with no operator on the wheel?

>Self-driving is currently statistically safer than human driving.

I don't know of any statistics saying so. I've seen plenty of stats like 'self-driving in easy conditions is safer than human-driving in typical conditions'

it's my understanding that these cars can only drive without any human intervention in certain, somewhat ideal scenarios. I've never seen a direct comparison to humans driving in the same limited set of conditions. are the AVs still statistically safer in these circumstances?

This is a weird hill to want to die on. Self-driving is currently statistically safer than human driving. Yes, caveats, for only the domains on which self-driving has been well-trained.

My point was that the statistics aren't even remotely comparable. Out of literally billions of miles driven daily across the US in all conditions, there are approximately 100 deaths nationwide. Each day, US drivers drive literally tens of thousands times more miles than all self-driving cars combined to date. There are at least 6 deaths attributable to SD cars so far...in the US, not including smaller accidents, despite driving only in optimal conditions. Scaled up per mile, self-driving cars are currently several magnitudes more dangerous than human cars.

The average is 1.25 fatalities per 100 Million miles driven, so not that telling yet.

Presumably that average is taken over all conditions, implying that the average is well below 1.25 fatalities per 100 million miles driven in the conditions waymo is driving in.

True, and drunk drivers, and unlicensed drivers, and people driving while very sick or tired. Really we will need a couple billion miles driven to really start to get into fatalities as a metric compared to humans. Fortunately most car accidents aren't fatal, so those will be a better starting point.

Two weeks ago I could have reached one of my life goals of ramming a waymo robocar if I were making a U-turn rather than a left so they still have quite a ways to go before they're ready for prime time. Maybe next time...

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