Cars are killing more people – and driverless cars won't solve the problem

theguardian.com

7 points·tim333··4 comments

I was walking around Southern California on a business trip and had to cross a freeway offramp without a signal. Standing at the crosswalk I watched cars blowing by at about 50 mph not giving a feather or a fig that I was on the edge of the crosswalk. Then I saw a Tesla. Oh boy!

I swung a foot out and the thing just slammed on the brakes like a champ. Must have been on autopilot. Man the driver was pissed though. Never seen someone so angry with their car when it was running properly.

To me, that demonstrates the problem with Tesla's autopilot. Maybe it recognized you as a pedestrian from five hundred meters away but didn't slow down and proceed with the extra caution warranted by your exposure and vulnerability. Instead it proceeded based on minimizing the applied safety factor and maximizing the passenger's convenience.

It had to slam on the brakes. That's not safe driving. Tesla's are programmed to play chicken with pedestrians. Their behaviors correspond to those of aggressive drivers.

Yeah, it takes a lot of thinking power to determine the difference between a pedestrian about to cross a street, one just walking alongside it, and one waiting for an Uber. Then again it was doing better than the other psychos who couldn't be bothered to slow down in case I walked in front of them.

It was cool that it recognized my foot swinging out and did something instead of letting the driver potentially run me down. I think that's the real potential of automated systems. Pedestrian and cyclist safety features flying under the radar as "Convenience" features.

The main thing is for drivers to have enough experience and don’t use mobile telephones and other gadgets while driving

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