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Comment by magwa101 | Hacker News Reader

I honestly hate this "false baseline" story line that applies to almost all anti AI/automation comments. A person who is focused may be better than self driving vehicle but even that is debatable. However, given real life self driving are already much safer than real life human drivers. Think about pedestrians and bike rider safety too!!

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> However, given real life self driving are already much safer than real life human drivers

Citation needed

The citation is that there is a wikipedia list of all the fatalities from self driving cars with only 6 entries on it, and most of them were due to human error still. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal...

You only forgot to consider that there are still drivers in the cars, so each time the human intervene it could have prevented an accident , I am not sure what is the average victims per accident say 2 , you can multiply it with the number of time the drivers had to take over and you have an upper limit, if you don't like this upper limit then we need better numbers but this companies keep them secret or under report the problems.

According to this [1], fatality rates vary a lot from country to country. For example, in Germany and UK the rate is about 1/3 of the US rate.

Will you cherry pick the geography to make your argument?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...

That is not a good citation given the number of autonomous cars on the road compared to the number of user-driven cars.

Due to human error because they are only level 2 or 3 selfing driving, which requires a human driver. Which means they clearly are not safer than human driving.

Telsa autopilot isn't even self-driving. It's fancy cruise control.

Bunk. Autopilot makes very strange decisions during normal operation -- decisions that normal human drivers would NOT make, such as merging into an entrance lane on the freeway. This in and of itself is enough to confuse and befuddle other drivers on the road, which makes it more surprising and dangerous than a human driver. Worse, it will actively fight the driver at the helm to make these decisions. Source: test drove a model 3 and it did just this and nearly caused an accident during the test drive and I could not instruct it to stop.

> during the test drive and I could not instruct it to stop.

Frankly, I do not believe that you are telling the truth. If you can provide a test case demonstrating this, however, it would be international news.

Tesla’s Autopilot can be manually disengaged in several different ways. If none of those worked for you, then that is indeed worth investigation.

I personally doubt your claim, though.

> I could not instruct it to stop

Bunk. You can take over at any time by turning the wheel, pushing the brake, or pushing the accelerator.

Source: I take over from autopilot all the time.

Bunk. I was not made aware that was even possible.

Source: I... was there? :D

Everyone knows that you can step on the brake to stop a car, even with the cruise control on.

At this point, you're not saving face by arguing with fact.

Did you even think to try the brake?

I would compare it to a brand new teenaged driver. I've had plenty of poor Uber drivers make the same sorts of mistakes that Autopilot makes. However, I'm surprised you had issues taking control, because a slight turn of the wheel or a quick brake disengages the system. However that said, Autopilot is definitely not safe or usable on city streets or in the rightmost lane of a highway, because of issues with lane markings. Source: I use it every day on the highway and I absolutely love it.

> and I could not instruct it to stop.

Can you please expand on that?

In my experience with the most advanced available Tesla driving features over the past two years, touching the brake pedal immediately disengages all of that software, and putting more than a pound or two of turning force on the steering wheel immediately disengages autopilot (steering control), but leaves adaptive cruise control on.

You can also use the same stalk you used to engage autopilot to disengage it.

'could not instruct it to stop' is a very bold statement.

It was a bold statement because it was a situation I was unfamiliar with, and the salesman in the car with me wasn't explaining how to prevent it from making such a move. Since the system was alien to me, I wasn't prepared for what I needed to do to do so.

>However, given real life self driving are already much safer than real life human drivers

Citation needed. Breakdown by different countries would be also interesting.

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