Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I never thought about it before but partial self-driving assistance makes a lot of sense for deliveries.

I live in a pretty quite neighborhood in a suburb of Chicago and I see Amazon Prime vans drive by all the time. The driver parks, hops out, runs around to grab the package, drops it off, drives on, and repeat.

This is a great scenario where you don't need total autonomy all the time: the delivery person could drive the highways and complicated parts, and then when there's a cluster of deliveries where the speed limit is 25mph and the roads are clear and regular, the van could go from house to house, with the delivery person hanging out in back or something.

It's not full self-driving, but it seems like it could make deliveries a little more efficient.

I was under the impression that freeways were the easiest target for self driving. The lack of pedestrians, bicycles and unprotected left turns makes it much more predictable. It's hard for humans because the speed is much faster than human reaction time evolved for, but that's not as much an issue for self driving. Tesla for a very long time only supportted self-driving on freeways.

Neighborhoods are the complicated parts: they're filled with pedestrians, cyclists, kids, animals, and uncontrolled intersections.

AFAICT, a self driving car has to pretty much assume that every pedestrian might suddenly dart into traffic, it can't really tell the difference between a normal pedestrian and a drunk heads down in their phone.

But keeping speeds below 20mph opens up a lot of opportunities simply because stops are basically instantaneous at that speed and because car-pedestrian collisions under 20mph are almost never fatal.

"Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph... The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph" [1]

But, importantly, that's for human drivers, who are probably braking when, or at least after, the collision occurs. An AV that completely fails a detection wouldn't necessarily even try to stop.

[1] https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve...

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