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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

You mean like this? https://www.11alive.com/article/traffic/fatal-wreck-75-north...

Even a simple level 2 system with driver monitoring like comma.ai in big rigs would save tens of thousands of lives per year.

I'm not sure tens of thousands of people die in accidents with big rigs every year (IIHS says around 5,000)[0].

Additionally, many big rig accidents could not be avoided even with perfect driving - they are caused by things like weather, other drivers doing stupid things, sudden stops in traffic, etc. AI does not really improve your stopping distance in a big rig.

0. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/large...

> they are caused by things like weather, other drivers doing stupid things, sudden stops in traffic, etc. AI does not really improve your stopping distance in a big rig.

AI doesn't need to improve your stopping distance, just your propensity to follow by more than your stopping distance. Even simple adaptive cruise control can do that.

> AI doesn't need to improve your stopping distance, just your propensity to follow by more than your stopping distance. Even simple adaptive cruise control can do that.

Do you write AI software for self driving vehicles?

> AI does not really improve your stopping distance in a big rig.

It doesn't improve the braking distance, but it should be able to improve the stopping distance if it can react faster.

Hmm, my general point is that there is a lot of energy in a semi running at highway speed. AI could help, but that energy doesn't just go away.

An autonomous truck could drive twice as conservatively as a regular truck driver or even just pull over in bad weather and still deliver its load faster than a human driver. A human has to stop for 10 hours every 11 hours, while an AI truck and just sail on through. Tandem drivers might be competitive on time, but now you're paying two humans!

> Tandem drivers might be competitive on time, but now you're paying two humans!

But you're only paying them for the time they're driving - so this is actually incredibly efficient.

That's not how labor laws work in many countries - if a driver is sleeping in the car, and not in his own bed at home that still counts as working time.

But they reach the destination in half the time.

I actually looked into this, you're half right. Truckers don't get paid by the hour, rather they're paid by the mile (or km). Each member of the pairing gets paid for half of the total distance of the journey. However, tandem teams are in high demand as customers are willing to pay a significant premium to get their goods delivered quickly. This has resulted in team drivers earning more for a unit of travel than solo operators.

That article on efficiency comes to mind: currently businesses have some slack built in on their deliveries because they can only arrive so quickly.

If AI trucks are the norm, and all that slack is eliminated for efficiency sake because the "AI truck can always get here in 13 hours, no stopping", then that increased efficiency only raises the urgency that it arrives on time, thereby eliminating the time savings on delivery.

It can actually improve stopping. Theoretically you can pack some systems to disintegrate the truck in case of an emergency, you don't have a driver inside to save.

The one big rig accident that I know of personally was road rage - a car cut off a truck at at 3AM on the entry into Phoenix, and the rig got even by running the car off the road.

Now, that is entirely anecdotal, and I have no idea how common such things are, but these type of things would at least be avoided by self driving.

I wonder if Self Driving Vehicles will retaliate by reporting bad drivers to the police instead of traditional road rage.

That is a completely unjustified statement. The prevailing rate of large truck fatalities in the US in 2017 was 1.6 per 100M miles which is ~1 per 60M miles [1]. The comma.ai website markets that they have driven 25M miles, so there is insufficient data to conclude that such a system would improve safety at this time.

[1] https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-t...

>there is insufficient data to conclude that such a system would improve safety at this time.

The hype behind self-driving is getting out of control. Sure, from a technological viewpoint it appears that, one day, computers should be able to drive better than humans.

But none of this has been proven yet.

I'm actually curious whether there are any trustworthy studies showing that driving automation helps safety, for any type of automation. I can buy the claim that emergency braking helps (although not as much as one would expect [0]). But is there good data that shows that cruise control helps? Lane keeping?

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/4/20898773/aaa-study-automa...

That AAA test uses a disintegrating dummy. So it looks really bad - the pedestrian gets smashed to pieces. But notice the car stops in most of these sequences almost immediately afterwards. That's because the vehicle was already braking, significantly reducing the impact energy, but it was hard to see because the AAA chose to shoot it in the most dramatic way.

The article does mention the main things Americans could do if they actually wanted to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths, which they don't - stop buying SUVs and other oversize vehicles that disproportionately kill pedestrians.

I suspect that most Americans care more about not killing themselves than in preventing overall number of deaths.

The chances of surviving in an oversize vehicle are disproportionately higher than in a tiny car (what I have heard referred to as an "aluminum covered electric bike").

yes, it's an arms race/prisoners dilemma, which is why the government needs to step in and align incentives. Personally I think a danger tax (similar to gas guzzler taxes) makes sense.

The pedestrian dummies in the AAA tests are standard test dummies. They disintegrate so that the test driver does not get hurt in the case of an impact. The video looks really bad not because the AAA staged it this way, but because it's really bad when a vehicle driving at 20 mph in broad daylight hits a pedestrian that's stationary or moves slowly along a line.

Emergency braking and automated cruise control appear to help a little but lane keep assist has no safety benefit.

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/benefits-from-advanced-driv...

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