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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>when you consider how high road mortality is

Except, depending upon your perspective, it really isn't most places. In the US it's about one fatality per 100 million miles driven and that includes driving under difficult conditions like snowstorms. People drive a lot so that still adds up to a lot of deaths per year. But the rate is not really all that high.

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That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

That seems an unrealistic bar especially as a hypothetical self-driving vehicle will be co-existing with human-driven cars even on main roads for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, airliners are flown by a pair of trained professionals, within an air traffic control system that minimizes their exposure to most serious threats, and are mostly (some bird strikes, sensor failures, etc. notwithstanding) flying under conditions that are fairly predictable. OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)

I agree with most of this, except for the unexpected rapid-response examples you list - I would expect an autonomous collision-avoidance system to react faster than a human being when faced with a deer in the road or someone running a light (otherwise - it's not a very good collision avoidance system!)

It can react faster to an object. But, under at least some circumstances, a human might recognize potentially questionable road conditions in a way that an autonomous vehicle would not. (Of course, presumably the human could also tell the autonomous vehicle to slow down.) And I've definitely seen animals at the side of the road looking they may be inclined to run out.

Overall, I don't really disagree on net though.

Something here is unrealistic, that's the point. I'm not so sure it's the reliability threshold for self-driving cars though. I'm more amazed at our continuing acceptance of the risks in driving. Having two pilots, air traffic control, maintenance standards, etc, are all regulation driven. Why do we have all those regulations if we're willing to accept 1000x worse in cars with much more lax regulation?

> OTOH, I doubt a self-driving vehicle will be all that better at dealing with a deer jumping out in front of a car, unexpected road debris, or black ice all that much better than an alert human driver. (And possibly worse given that a human driver may pick up on certain cues that an automated system might not.)

I'd expect the opposite actually. Humans are incredibly slow reacting in the best of circumstances and they often drive distracted. They also suck at reacting even when they do which is why we now have automatic systems to reinforce braking in presumed emergencies as humans don't consistently apply full brakes in emergency situations. Collision avoidance in a few milliseconds with reliable reactions should make quite a few of those scenarios much better.

>Why do we have all those regulations if we're willing to accept 1000x worse in cars with much more lax regulation?

I think it boils down to "because we can and still have a viable commercial airline industry." (And general aviation is much riskier than commercial airlines.) Whereas were we to vastly increase the training, maintenance schedules, monitoring of driver alertness, and requirements to have all the latest safety features, you're probably effectively eliminating driving for most people who can't just hire a professional driver/car.

For many things, we accept that we could make things safer if we wanted to. But were we to do so, we'd effectively be banning the activity or at least severely restricting it. (Which is probably one reason why we don't really have flying cars.)

> as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars

Why do you think this? It makes sense to me intuitively that people would be willing to accept more death causes by other people than more opaque and unfamiliar autonomous systems, but I haven't seen any hard data on this and am curious. Is this mentioned somewhere in the Wikipedia article that you linked or did you just share that to demonstrate the other number you mention?

The Wikipedia article is just for the fatality statistics. The expectation of airliner reliability for self-driving cars is what I get from the discussions around this. Here on HN and in other places. Maybe it will be lower and the uncanny valley will be smaller but I wouldn't bet on it. People are much more afraid of flying than of driving even though driving is much riskier. And that's because you're much more willing to accept risks when you think you're in control of them. Self-driving cars will take that illusion of personal control away.

Gotcha, OK. Yeah, I agree with you directionally.

This statistic is in terms of passenger miles, but airplanes travel much faster per car, and airplane journeys are normally much longer than a typical car ride.

So, planes might be around 500x better per pax-mile, but per pax-journey they're just about 5x better.

Incidentally, the fatality rate for self driving cars should be also around 5x better (per vehicle mile) than human drivers for wide spread acceptance, according to an 2018 study.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180530132959.h...

Per-distance statistics may stretch the risk perception as people use planes for different trips than cars. But per journey statistics seems a much bigger error in the other direction. Fatalities with airliners are pretty close to 0 per year whereas 30k+ people a year die in car accidents. Most people know of someone that died that way whereas any airplane accident is national news. 5x really understates that difference. I don't think per-journey numbers are reasonable as a comparison.

The study showing 5x is quite neat, thanks. I expect this to be a floor for the difference though. Once some of the deaths with self-driving cars are shown to be things that human drivers would easily avoid the requirements will be higher, even if in total 5x better has been achieved. For widespread acceptance I'd bet on 10x as a minimum and 100x at the extreme, depending on what types of accidents are in there that shape the perception.

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