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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

You must have missed their #1 requirement for these systems: safety.

"Even after two years, Cadillac’s Super Cruise remained our top-rated system because, when turned on, it uses direct driver monitoring to warn drivers that appear to have stopped paying attention to the road."

Autopilot doesn't "nanny" drivers, as you call it, and is therefore not a safe system so they ranked it lower. If you're fine with your ADAS system killing multiple people [1], this is not the ranking system for you.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/ca5e62255bb87bf1b151f9bf075aaadf

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Tesla's term "Autopilot" is misleading and it's gotten people killed. Tesla and Musk deserve opprobrium for giving their driver assist system a name that implies that the car can drive without constant supervision.

But Consumer Report's title isn't entirely clear either. They rank Cadillac ahead of Tesla because Super Cruise makes stronger attempts than Autopilot to make sure the driver is engaged. That isn't a bad thing, but it should be clear in the title that the "performance" they're measuring heavily weighs toward safety. It's like saying that a Volvo station wagon outperforms a Ferrari sports car because your family is safer in the Volvo. Sure, I'd rather my kids ride in a Volvo but that's not what I think of when I read the word "outperforms".

There exists a total of 0 pilots in the world who believe autopilot system will fly the plane without any need for intervention. If your ingnorance gives meaning to words it does not make them true.

>You must have missed their #1 requirement for these systems: safety.

Not really surprising from CR. They've always emphasized safety--along with maintenance, cost, etc. The target audience for CR is mostly a conventional middle-class suburban family (understanding that Cadillac is still a relatively high-end car). They don't really care about car enthusiasts who are prioritizing other types of capabilities.

Roughly 38k people a year die in human caused car accidents. ADAS systems will kill people, as all systems can and will fail. Six people (the number of people killed while Tesla vehicles had Autopilot engaged) seems within a tolerable amount if we expect progress to reduce human caused vehicular deaths. NHTSA and adjacent regulatory bodies allow Tesla to continue to sell Autopilot functionality, and allow it to remain active on sold vehicles. Their opinion counts far greater than that of Consumer Reports.

That's hardly a fair comparison, given how many people are driving vs. how many automated driver systems are out there.

Propose an alternative comparison that is not so outlandish as zero deaths ever. We're currently at six deaths with almost a million Tesla vehicles sold and 3+ billions of Autopilot miles travelled [1].

[1] https://electrek.co/2020/04/22/tesla-autopilot-data-3-billio...

The fair comparison would obviously look at deaths per mile traveled for each category, not total deaths.

That gets into fun with statistics.

On a pure deaths per mile basis Autopilot is already safer than the average car driven by the average driver. However, people downplay that by adjusting for various things making them relatively equivalent with not enough data to really say one way or another.

Basically, there is simply not enough data to be statistically significant improvement or detriment vs drivers, but there is enough data to say they are safe enough to be used.

How can you say autopilot is safer when the human driver has to take over when it sees the autopilot isn’t up to the task? Isn’t the prima fascia evidence that the human driver is safer?

Different areas of expertise, a computer’s doesn’t get bored, drunk, or text people while driving. Safety is just about not crashing, actually getting somewhere is a different story.

In some ways having a human take over in difficult conditions is stacking the deck, but computers are also taking over in an crash to slow down before impact and people are adjusting how much autopilot speeds. So, it’s kind of a grey area, but at a minimum we know autopilot isn’t dramatically worse than humans.

Of course it is. Count every time the human has to take over as a crash for the computer, and then see what your statistics look like. The computer is much worse.

Every time the computer is handing off control that’s a multi second process where it could have come to a complete stop instead. Essentially that’s the same thing as the vehicle stability assistance kicking in, which very much favors the machines.

Instead you need to count the number of times someone has actively taken control to avoid a collision, which is rare enough it’s hard to find examples.

You seem to be claiming that the computer really is good enough today for fully autonomous driving, and that the need for the driver to pay attention and keep hands in the wheel is really unnecessary. Is that right?

I don’t think fully autonomous driving is ready, fully autonomous human equivalent accident avoidance is a much simpler problem that seems to be largely solved.

Having an alert driver paying attention is a net benefit, but in practice people don’t continuously pay full attention for long stretches with autonomous driving. If you assume people are paying attention say 90% of the time in practice then their only catching less than 90% of the potential accidents they could avoid. Further, assuming identical rates of accidents to the average person the other car is at fault 1/2 the increase is further reduced.

As such, I think the regulation is a good idea for now as the net benefit to fully autonomous driving is to the individual while the risks include other drivers.

I think deaths per hour driven gives a more appropriate weighting to city driving, which presents different complications and hazards from those encountered on a highway.

That also seems reasonable, although city driving will be biased toward more accidents, but fewer fatalities.

The fact that you've edited your comment to reference number of vehicles sold and miles traveled shows that you don't need any help coming up with an alternative comparison that is more reasonable. You already know that the numbers you initially cited need to be divided by their share of miles driven.

The fact that I've edited my comment reflects that I want it to be historically accurate after the edit window times out. Hacker News participants aren't going to have any impact on regulators, so while I try to persuade that this automation development is necessary (because I genuinely believe that, and have lost loved ones [plural] to vehicular accidents), it's moot beyond discussion (and there are so many discussions [1]). Some will argue that any deaths are too much, other will argue that many deaths are reasonable. I argue that some deaths will occur, which will lead to less deaths overall over the long term (which I would also argue is a goal we could all agree on), and I don't believe this is an unreasonable position to hold.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=tesla+autopilot

I don't know if the OP asked for "zero deaths ever", but:

Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared with vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries.

From "Driving to Safety - How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?"

The fair comparison will show the same thing lol.

Each car in with the automated system will provide data to update all the other cars with automated systems.

I trust that process way more than individual unconnected human drivers. I don't trust Elon or Tesla corporation to care about human lives but I do trust that it will eventually get better and very quickly.

So, thank you for the altruism everyone, it will be fine.

6 is also a total not a rate per year like 38,000. The rate of self driving car deaths is roughly identical to the rate of non self driving car deaths. However, unlike drivers these systems can significantly improve over time.

I think drivers can improve over time as well, especially with assistive technology such as lane departure warning, blind spot detectors, etc becoming more prevalent. Luckily self driving isn't an all or nothing deal!

People are already comparing individual models with and without self driving features to adjust for things like visibility. As these cars already have those driver assist features having them become more commonplace isn’t going to change the relaxant statistics.

That said, unknown future forms of driver assistance might be relevant, but I would lump that in with better cars.

This isn't even a choice we have to make. Why can't SuperCruise make sure the driver is paying attention even when it's not doing the driving?

The numbers are pretty clear. If we want to save lives by making sure drivers are paying attention, it should be on the cars without Autopilot.

They have a funny definition of safety.

Specifically, they insist that the system should only be usable on limited-access highways. CR docked all manufacturers (except GM) 4 points for that.

CR also docked 3 points from every company (except GM, again) for "unresponsive driver" without saying what, exactly, GM is doing differently from everyone else.

Finally, under "keeping the driver engaged", GM somehow got 3 more points than anyone else, despite being subject to the same complaints.

Sadly, CR is not the publication it used to be. While this isn't a "Tesla hit-piece", it is quite clearly a "GM submarine."

If your idea of safety is explicitly that it should be disabled in the places where most traffic fatalities occur (rural roads + intersections) due to rampant human negligence, then I think you should reconsider your definition of safety.

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