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Comment by jojo2333 | Hacker News Reader

Still magnitudes safer than human drivers.

Drunk drivers and human mistakes are two things I accept in traffic (or rather - laws and human behavior both show we don’t accept them). It’s factored into my risk.

And FSD isn’t orders of magnitude safer. They are barely as good as human drivers and only in some conditions.

For the worst situations they aren’t comparable at all (since they won’t drive at all)

This must be repeated over and over for some reason: people will never accept self driving cars that are just as good or bad as human drivers. Nor should we. It’s a much too low bar.

Self driving cars will need to be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers to be even remotely acceptable.

If it's consistently as good as an average human that's still better than an average human. That's because robots don't get tired, hungover, angry, bored, drunk, or get an eyelash in their eye at a really bad time.

Yes. But again people won’t accept that. People will rather be killed more often by drivers that feel guilt, go to prison, have strokes or poor eyesight than less often by a machine that does not have all of those flaws but also none of the feelings and responsibilities.

I’d be thrilled if self-driving cars could meet that bar, because then I can feel at least as comfortable napping in the car as I do driving it. And unlike humans, I have the expectation that my car learns when other cars crash, so I have a lot of reason to expect that once the system rolls out it will continue to improve.

I hate almost everything about Tesla and their business model but the idea of full automatic driving, once vetted to even a bare minimum level of approximate human parity, is enough to make me consider one anyway.

Lets do a simple test:

You are in between two walls and there are two straight lanes. Lane 1 has Tesla FSD coming in at full speed. Lane 2 has a human driver coming in at full speed. You can choose to be in one lane. The FSD and the human can both see you only 50 mts out and if they brake as soon as they see you, you will survive.

Which lane will you choose?

Well, a Model S can just barely stop in 50 meters at 60mph, while some other luxury and sporty cars in the segment can stop in 35 meters or less. And that’s only 60mph, hardly “top speed” or even a normal highway speed. So regardless of driver assistance features, I’d choose a car that at least has a chance to even physically stop assuming instant reflexes. 50 meters is probably a much too small distance for this thought experiment.

I don't know my cars that well, but an alert driver will take at least 300ms to begin reacting. That's over 8m at 60mph (not sure why we're combining unit systems here). So I'll stand in front of the Model S in this particular scenario and hope to get away with 'mere' broken legs/pelvis. Give the human more time and is probably take the human, not because that's necessarily the more reliable option, but because its distribution of outcomes is more well known to me.

Most, if not essentially all, cars in that category have emergency automatic braking, so the Model S still isn't the best choice.

It absolutely isn't.

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