AAA survey finds 86% of drivers afraid to ride in automated vehicles | Hacker News Reader

AAA survey finds 86% of drivers afraid to ride in automated vehicles

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22 pointsjocker1254 comments

In my teens and twenties I was very confident in my driving. As I've gotten older my self confidence and my confidence in others' driving abilities and attention to the road have eroded significantly.

I've been rear ended several times, almost gotten hit by reckless drivers, and a few friends have died in traffic accidents.

With every year that goes by, getting in the car feel more like a game of Russian roulette to me.

> I've been rear ended several times, almost gotten hit by reckless drivers, and a few friends have died in traffic accidents

All of which will happen to people riding in autonomous vehicles.

I get what you're saying. But almost nobody fears their own driving on the road, they fear other people's driving.

If you are a careful and attentive driver you would have no reason to fear your own driving on the road. Accidents happen due to negligence. Someone is speeding/running lights/texting/emailing/facetiming/makeuping/eating/reading/netflixing/instagramming/drunk/high/distracted/drowsy at the other end, otherwise it just doesn't occur if everyone is following the rules of traffic. People who operate vehicles in those states of mind are of the mindset that getting into a bad wreck is a lightning strike event, surely not to happen to them, until it does, then it was the other guys fault and no behavior is changed.

You might know a couple people who always seem to get into wrecks. Some people talk about totaling four cars in conversation like it's the cost of doing business. It's jarring.

It doesn't help that over half the people on the road have their noses and hands glued to their phones, texting away. Back when I used to commute to work via bus, I'd just sit there counting the cars that we passed, and I'd guess at least 2/3 of them were totally inattentive, playing with their phones. I'm terrified to even get close to other cars anymore.

I greatly suggest to everyone to attend car control clinics regularly (or even at least once in your life, but regularly would be best).

It should be part of driver ed but it sadly isn't, so one needs to take initiative to get to them.

I wonder if it's an age thing. I'm 20, I have quite little fear and I think most of my peers feel the same way. I'm planning to buy a Tesla the second they let me buy one with bitcoin and I 100% plan to daily drive autopilot on city streets when it's ready, I really can't picture any of my friends being like wtf turn that shit off.

Edit: Disregard, I thought it was self driving related not full robotaxi that shit is spooky. I'd do it but I'd let other ppl do it for a few months first.

Being behind the wheel of a car with "autopilot" is not quite the same as being stuck in the back seat of a self-driving car where you have no control over it at all.

I'd gladly drive a Tesla with autopilot, but wouldn't want to let it drive me while I lounge in the back seat.

Experience. Indirectly linked to age. When you have been driving for a number of years and have experienced how quickly and unexpectedly things can happen while driving, it's hard to completely put your life in the hands of an automated system.

I think it's more fundamental. I trust a computer more to react quickly to something unexpected than I trust myself to. Maybe I'm biased because I spend all day programming and poking at computers and almost none of it driving.

I'm in my early 30s, and yes I also trust a computer to react better than me in the situations it has been trained for. The problem is for situations outside of the the normal, which based on my experience I'd say is what causes most fatalities in road traffic accidents. The fact that these are closed systems doesn't inspire confidence either - I wonder whether regulations will change this later, to require third parties to evaluate the system.

If I were to buy a new car today, I'd for sure look for one that has some of the modern safety features like lane keeping and automatic emergency braking. Dynamic cruise control would be great for long journeys. But I wouldn't feel safe riding in a car with what Tesla calls 'autopilot' capabilities, or more complete self-driving like Waymo - although to be fair in a city due to lower speeds the risk of injury (to myself) is going to less than on a highway, so I'd actually say I'd feel safer in Waymo than a Tesla.

Dynamic/adaptive cruise control is a really nice safety feature which I use whenever I can. I guess the 'autopilot' capabilities is just another form of that, but I'd still be hesitant to be hands off and read a book.

>daily drive autopilot on city streets when it's ready

Please note that it is not real autopilot and be safe.

I can understand not being scared of automatic vehicles but Tesla isnt self driving yet.

Yeah, I do think it's vaporware forever or at least a few years, but who knows.

I'm planning to buy a Tesla the second they let me buy one with bitcoin

You can buy one with BTC today. You just have to use an intermediary to turn the BTC in to USD. Why would you wait until you can send BTC directly?

I want to support businesses accepting BTC directly. Also, it's a good meme, buying a self driving car with magic internet money, it being a meme like that and sorta being a piece of the bit of history I care about is the only reason I feel like spending 50k+ on a car. I have an old ass car it works fine.

What do you mean by "when it is ready" it sounds to me like you aren't ready to drive in a self driving car, and are part of that 86% I'm actually surprised that 14% think the auto cars are ready

> It's a feature that is not available, if u try to turn on self driving in city streets it tells u no.

It's a question of trust. Tesla's software is proprietary and we don't know how well verified, either. Plus, it's AI driven. I regularly fill captchas wrong but I'd never get in a car that's had its training griefed.

Couple of things. Except for Waymo in Phoenix, there is no finished working automated vehicle. Most of the videos out there are of tests or of Tesla FSD Beta which originally was actually pretty dangerous.

So if people are going by those videos then maybe they should be scared.

Also, what percentage of AAA members are under 50?

Up to 80% of drivers rated themselves as 'above average' in a survey [0]

And there have been similar results in other surveys

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3730094/

People seem to be very bad with subjective averages. Just like 80% of men on OkCupid were rated by women to be below average.

That could very well mean that mostly the below-average men are creating accounts on OkCupid, though.

Could be. But men rated women very closely to a normal distribution which makes it not impossible but unlikely.

I laughed at that statistic the first time I read it, but it isn’t ridiculous. 80% of drivers consider themselves better than what they think of as the average (mean) driver, not average (mode) driver. Same for most surveys. People see how bad the worst is, how good the best is, and then place themselves somewhere above the middle of that range.

It could also mean that 80% of people are better than average according to their preferred metric of good driving but that everyone has a different metric.

And that noone grades themselves on their absolute worst distracted behavior. Whereas what you see/notice in traffic are of other drivers experiencing just that.

The majority of drivers are good drivers - most of the time.

Ratings: 1 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9

Average Rating: 8.2

% Below Average: 10%

% Above Average: 90%

Driving skills are literally to be normally distributed, which this distribution is not.

Disagree, the first driver might get in 1 accident every million miles and the other drivers one every 9 million, objectively 9 times better.

Also, there is a magnifying effect. Every one of those "9" drivers will notice the "1" driver. They'll talk amongst themselves about the terrible drivers they've seen, never knowing they are all talking about the same high-visibility driver. But if one of those "9" drivers is actually a "10", the others could drive alongside them all day long and never even notice, because the "10" driver never did anything to call attention to themselves.

Conclusion: "Most drivers [that I notice] suck."

s/literally/likely

Selection bias in a survey. Bad drivers do not spend much time on road, do not own vehicle, do not have an insurance on their name, do not even have a valid driving license...

After riding in a Waymo in Chandler, I can say that it's incredible how quickly that apprehension turns to boredom.

“Months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror”

Worth noting this is the summary of most all accidents with humans at the wheel driving regularly. This whole issue is a matter of psychology.

My first thought was also, there is a self selection here. If you are a AAA member, that puts you in a risk averse/more cautious group anyway. So some in-built bias.

Pilots are still used to take off and land the plane. Personally, I'd have apprehension too. I'm coming up on a turn on the freeway at 60 mph and I'm just supposed to hope this version of software is bug free on top of everything else? We are talking software, here. You can't inspect it to see if the parts are rusted out or do regular maintenance and expect with certainly the wheels won't fall off; it works or it doesn't and that's terrifying.

I'd be comfortable with automatic cruse control/lane departure avoidance, but for complicated maneuvering on interchanges or in gridlocked traffic, I'm going to want to be able to take the reigns at a moments notice and expect to still have a steering wheel/etc.

89% of horse riders were afraid of riding a train.

I think state of PA tried to ban automobiles by saying they were too dangerous. They said in order to drive a car it should be manned by a driver, a mechanic, one guy to run in front of the car and one guy to walk behind the car and god forbid they see a horse rider they must disassemble that car and hide the parts in bushes until the horse has passed.

It was the UK that passed the Locomotive Act, aka the Red Flag Act in 1865, and Vermont passed a Red Flag Law in 1894. Both were repealed in 1896.

Vermont's law required a "person of mature age" to walk an eighth of a mile ahead of the vehicle with a red flag in the day or a red lantern at night.

The UK's law had additional requirements such as the number of people who had to drive the locomotive.

Neither law required anyone to disassemble the locomotive or automobile and hide the parts.

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

In that analogy, though, what we have now isn't a train: it's a half-finished engine that usually works as expected but sometimes spontaneously derails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(before...

Plus, trains (and cars and planes and buses and taxis and limos and horse buggies and ... and ...) are generally under the control of an entity with a sense of self-preservation, and actually cares about getting home tonight. Contrasted with an auto-auto, which will cheerfully drive into a wall when you least expect it.

89% of horse riders afraid to ride autonomous horses

If an autonomous horse is a wild horse, bump that to 100%.

A locomotive is a lot like an autonomous horse, comparing a rider to a passenger.

I don't blame them. There are too many incentives for companies to ship self-driving features in vehicles before they're ready to be on the road.

As in, the incentive to kill customers? I see the value of considering incentives, but I think the situation is more nuanced than that, regardless of whether wide-spread self-driving will start off unsafe.

Echoing the same sentiments with methodology that others have made - I wonder if they put self-driving, or autonomous vehicles, instead of something like "automated vehicles" that the percentage would go down. After all, most people don't know it as 'automated vehicles'.

The wording also might betray the age demographic of most people in the survey, but who knows.

People won't trust the technology until people around them are safely riding in it. To be expected.

Maybe they’ve used software before?

14% of driving are fine riding in automated vehicles? Higher than I thought!

I highly doubt a lack of demand will be the problem for self driving tech. This survey is wildly different than giving someone the option and seeing if they take it.

I'll drive myself as long as I legally can. I don't trust computers.

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