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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

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zabzonk

How mad would you have to be to get into one of these?

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This is what people once said about elevators, airplanes, bicycles…

How mad would you have to be to keep riding in human-driven taxis after the data shows AVs to be safer?

Honestly for the early ones those people were right.

> airplanes

Have pilots.

> bicycles

You steer them.

And the early airplanes were canvas over wooden sticks, and the early bikes made you fall over if you leaned a little bit funny. I'll let other people break their bodies on the penny farthings of the day, I'll wait for the safety bicycle to come along and not miss out on much in the mean time I expect.

If, after a year of testing, autonomous taxis prove to be exactly half as dangerous as human-driven taxis, would you ride in one?

That would depend on the rigor of the testing being done and where this thing is taking me

Let's say, for the type of journey you need to do (e.g., traveling within a city at <= 30 mph in clear daytime weather), the AVs in question have provided over 100 passenger-years of service, and across that dataset, at-fault crashes are half that of human-driven cars at every level of severity (fender-bender, injury crash, fatality...)

At that point, would you choose to ride in one, or a human-driven taxi?

It depends on the context of the test once again. Is this thing trying to get onto a major artery road in LA? Hell no. 30mph would feel very dangerous when the other drivers are flying around weaving at 50-60mph. The thing would be cut off so much the average speed with the automatic braking every time someone cuts it off would probably be less than me walking on the adjacent sidewalk. Bus drivers in LA have to be aggressive and honk and muscle their way back into the lane for a cars to actually let them back in, sticking their bus out literally threatening cars to it it. I've seen them outright cuss drivers out plenty of times too.

Freeway in LA in a self driving car? Absolutely not. Full stop. I've seen more variables play out on a given day than any training model can possibly consider with good support. If someone says they have good support with their model for an LA freeway I will laugh in their face. The freeway is chaos. You have people with scrap piled 12 feet over their pickup truck doing 40mph in the middle lane, people with BMWs and a cell phone in one hand doing 100 splitting lanes with no signals, outright debris on the road (my roomate hit a log in the middle of the 101 that took out another dozen or so cars one morning, how did a huge log even end up there?), not to mention construction conditions and less than stellar road markings during that making lane identification no small task for a self driving system.

On a little loop through something like a zoo, sprawling corporate campus, or as a vehicle to get me from my parked car to the front of the venue, absolutely I'll hop right into a self driving car. On the road with the current state of the road in my city? I'll let someone else take the literal hit today.

Self-driving cars without a safety driver haven't been approved to operate in LA yet, nor on Bay Area freeways, nor anywhere that the speed limit is above 30mph; I think it's clear they won't get their approval to drive in such conditions until they've proven their ability to do so safely and without disrupting the traffic around them.

What we're discussing right now is riding in one on Bay Area streets where they're already proven their safe and orderly track record.

Do you feel unsafe riding in a human driven taxi? If not (I don't), why would you want to ride in a machine driven one? I simply do not understand the HN desire for sitting in machine driven cars, which have already demonstrated far, far poorer safety than human driven ones.

Computers are good at some digital things. They are not good at others.

I feel unsafe any time cars are involved, whether I'm outside, a passenger, or driving. Cars are much more dangerous than a lot of things people worry about. I'm very happy to see computers making them much safer.

> machine driven cars, which have already demonstrated far, far poorer safety than human driven ones

Citation needed.

At 30mph max in the back seat with the belt on? Not that mad I reckon.

As opposed to having one with a human driver?

I dunno? I guess I'd have to look at the statistics. My sense is that the Waymo vehicles at least are statistically safer than a human driver at these speeds, although not as competent. (I.e. they are less likely to cause an accident, but more likely to encounter a situation they can't handle and get stuck.)

I'd love to see these vehicles handle situations where pedestrians or debris are all over the road. Like in front of a busy bar, construction area, or homeless camp. To the best of my knowledge the environments they've been test driving in have been pretty controlled and orderly and they still manage to find people to run over.

You're wrong twice over: Waymo and Cruise have been testing in SF for a long time, and so far neither has run anybody over.

Uber ran someone over, it turns out they were shockingly incompetent, and thankfully they don't have an AV program anymore.

Wait, I see them everywhere in SF and in completely random places too…

> As opposed to having one with a human driver?

Given some of my recent Uber drivers in the Bay Area, I reckon a blender would be a safer ride.

They're already successfully deployed in a subset of the Phoenix metro area, so not very mad, probably.

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