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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of this is part of a genuine attempt to bring a safe product to market, and how much is to pressure the German government (and soon thereafter, the EU) into making this sort of promise mandatory for all car manufacturers, including those that are ahead of Mercedes in the self-driving space. I.e. to create a legislative moat in an area where they're behind.

While I don't agree with Tesla's strategy of playing it fast & loose, I'm afraid that risk aversion will lead us to demand perfect instead of the good enough.

A car manufacturer might not be willing to accept 100% liability, but their system might still be a lot safer than a drunk driver returning home from the bar.

Realistically we're not going to be able to pick "well, don't drive drunk then!", it'll happen. By demanding that these system are that reliable before they're in common operation we'll have incurred a net loss in terms of safety.

I don't know what the right solution is, probably some mixture of the two. Clearly you don't want manufacturers to be incentivized to ignore the risk associated with their systems, but you also don't want these systems not to be offered when they'd be a net gain in safety.

The point at which they're a net gain is not the same point that they become financially viable to the manufacturer from a liability point of view.

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> A car manufacturer might not be willing to accept 100% liability, but their system might still be a lot safer than a drunk driver returning home from the bar.

I don't care what they're willing to accept. It's a total cop-out to not "accept 100% liability" for a self-driving system they built, and instead avoiding responsibility by insisting on an inhuman-level of human monitoring. If they're not willing to build a reliable system (or buy enough insurance to pay out the claims when their system crashes), then they simply shouldn't be selling production self-driving cars, period.

The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case.

I'm skeptical they could even avoid liability in the first place. Products liability is hard to avoid.

> The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case.

It hasn't be solved at all, there are still too many deaths on road due to drunk/high drivers.

> It hasn't be solved at all, there are still too many deaths on road due to drunk/high drivers.

More precisely: it's got a solution better than a current-generation, unsupervised self-driving car.

Or you can just let someone else drive, or you can just not drink or get high if you have to drive a long way back home, or take public transportation. These all are also "solutions" that don't work all the time. So a vehicle that can safely drive itself is yet another solution that can be added to mitigate the issue.

It has been solved in other countries, but the U.S. is ok with the right people driving while drunk so has decided to not solve it.

For example in Norway you can drink 1/4 of the amount that you can do in CA while driving, you get jail penalties at .05 and right from the start at .02 the fine is one month salary, meaning even if you are rich you will pay a meaningful amount. So in general Norwegians don’t drink and drive.

I love that the fines are scaled to income, makes so much more sense than a flat rate.

That's a Scandinavian thing I love as well. I remeber that a Nokia CEO once paid the equivilant of a new Porsche 911 for a speeding ticket in Helsinki.

On the other hand, I like it when my tickets are basically only table change for me. Egoistics aside, scaling tjose fines with income would be much fairer than a flat fee.

Kind of gives police departments justification for profiling wealthier people. The country already has a serious problem with policing for profit, and you can bet it will only get worse if they can issue $10k+ tickets to individuals.

As it stands now, if you get a BS ticket from one of these towns[1], you're out a few hundred bucks. Scale it up to a month's wage. In a lot of these places, you can't even get a fair trial because the local court is in on the action.

https://www.thrillist.com/cars/nation/the-worst-speed-traps-...

California solved this by making speed limits not specified explicitly by the CVC unenforceable if they aren't backed up by a traffic survey. This will still result in places where the speed limit drops and local enforcement may try to profit from the drop. However, it stops local governments from reducing the speed limit arbitrarily for the purpose of creating a revenue stream.

Towns trying to juice out money from drivers happen at very least in Italy as well which is not Northern Europe at all. At least in NE this scales up for the wealthy as well. In Italy's case if you are rich you can just ignore speed limits (to a certain degree, driving licenses have points and you lose some of them when caught doing something illegal).

Right now, due to probation fees and interest, it's in the police's best interest to ticket poor people who pay more and cannot fight back. Having the police target wealthier people is strictly better, since they have the power and incentive to fight back against BS

But we should also take steps to fight policing for profit.

Out of curiosity, how do they determine the fine for people without a salary (students, retirees, self-employed, disabled, otherwise out of work, etc.)? Social safety net amount? Fixed minimum?

There is a minimum, it starts at ~$700 for 0.02 BAC. It is also possible to use less than a month salary for people with low income and/or high degree debt due to children etc. The intention of the law is that everyone faces meaningful penalties.

Very interesting, thanks!

I doubt if drunk driving is solved solely by a sliding scale of punishment. Nor is it remotely ok to drive while drunk in the US.

I agree.

In my opinion, drunk driving is solved by city planning.

It's a fight and a half to convince most Americans that it's actually realistic for suburbs or even rural communities to have functioning public transit and walkable distances, even though towns and suburbs built that way exist in America (rarely, but they do exist).

Rural towns with functioning transit and walkable distances include a laundry list of college towns.

Suburbs with these features include a laundry list of inner ring and street car suburbs built before widespread automobile ownership.

Nothing grinds my gears more than hearing someone say "people need to stop moving into my town, the traffic is getting ridiculous." It's not the people that's the problem, it's the unsustainable forms of development that are just seen as normal.

in most us states, 0.08 is the "per se" limit. you can absolutely be convicted of DUI (or whatever it's called in that jurisdiction) below that BAC based on the testimony of the officer. at or above 0.08 just makes it automatic (you can only argue the validity of the test itself).

Yes drunk driver is not the right bar, but I think he still has a point. If the accident rate is less than overall human accident rate we should want to use the self driving cars, but the accident rate might still be high enough that a car company wouldn't want to claim 100% liability for every single accident.

Car accidents are one of the top causes of premature death in the US. Self driving cars aren't there yet, but when they are an improvement on human driving they should be encouraged, even if the absolute numbers are still not amazing.

The problem is that it's a different set of people who will die with self driving cars. Imagine the trolley problem but instead of 5 vs 1 it's 30,000 vs 29,000. The 30,000 people get hit by the trolley and die if you don't pull the lever, and a completely different set of 29,000 people die. People who did not do anything wrong. People who had no chance to fix the situation. Sure, it's 1,000 fewer people, but none of those 29,000 people did anything wrong. They were all killed by the self driving systems made by car manufacturers.

Regardless of whether or not you personally would pull the lever, you have to admit it's not the same as saving 1,000 lives.

I just want to point out that drunk driving also kills innocent bystanders: pedestrians, cyclists, sober drivers around, etc.

This is completely absurd reasoning. If we knew who was going to die, we'd let them know beforehand, so they could pick a safer spot on the street at their "death time".

There's no such thing as a deterministic future, as you suggest.

We can't stop doing things because a theoretical future will be changed. This is absurd.

While it is a whiff, one grain of truth is that its possible that pedestrian deaths increase with self driving vehicles, even if overall deaths decrease.

Is it fair to trade lives of people who choose not to drive a car at all for those who do? As of now NHTSA weighs weighs them identically which I think is a huge mistake.

That said its hugely dependent on the technology involved. I think a Waymo is safer than your average driver already for pedestrians. FSD Beta if unmonitored would be drastically worse than your average driver for pedestrian safety.

I'm not suggesting it's deterministic.

People have been saying that if driverless cars are safer than humans by any amount we should allow them. I'm saying they should be much safer than humans before we allow them.

The public will not tolerate car manufacturers killing 10's of thousands of people per year just because they are very slightly statistically safer than the average human driver.

who do you think should take the other portion of responsibility? Certainly not the person sleeping in th back seat with no control?

Well, if they're the ones who are nominally in control of the self driving car, because they activated it and are occupying the car, I would say that they have a portion of the responsibility.

Then we're back to the Tesla model - you don't have a self-driving car, you have a car that claims it is such, but a human needs to be 100% aware and in control at all times.

Honestly, I think that's fair. If you are the one who pushes the button and sends the device out into the world, even if you didn't program it, I think you deserve some part of responsibility of it malfunctioning.

My biggest problem with this approach is humans are terrible at paying attention to things that don't demand 100% focus.

A car that drives itself 99% of the time, but fails catastrophically the other 1% is doomed to failure. The human operator won't be engaged enough to take over that 1%. At least not without airline levels of squawks and beeps and wheel shakers and even that might not be enough - airlines don't have to worry about children chasing balls into busy streets, etc. And the pilots are highly trained - drivers are not.

I would think for a self-driving car to reach an acceptable level, it should be like a train. If I get on a subway or a bus and it hits someone, I am not held responsible, even if it stopped specifically to pick me up first.

worth noting the manufacturer doesn't have complete control over the car either, once it's "in the wild". maintenance is an important and frequently overlooked part of driving safety. a sophisticated ai driver (or human for that matter) can't do much with a set of bald tires or bad brakes.

Taxis are liable for their accidents.

> It's called a taxi

Try finding a taxi in about 99% of the US more than a few miles out from big cities.

I live just outside Minneapolis and we were SOL until Lyft arrived. Lyft and Uber still aren't available in most small towns. This is not "solved".

> Try finding a taxi in about 99% of the US more than a few miles out from big cities.

> I live just outside Minneapolis and we were SOL until Lyft arrived. Lyft and Uber still aren't available in most small towns. This is not "solved".

You can call for a taxi, even "just outside Minneapolis."

Also, taxis aren't the only solution to drunk driving that's better than unsupervised self-driving cars. You also have things like designated drivers, etc. It would have been silly for me to enumerate every single one in my original comment.

Unless things have drastically changed from my youth, a taxi is just a phone call away anywhere within about 40 miles of the Twin Cities.

Then have a designated driver. It's not complicated. If you go out to a bar and cannot arrange for a designated driver than don't drink.

easy to say, and not hard to do yourself. nearly impossible to convince the general public.

Make the bar identify a DD (or not if you're in an area with taxis) or lose their liquor license (like with serving underage kids). Or have them confiscate keys of people who drive into the parking lot and only give them back after a breathalyzer.

It seems easy enough to do if we're serious about it.

    > If they're not willing to [...] buy enough insurance to
    > pay out the claims [...] they [...] shouldn't be selling
    > [these] self-driving cars, period.

The problem with this view is that you're assuming that the current risk created by drivers that society would benefit from moving to self-driving systems is priced into their current driving, or into their insurance.

Western countries have mostly decided that society should simply eat that cost.

If a child gets killed by a negligent driver the driver or their insurance is almost certainly not going to be "fairly" compensating anyone, to the extent that such a thing is even possible when it comes to losing a human life.

There was a case in The Netherlands[1] where a grossly negligent driver killed 2 year old and her grandparents by rolling their car over them in a turn they were speeding through. The driver got probation, and a bit of community service.

On reflection I don't even think that's a bad outcome per-se. Very few people could truthfully report that they've never broken the traffic law in a similar manner even once.

It's mostly just moral luck that decides the difference between that being something stupid you did in your 20s with no repercussions, and another equally irresponsible person being unlucky enough to kill a child.

So should that person spend 20 years in prison and be subject to wage slavery for the rest of their life as a result? Probably not.

Now, imagine the same outcome, except this time the CEO of Tesla or Mercedes is going to have to answer in court for it. "Mr. Musk, why isn't your company paying out these parents fairly?". Of course a self-driving car is unlikely to accidentally make that specific mistake, but statistically the outcomes might be comparable.

My point upthread is that we're almost certain to end up over-pricing the risk caused by self-driving vehicles, while directly and indirectly subsidizing the continued operation of motor vehicles by even more flawed human beings.

People are simply bad at reacting to diffuse v.s. concentrated risk, and are inherently conservative when it comes to evaluating the risk of something new, v.s. an even riskier activity they've gotten used to.

1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-father-throw-...

> The problem with this view is that you're assuming that the current risk created by drivers that society would benefit from moving to self-driving systems is priced into their current driving, or into their insurance.

That's neither here nor there. Liability shouldn't be separated from the driver, since that's incentive for them to drive better. However, with self-driving vehicles, the driver is the manufacturer, full stop.

> My point upthread is that we're almost certain to end up over-pricing the risk caused by self-driving vehicles, while directly and indirectly subsidizing the continued operation of motor vehicles by even more flawed human beings.

1. You're making the flawed assumption that self-driving vehicles will be better drivers than humans. Maybe they will be, maybe they won't. It's yet to be seen. We'll know once the manufactures can't cherry-pick driving conditions or rely on backup humans to smooth over their defects.

2. If the problem you outline is an issue, the solution of pushing liability onto people who are not actually driving is a bad one.

> However, with self-driving vehicles, the driver is the manufacturer, full stop.

I don't think this argument has unanimous agreement.

If we force manufactures to be responsible, then they are going to find a way to reduce payouts. No country is going to destroy their automotive industry because of self-driving cars. And Too Big To Fail companies are never held responsible for their actions.

I'm in the camp of owner-responsibility. Insurance rates for self-driving cars will set a price for the safety of the system. It will happen rather quickly and will be largely accurate. Are you going to even use a self-driving system if it elevates your insurance premiums to $10k a month? Even a person who prefers convenience over personal safety is going to think twice about paying all that money to insure themselves.

> If we force manufactures to be responsible, then they are going to find a way to reduce payouts. No country is going to destroy their automotive industry because of self-driving cars. And Too Big To Fail companies are never held responsible for their actions.

No country would "destroy their automotive industry because of self-driving cars," by making manufactures liable for their products. Worst case is the shareholders would get wiped out in a bankruptcy, but the manufactures themselves would survive.

> I'm in the camp of owner-responsibility. Insurance rates for self-driving cars will set a price for the safety of the system. It will happen rather quickly and will be largely accurate. Are you going to even use a self-driving system if it elevates your insurance premiums to $10k a month? Even a person who prefers convenience over personal safety is going to think twice about paying all that money to insure themselves.

That's a ridiculous, Rube-Goldbergian idea. Lets simplify it: the manufacturer has the liability, buys the insurance, and includes the cost into the price of the self-driving feature. Instead of waiting for your insurance bill after you buy the car to find out if you can afford self-driving, it's there in the sticker price.

> I don't even think that's a bad outcome per-se. Very few people could truthfully report that they've never broken the traffic law in a similar manner even once.

I've never run over anyone, no. [Edit: The next paragraph addresses the concept of moral risk raised by the parent. Maybe this was a bad opening line, as it seemed to be the only thing responded to.]

It's unclear from your link what the person did. But, in general, hitting and killing three people requires unsafe driving that I've never done. And, to preempt the false analogy, I've certainly broken traffic laws. But I don't think I've ever driven unsafely while doing so.

It's also worth noticing that that person never even apologized. That's horrible.

> Now, imagine the same outcome, except this time the CEO of Tesla or Mercedes is going to have to answer in court for it. "Mr. Musk, why isn't your company paying out these parents fairly?"

Why wouldn't he be able to pay the parents fairly? Either (a) he fundamentally mispriced self-driving cars (in which case he should lose money) (b) his self-driving cars were worse than he expected (in which case he should lose money) or (c) he correctly accounted for risk in pricing, in which case the payouts are already baked in as a cost of doing business.

In the event of (c), it's very similar to other insurance products. Everyone pays some extra to cover the inevitable rare but serious failures.

Yes, I oppose any set of laws that allows Tesla to walk away from a fatal car accident caused by their self-driving without at the very least an appropriate civil punishment.

    > I've never run over anyone, no.

The point is that you could have if circumstances beyond your control were different.

The concept of "moral luck" is about people having drastically different moral outcomes for similar actions, mostly due to getting unlucky.

E.g. most people who own a cell phone and drive cars have probably broken the laws stating that you shouldn't operate your cellphone without using the appropriate hands-free equipment.

I certainly have at least. I know I shouldn't do it, and I can truthfully say it's not a thing I "do". I know about the dangers involved. But has it happened? Yes, and I'm not proud of it.

But nothing's bad has ever happened to me as a result, but there's some person somewhere where the first time they looked at their cellphone beeping the driver's seat they drove over someone and killed them.

Can we say that I'm a better person because that hasn't happened to me? I don't think so, I just happen to have good moral luck (so far).

I understand what you're talking about. As I said, I've broken traffic laws, but never in an unsafe manner that relied on luck not to kill three people. I reject your binary "if you broke any laws, you were equally likely to kill someone". I've observed my surroundings and took what I considered to be safe actions. I also try to apologize when I make mistakes.

I don't feel that the person took appropriate care in the way a reasonable person did. But the article was unclear. Why don't you react by citing the specifics instead of doubling down on the bigger general point, since I disagree that it was moral luck in this case, not with the concept.

I don't believe for a millisecond no mistake you've ever made couldn't have had a drastically different outcome. This notion you seem to have that you are completely aware of every variable in every situation you've ever been in is absurd.

I've never claimed I never made a mistake that couldn't have had a drastically different outcome. But I don't believe I've ever driven in a way that could have killed 3 pedestrians without some aspect of the vehicle failing. I've repeatedly asked for details of the "totally relatable because we all do it" accident.

But yes, I've avoided failures through luck. That's just a different failure state. I admit that moral luck it totally a thing (although I am using the other poster's phrasing, not familiar with that term.) And certainly I've avoided car accidents like that. But not hitting pedestrians.

What if the person doesn't maintain their car? What if they drive through mud that partially covers some sensors? It seems like there are lots of things outside the control of the manufacturer. It's probably best to see if any future accidents are because of errors with the system or end user errors. Anything else is doomed to failure.

The manufacturer controls the only thing that matters: whether the autonomous driving system will engage. If the sensors are covered in mud or the tires are detected to be bald, the system can choose not to engage, disengage with a window for a human driver to take over, or pull over and disengage.

having a system that can detect the current state of all safety-related components of the car seems like an unreasonably high bar. humans are driving around right now with bald tires, loose lug nuts, bumpers held on by scotch tape and a dream, the list goes on.

It's probably easier to test for bald tires and loose lug nuts than you think. Don't know about bumpers, but I doubt something like that would be covered by the manufacturer's liability. I assume any collision involving the self-driving systems would have an investigation to determine fault, much the same way they do already

should be easy to test for loose lug nuts, I agree. bald tires (or inappropriate tires for the season, just as bad) I'm not so sure of though. afaik, limit of traction can only be determined by exceeding it.

> I assume any collision involving the self-driving systems would have an investigation to determine fault, much the same way they do already

agreed. specifically, I feel the manufacturer should design the system against some minimum level of maintenance and publish that. they would be liable for any mishaps that occur within design parameters. the driver/owner should be responsible for actually keeping the vehicle within that envelope. I don't feel that's an unreasonable burden.

No maintenance and self driving is disabled. If sensors aren't working then self driving will be disabled, if currently in use then some kind of safe mode should be available to safely stop the car.

Since you brought up insurance, here's a third option: leave it up to manufacturers and consumers to determine how liability is structured in their private agreements, but make self-driving car insurance mandatory. This could even be enforced by mandating that new vehicles refuse to activate self-driving mode without a valid token as proof of insurance.

With a system like that, the market would ultimately work out an optimal solution. Vehicles with safer technology and greater manufacturer liability would be subject to lower insurance rates, while on the other end of the spectrum consumers would be responsible for paying for the externalities of their choices. No one is going to use a self-driving mode that costs more than the vehicle itself to insure, so in theory manufacturers will be more strongly incentivized to get this right.

Edit: A follow-up thought: self-driving car insurance should be independent of manual car insurance. They could be bundled together for savings, but someone who doesn't intend to drive manually shouldn't be required to purchase two types of insurance. Eventually, as the technology improves, self-driving insurance will become cheaper than manual insurance.

This model also neatly solves the current issue of enforcing insurance requirements. If self-driving mode can require a valid insurance token, then so can manual driving mode.

This. Insurance is how liability should be handled because that aligns incentives for everyone. Tesla's approach "it's drivers responsibility to pay attention" is a cop out and "manufacturers are responsible for 100% of everything that happens when automation is active" will stifle tech development. Insurance can set premiums based on number of accidents in the area and let market find most efficient solution.

Insurance is about shifting risk. Sometimes shifting the risk aligns incentives and/or efficiently allocates the costs of the risk but it’s far from guaranteed.

It's not guaranteed, but there's money to be made for anyone who can accurately assess the risks and determine optimal rates. Price too low and the payouts will put you out of business; price too high and the competition will eat your lunch.

> "manufacturers are responsible for 100% of everything that happens when automation is active" will stifle tech development

That's... technically true but not at all an acceptable explanation for anything. We don't just go ahead and do whatever we want to "speed up innovation". All kinds of abuse constantly gets bundled under the "only way to innovate" umbrella.

If a manufacturer advertises a feature and even charges money for it then it certainly should take responsibility for the feature working as expected and for the fallout from any failure outside of user control. The customer insures against things that are their own doing, or simply cannot be assigned to someone (weather?). The company pays for it's mistake directly, not via "market forces". That's why companies don't get out of such lawsuits by just claiming "innovation" and "the market will deal with us".

"Driving" is absolutely core to a car. It's not a GPS where the manufacturer can or should be able to just say "we take no responsibilities for the outcome of a GPS or (self)driver malfunction".

If the insurance on your car suddenly triples because the stuck accelerator pedal caused accidents, you're now left with a car which is not only terribly expensive to operate but also impossible to sell because the expense follows the car. All because of something the manufacturer caused. And that will also stifle innovation in all kinds of ways.

Insurance shouldn't (but probably will anyway) go up when your brake pedal is discovered to be defective, because the insurance is there to pay for the financial loss caused by the defective pedal. The loss in the resale value of your car and the increase in future premiums are losses caused by the defective pedal.

Of course, the insurance company can simplify this by just not charging you more for future premiums, rather than paying you for future premiums and taking it back later. And by not charging other people more for future premiums, they preserve the resale value of the car.

This is an automobile equivalent of "why health insurance should cover preexisting conditions"--any increase in future premiums caused by your condition is an expense caused by the condition, so your insurance should pay for it. If you switch companies, technically the first company should pay for the increased premiums from the second company, but averaged over the whole market this is still equivalent to just not increasing premiums.

> Insurance shouldn't (but probably will anyway) go up when your brake pedal is discovered to be defective, because the insurance is there to pay for the financial loss caused by the defective pedal. The loss in the resale value of your car and the increase in future premiums are losses caused by the defective pedal.

I actually have (some) personal experience with that. When Toyota has the defective accelerator pedal issue:

1. I got a check from Toyota from a settlement compensating me for the reduced resale value of my car due to the issue.

2. Insurers sued Toyota for compensation for the claims they had to pay out: https://www.reuters.com/article/retire-us-toyota-insurance-i...

> "manufacturers are responsible for 100% of everything that happens when automation is active" will stifle tech development

So does food safety, regulation of harmful chemicals, etc. Do we have a shortage of tech development? For self-driving cars? Are these companies so fragile?

How does it help the victim of the accident?

The owner of the vehicle got the cheapest package and nobody will cover the victim.

This is the reason why we demand drivers to have an insurance and don't leave it to the owner to figure this out. Without regulation this doesn't work as not everybody who in the end is affected is involved in the negotiation when buying the insurance.

>How does it help the victim of the accident

Insurance payout goes to the victim.

>The owner of the vehicle got the cheapest package and nobody will cover the victim.

Like regular insurance, 2nd party liability is mandatory.

A model where the manufacturer is responsible is also leaving it up to the market. All you're doing is assigning blame where it belongs (the actual driver being the software and not the end-user).

The manufacturer (or their insurer) will find the sweet (market) spot between safety and costs, where costs include not just manufacturing but the legal repercussions.

Putting the onus on the end-user is messy and wasteful from a market efficiency stand point. It may benefit Elon to make the user at fault, but it's just as "socialist" (or more-so) than putting the onus on the manufacturer.

I think the bigger concern is how to assign fault. If you allow the end-user to override the software then you'll need an objective 3rd party to determine blame (not the manufacturer or the end-user).

It’s my opinion that until the next major breakthrough in AI, all self driving cars should be unable to engage self driving mode if they detect more than a certain number of active vehicles on the road that are not self driving. There is no way in hell we are ready for self driving vehicles in crowded cities like Chicago or New York. For road trips through the rural areas sure! Navigating geometry is not the problem it’s decision making in complex real time environments.

> leave it up to manufacturers and consumers to determine how liability is structured in their private agreements, but make self-driving car insurance mandatory.

The free market's efficiency requires a balance of power and information. Similarly, in law, the validity of contracts depends on the relative position of the parties; the court will frown on a company that tries to enforce absurd contractual clauses on naive individuals.

A car manufacturer has incredible power and resources (including lawyers, actuaries, etc.) compared to an individual consumer buying a car. What will a consumer do, hire their own legal team to call the general counsel's office of Mercedes and renegotiate the agreement? It will cost more than the car. Have you ever done that with any agreement with a corporation?

We use our government to regulate where the market fails. Otherwise, we still have lead in gasoline, monopolies, etc.

Leaving things up to capitalism to solve has not worked.

Regulation works.

Standards works.

Consumers get rug pulled.

No, don't leave anything up to consumer and manufacturer to figure things out. First of all, it not two way relationship, it is manufacture, insurance companies, consumer, other participants on the road and government in two capacities: as a an authority that sets the traffic rules and an another authority that maintains road infrastructure. These relationship is highly asymmetrical and tilted against the consumers, which asymmetry contract law won't work as expected.

>The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case.

This is just wishful thinking. This is a description of what people should do, not what people actually do, and I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion. Millions of people drive while over the limit of alcohol consumption [1]. It is totally plausible that self-driving cars could radically reduce that number and improve overall safety even if they are not perfectly safe and occasionally cause accidents.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-americans-admit-to-...

You can say that "drunk driving is solved" if you speak from the point of view of the driver, because of course one can avoid it. But that's not too relevant.

Getting killed by a drunk driver (which is actually the real problem) is far from solved. It's something that can happen to anyone.

"The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved."

No, it has not. Taxis have been around as long as cars, and people are still dying.

Drowsy driving hasn't been solved, either.

> self-driving system they built

It's not 'self-driving', it's driven by Mercedes's developers.

> It's a total cop-out to not "accept 100% liability" for a self-driving system they built

And what exactly is the liability for anyone produces cars that go well above and beyond every legal speed limit? By your logic, any car made that can go above the highest legal limit in a country should be held 100% liable for any accident occurring in that condition.

A certain level of data should be collected and available upon every crash like with airplanes. If the manufacturer is found at fault due to a flaw in their design, then they should be liable.

“Safer than a drunk driver” is a crazy low bar.

At the .08 BAC legal limit odds of crashing a car are 200% higher than a sober driver. The risks obviously increase with higher alcohol levels. A .16 ‘double the legal limit’ drunk is 1500% more likely to crash. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/09/how-j...

So yeah, ‘safer than a drunk driver’ means basically ‘only about twice as likely to crash as an average sober human’.

There are gadgets that prevent the car from starting when your BAC is too high. Clearly we need the opposite for activating the autopilot.

Alcohol based mouthwash becomes a requirement in the glove box. Whiskey manufacturers start doing sponsorships where the autopilot is named after them. "Had a long day? Jim Beam will get you home."

Why aren't alcohol manufacturers investing in self-driving technology? That seems like it would be a net positive for them now that you mention it.

Should we let drunk people get home in their fully autonomous Mercedes? It's an interesting problem!

I think the answer right now is no, we're still requiring the driver to be able to take over, and our thought experiment presupposes they're inebriated.

On the other hand, it's obviously better to have the computer take a shot (no pun intended) at getting home than letting the driver do it themselves, even today. At what point does that moral balance tip? It seems like we're not too far off from the answer being "obviously let the car drive, whatever the drunk person was going to do is probably riskier for both themselves and everyone else".

That problem cries for a solution... Maybe some service, paid of course, that can drive those people home? Maybe combined with an app, and self-employed people providing that service, shared economy and so on... Seems to be a great opportunity!

In my town, Uber absorbed a bunch of the travel, public transport was cut in half, and now with gas and other expenses no one can afford to run Ubers up here. Maybe one car around, often a 20 minute wait. Car pool services cannot fill the gap.

Gas is too expensive to afford using Uber, so you have to use your own car instead?

I interpreted that as gas being too expensive to make it worth being an Uber driver.

I thought Uber had some fancy math that raised their rates to incentivize more drivers when their pool of drivers got too low? So why hasn't their math increased pay to offset the increase in gas prices if they don't have any drivers?

I don't live in an area that has Uber, so I'm not that familiar with it, only used it a few times when traveling :)

I don't think I know them any better than you do. I used one to get to the airport once and it cost $40. Economy parking would have been cheaper, so I use that now. That's the only time I've used one personally.

My impression of the the way drivers are compensated is that the hours, fuel, and wear on your vehicle make it kind of slim margins.

An Uber driver needs to be able to cover gas out of their pay plus make enough extra to effectively receive a decent wage. If gas prices go up but the price of an Uber fare (and subsequent payout) does not, then it becomes uneconomical for people to drive for Uber and they stop doing it.

Other than when Uber deeply discounts to drive growth, it's always been cheaper to drive yourself than to pay Uber. The reason you pay Uber is for other reasons (e.g. convenience, cost of parking, being away from your vehicle, intoxication).

The problem is that people are rational and 1) the costs of using Uber for routine trips to the bar are very high; and 2) the likelihood of getting in a crash on any particular trip are pretty low. So millions of people every year do the math and decide it's worth the risk.

I think they're wrong to do this, because the worst potential outcome of drunk driving is so devastating and catastrophic that it's personally optimal to eliminate that risk to zero. But the fact is that this isn't really how humans weigh risk.

Obviously anti-drunk-driving campaigns have been somewhat effective. People take this problem more seriously than they did 40 years ago. But I wonder if we aren't at a point of diminishing returns. Some people are going to drive drunk, no matter how many times you tell them to take an Uber.

Is someone who won't pay for a taxi really going to spend money on a tesla or Mercedes with self driving capabilities?

When I say "costs" I don't mean the $20 for the Uber (although that's not nothing). You have to think about the guy who wants to stop at the bar on his way home from work. To do that properly, he has to drive right past the bar, park at home, schedule an Uber, wait for it, then take it back to the bar.

Or he can just stop on his way home.

We both know what the right thing to do is, but one has significant costs the other doesn't.

Or imagine he does stop at the bar on his way home and tells himself he'll just have one beer, but he ends up having four and shouldn't drive. Now he has to get an Uber, take it home, get another Uber before work in the morning, and take it back to the bar to get his car. And then, finally, head to work.

Or he can just drive home.

Again, we both know what the right thing to do is, but one has significant costs the other doesn't.

It's probably a negligible portion of drunk driving incidents, but there definitely are people like that. In the past year there have been multiple drunk driving incidents with well-paid NFL players in nice cars, and these are just the ones who get caught. Whether those guys would turn on self driving mode is another question I guess, but every time it's baffling they didn't just request an Uber Black or something.

That tells you that the "cost" of taking an Uber isn't primarily monetary. It's a big hassle to leave your car at the bar, take an Uber, wake up, get another Uber, go get your car, then drive your car back home. People are weighing that hassle against the odds anything bad will happen on their trip home and deciding it's worth it.

People with expensive cars don't drunk drive? Seriously?

Even if that were true, I have a hard time imagining that the cost of self driving packages won't continue to decrease until it's included in literally every new car. Just a matter of time (assuming someone is able to make a fully working version).

Maybe an alcohol test in the car. If too drunk it wont start and call an uber

How many Uber drivers are high or a little drunk at work? I’m betting it’s more then 0%.

That works great in major cities and not at all on country roads in the rural US.

It's way cheaper and safer if they just ride a bus/taxi/the car of their "designated driver friend" instead, all with tech that's already here.

I'm way more interested in self-driving (and, more broadly, driving assistance) for emergencies like someone having a heart attack while at the wheel. For example, I feel a lot better now that, should I somehow die or lose consciousness while driving (but not due to being drunk!), my car with autonomous breaking will mostly keep going in whatever direction I had it but with a much better chance of stopping before causing someone else harm.

How often does that happen to be a concerne for you? Just asking if you have numbers or so. :)

I had a heart attack a few years ago and while I kind of know the fear is not very rational, I still wanted to be able to continue driving and not feel like I could hurt or even kill someone if I get another one that kills me while at the wheel.

So, hopefully not very often :) But it's one of those things where, since I could afford to change the car, I felt I had to go ahead and make that investment in safety.

There is much more cheaper and safer solution, a system that detects if the driver is drunk,ill, not paying attention etc. But some fanboys prefer faked self drivers systems with faked stats because it looks SciFi rather then say force a drunk detector in all cars.

It's way cheaper and safer if they just ride a bus/taxi/the car of their "designated driver friend" instead, all with tech that's already here.

I think a lot of people are unfamiliar with rural America -- the nearest bar might be 10 miles away down a country road with nothing else around (which was the case in my hometown... well more of a "village" than a town), and your friend may live 10 miles on the other side of that bar, so he may not want to drive that far out of his way so you can get drunk and he can't. And taxis and buses aren't an option.

Relying on humans to make the correct and safe choice to not drive while drunk is a losing proposition, our DUI death rate shows that.

Even if a smart car can't be trusted to drive you, it should be able to notice that you're drunk and refuse to let you drive. My car notices when I'm losing focus and gives me an alert reminder, so it should be able to notice when I'm drunk.

It always strikes me as odd, when I'm driving on country highways and encounter a bar in the middle of nowhere.

How is the bar not sued out of existence? There is no plausible way to travel to and from the bar, other than a private automobile, and no taxi service within an hour's drive. There are no houses nearby with clientele that could walk to the bar. Why isn't that considered an attractive nuisance like a swimming pool?

Exactly. And yet, many people choose to do exactly this on a regular basis.

Granted, it becomes an issue when people who wouldn’t drive drunk decide to use self-driving functionality simply because is there. But, there will be a point where it crosses over into being a net improvement, and that point may very well be a fair bit before meeting parity with humans. Obviously it’s not quite that simple (not all failure modes are equal) but it’s not that far off, either…

I suspect that point will come sooner if manufacturers are held liable for accidents their self-driving tech causes.

Reminds me of what I've heard about how bicycle helmets can cause riders to take more risks, so overall accident rates go up (I don't know how true that is, but it sounds plausible).

People who may not have chosen to drive (e.g., tired, drunk, impaired, or otherwise incapable of driving) might choose to do so since they can "lean on" the car doing it for them, and if the car encounters a situation it can't deal with the driver is completely incapable of handling it.

I hadn't heard that in the context of bicycle helmets, but it's definitely true for football helmets and protective gear.

200% increased chance of crashing would be 3x as likely to crash.

A 100% increase would be 2x as likely.

Yes. That is how math works.

I gave the ‘better than a drunk driver’ claim the benefit of the doubt and allowed it to be merely 2x as likely to crash than a sober driver, since that is still ‘better’ than a driver who is exactly at the federal US legal limit (and who will crash 3x as often).

Why not lower all regulations based on the fact that some people do them drunk? Doctors? Bus drivers? Security forces?

> Why not lower all regulations

Now we're onto something!

> At the .08 BAC legal limit odds of crashing a car are 200% higher than a sober driver.

What are the odds of a sober driver crashing a car?

Not sure, but 30% of crashes are alcohol-impaired. https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm# -> chapter 2 -> alcohol -> table 31

The all cause rate is somewhere between once per 10.5 years according to Allstate [1], which at an average of 15,000 miles per year is ~157,000 miles, or once per 500,000 miles according to the Bureau of Transportation [2] numbers of police-reported accidents. The rate of injuries is 84 per 100 million miles (once per ~1.2 million miles or ~80 driver-years) and fatalities is 1.11 per 100 million miles (once per ~90 million miles or ~6,000 driver-years) by the same Bureau of Transportation statistics.

[1] https://www.allstate.com/resources/allstate/attachments/best... Page 4

[2] https://www.bts.gov/content/motor-vehicle-safety-data

200% (2x) higher is not as high as I believe many would guess. If you did a straw poll you'd likely get answers like 10x, 20x etc. Hell SOBER driving had 10x more crashes when you/your parents were learning to drive compared to you/your kids.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

It's actually 3x, not 2x. Probably why writers shouldn't express things this way, but it's clearer reading the article, this is a 200% increase, not that the rate is 200% of the normal rate.

Also, the link to the NHTSA doesn't work, but I'd be interested to read the primary research. Concern is they're just taking accident rates for sober drivers and BAC 0.08 drivers, which isn't a fair comparison because they aren't time matched. As in, drunk driving is a lot more likely to happen very late at night/early in the morning when bars close, when traffic is extremely low and accident rates are also very low. If your chances are 3x the chances of a person driving any time at all, you're much more than 3x the chances of someone driving unimpaired at 2 in the morning.

Of course, even if they time match the rates, there's still the reality that a lot of sober people driving at 2 in the morning are still impaired. Tired driving is also quite dangerous.

I found literally the most conservative statistic I could for how dangerous drunk driving is - that someone whose impairment is literally on the threshold of legal is 3x as likely to have an accident than a sober driver.

I could have gone for a shock stat - 100000 people a year are injured in accidents involving drunk drivers. 10000 people are killed.

I could have taken the position that a typical drunk driver is probably actually 10x as likely to have an accident as a sober driver, based on those NHTSA numbers.

But I didn’t need to to make the point that a self driving car could be literally twice as likely as an average driver to crash and that would still be ‘better than a drunk driver’.

That's not a low bar at all. A lot of activities people do while driving are way more dangerous that driving "drunk". In fact, "drunk" (0.08 BAC) driving is often the baseline multiple that such activities are reported in.

Self-driving cars which are merely as safe as driving with a 0.08BAC will still greatly reduce traffic accidents. Of course, no one will report it as such. Having something that's paying attention 100% of the time is going to be a huge boon for traffic safety. Spending 15 seconds picking a song on your phone is all it takes to rear end a car or blow through an intersection.

Even if it was the EU doing, it has nothing to do with demanding perfect instead of good. It's about blaming who/what is doing the actual driving when an accident happens. I think it's perfectly sensible.

Put in another way, I don't expect my taxi driver to be perfect, in fact I probably drive more safely than most of them. But if they get into an accident it's their fault, not mine.

That's the OP's point, if you blame it simply because it's driving, you're incentivizing the systems to only work when it thinks it's 100% safe to drive. It's how you get "you can only engage on pre-defined major highways and only during daylight".

If the automaker advertise a level of automation where I am not supposed to do anything while the car drives itself (which seems to be the case), of course I blame it in case of accident: what could I have done it to prevent it, except for not using the feature at all ?

If instead we talk about driving assistance and I am supposed to keep an eye on the car, I am fine with being responsible for any accident.

But isn't the human always ultimately in control of the vehicle? Any time the car is set in motion, it is the result of a human request, they don't just randomly drive around for fun. Just because the human farms out some of the monotony of driving, does that absolve them from setting the vehicle in motion in the first place?

For now I'm leaving aside things like "summon my car to me", or "tell the car to randomly drive around until it finds a parking spot" where no human would be present in the vehicle at all because I think those kinds of scenarios are still a very long long way off, where the vehicles can be expected to move with no supervision at all.

But the "vehicle in motion" is not the problem. Accidents are a problem. Exactly the same way as in a taxi - if the taxi driver causes an accident, is it your fault because you told him where to go?

> I'm afraid that risk aversion will lead us to demand perfect instead of the good enough.

Then Mercedes' move is exactly the sort of pragmatic, no-bullshit yardstick you want. 'Putting your money where your mouth is' is a widely-understood and respected way of showing you are not bullshitting.

Current liability laws have not forced car manufacturers to make perfectly safe vehicles (which, would, of course, kill the industry), and there's no reason to assume they will do so for self-driving cars.

Unfortunately Tesla has been completely irresponsible, so I'm entirely in favor of the moat.

And this addresses the "uncanny valley" of driverless cars, where the car does everything up until you're expected to leap into immediate action to prevent it from killing someone, even though for hours you may have been doing nothing.

The technology really does need to be all-or-nothing. The in-between solution that Tesla is trying to exploit isn't reasonable given how human minds operate.

I do not see how this can be an attempt "to create a legislative moat in an area where they're behind". If they are behind in self driving they would not want to raise the stakes by creating this higher liability hurdle which another company can handle better. Any way you look at it if this were an attempt to get a competitive advantage through using the liability laws, then it must only mean that Mercedes are certain that they are ahead in the field of self driving not behind.

I very much welcome this development and it is, in my opinion, necessary for level 3 autonomous driving. By definition, level 3 autonomous driving implies that the car must take responsibility. The Level 3 definition says that the driver may take his attention off the road and does not need to supervise the technology (if the conditions are right).

Regarding drunk driving, if the machines start killing people, good luck explaining to the victims and the scared public that it may have been worse if they were drunk drivers. The fact is that new technology usually requires notably higher performance to replace the old, this will be the case with self driving, so we may as well embrace that and go forward.

I know we all hate subscription models, but for self driving it makes sense. If car manufacturers are expected to be liable for their self driving cars, then they should be charging money to their customers so they can insure them.

Manufacturers who produce safer self driving vehicles will have to spend less to insure their fleet, and be more competitively priced. This at least gets the incentives right

I don't want car manufacturers insuring vehicles. This would lead to inflated prices because manufacturers know that you cannot sell your vehicle at any time.

I don’t follow

For an actually fully autonomous car without a steering wheel, maybe. But for a car that can engage autopilot when you choose, absolutely not. Even if the self driving software is a monthly fee, the car is something you should be able to own and control.

Tesla gets a lot of flak about driver security, but this is incredibly irresponsible.

> Once you engage Drive Pilot, you are no longer legally liable for the car's operation until it disengages. You can look away, watch a movie, or zone out. If the car crashes while Drive Pilot is operating, that's Mercedes' problem, not yours.

If the car crashes, it's your problem primarily because you're the one in the car that could be injured. Maybe they'll pay for repairs or your hospital bills or even a loaner, but its primarily your problem. We have to remember the limitations of these systems and accept that they're level 2 and require full attention

Tesla gets a lot of flak for advertising Autopilot in a misleading way. Advertising with functionality and liability that could exist at some point but simply doesn’t.

What Mercedes does here is not just empty advertising, it’s offering actual lvl 3 autonomous driving complete with the car being liable in those situations.

Which in practice means Mercedes can actually deliver what Tesla so far has only been advertising with; Taking your attention actually away from the street to watch a movie or check your emails.

This is not a “problem”, it’s the literal definition of lvl 3 autonomous driving; Car takes liability in certain situations to such a degree that the driver is legally pretty much just a passenger.

> Which in practice means Mercedes can actually deliver what Tesla so far has only been advertising with

Do you have experience with this tech or are you taking the word of an marketing campaign? Taking "liability" doesn't mean much if you get in a serious accident and have medical issues for the rest of your life. If you get in an unsafe cab does it give you a lot of assurance that technically the driver is responsible?

It means that failing to prevent an accident will cost MB significantly more than they can possibly make with a single car. So they need to have run the numbers to be confident that this will not bankrupt them. This is _far_ more than Tesla ever did.

Tesla, until maybe this year, was never cashflow positive and the remaining lifetime of the company was always a significant risk. MB is an institution here in Germany. For many many reasons they will be one of the car manufactures that will disappear last. This is a company that cannot do such a risk without massive personal retribution risk to the executives, especially not after the Diesel scandal.

Of course that doesn't remove the "but I'm in the hospital/disabled/..." part of being personally in an accident. But that can happen _anyways_, irrespective of you being responsible even if you drive yourself. Compared to any other offering, this is a significant change of the rules of the game.

Getting in a cab where the driver accepts liability (and has insurance) seems much safer than getting in a cab where the driver passes liability to you and your insurance. Neither is intended to be the only way you asses safety, but the former is much better signal than the latter.

How does one differentiate an unsafe cab from a safe cab?

For a more apples to apples comparison: Tesla vs Mercedes. Tesla broadcasts L5 confidence in a poorly implemented L2 system, and accepts zero liability for its faults. Mercedes broadcasts L3 confidence in their system (which I'm not familiar enough to actually characterize), and accepts full liability for its faults. I'd prefer to share the road with a self-driving Mercedes than a Tesla, because mistakes are inevitable and insurance payouts are not. If I'm disabled for life, I'd rather get paid for damages than not.

> Taking your attention actually away from the street to watch a movie or check your emails.

If I were the kind of person that can afford and buy an EQS[1] I would rather hire a driver so I can do it all the time, not just at 40km/h in a slow moving highway jam.

[1] https://www.mbusa.com/en/future-vehicles/eqs-sedan

How is this different from riding as a passenger in a taxi, for example?

Also: Drive Pilot is a level 3 system, not a level 2 system. That's the entire point.

The primary difference is a few billion years of optical and neurological evolution.

The point is that whenever you ride in a conveyance (whether as passenger or driver) it's always "your problem" if there's an accident.

Short of MB putting an executive to sit alongside every passenger in their car (which you'll note that Uber, the airlines etc don't do either), what exactly are they supposed to do above and beyond taking liability for accidents while the system is in operation?

It is in fact the opposite, because it sets the bar at that level understanding that people treat Tesla’s autopilot in the same way. Tesla just hide their relatively lower capability behind a legal out.

People do not care what “level” their driverless control is. After a certain point of “it seems to do everything”, they assume it does everything. If they think they can get away with letting it take control, they will.

Requiring automotive manufacturers to deal with this is manifestly responsible. It is demanding an engineering control over an admin one in the hierarchy of risk controls, and that ecpectation is in line with how every non-software engineering discipline of engineering approaches the world.

Tesla gets flak because they have repeatedly implied (or flat out said) that their level 2 system drives itself. This is a level 3 system, so it actually does drive itself.

Level 3 is the lowest level where “the car drives itself”

https://www.motorweek.org/images/SAE_Chart.png

As road safety is a win for the whole of society and not only the driver it would make sense to incentivize safety at the government level. On the other hand there are already incentives in the form of insurance, which is mandatory at least in most (all?) places and should take into account vehicle safety. If autonomous vehicles are safer insurance premiums should go down for them, as it happens for example for vehicles with smaller power trains.

Maybe. It seems that some of that would be offset by the higher cost of the vehicle for the comprehensive part of the insurance.

"as it happens for example for vehicles with smaller power trains."

Is this still true? I know they did some HP based stuff in the 70s-80s, but thought they did away with that since then.

I'm not really sure about the power train, if it's still relevant.

Vehicle value impacts the premium, since the policy may cover things like theft and vehicle damages. However the biggest risk is damages against persons. Truck insurance for example is very expensive not because the value of the truck but because an accident is more likely to involve deaths and permanent damages. It's not unusual accidents for several million €. That said there are lot of considerations for selling policies. The insurer may make a discount for a risky sports car if it thinks it will recover the cost cross selling you other products. Or for commercial pressure, accidents are a problem for the future. But yes, you are right, it's not a certainty.

> While I don't agree with Tesla's strategy of playing it fast & loose, I'm afraid that risk aversion will lead us to demand perfect instead of the good enough.

I'm actually afraid of the opposite: where self-driving becomes so associated with failures and danger in the mind of the public that the technology never take off.

And it doesn't take that much effort to make the public afraid of something, just look how terrified of shark people are.

Accepting liability doesn't mean they require the system to be perfect.

Accepting liability really just comes down to who's insurance company pays when it fails.

If the manufacturer can demonstrate to the insurance company that their self driving system fails less frequently (or lower overall cost of claims payouts) than human drivers then the insurance company will happily charge a lower premium for cover. Even if it's not perfect. The closer the system can be demonstrated to be to perfect the lower the insurance premium is going to fall.

There is certainly a regulatory moat being set up here as it will prevent new startups from entering the space unless they can find an insurance company willing to cover their risk profile, which in turn means demonstrating a suitably high level of safety to keep the premiums affordable. But I think in this matter I want a level of regulation that says if you're making something that's used on public roads, and risks injuring or killing people you'll accept liability when it goes wrong. It's not much different from the system of mandatory insurance for drivers in most countries. If you're going to drive on the roads, you must meet a minimum insurance level whereby you can accept liability for any failure that causes damage to other property or people.

You can measure the confidence of the manufacturers, which seem to opt for beta testing on the roads. But I agree that it is probably a move to attack competitors.

Personally I wouldn't want to be near automatically driving vehicles for now. Maybe because I worked in computer vision and even with drastic advancement of the field, the possibilities are still quite primitive, even with "AI" support. Sure, I could get hurt by a drunk driver. But they are also not allowed on the roads for that matter.

I think a solution is to restrict the zones which an autopilot is allowed to be active at first. Ultimately the driver must be responsible. He made the decision to activate the auto pilot. Manufacturers should be forced to be honest about the capabilities though.

>I wonder how much of this is part of a genuine attempt to bring a safe product to market, and how much is to pressure the German government (and soon thereafter, the EU) into making this sort of promise mandatory for all car manufacturers, including those that are ahead of Mercedes in the self-driving space. I.e. to create a legislative moat in an area where they're behind.

Mercedes is just going to place the assumed liability with a reinsurance company anyway. It seems like a very efficient solution to ensure accountability SOMEWHERE without vast amounts of litigation every time there is an incident. It's honestly hard to see how self-driving vehicles will ever meaningfully make it to the consumer market without an agreement like this.

Note that drunk driving is much less socially accepted in Europe than in the U.S. A post on this topic was actually at the top of /r/germany just a week ago:

https://old.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/tejhxv/all_my_amer...

"All my American friends drive after drinking and I don't know what to do"

Several European countries "beat" the US (in a bad way) when it comes to alcohol-related traffic incidents:

https://www.itf-oecd.org/alcohol-related-road-casualties-off...

A friendly reminder from a fellow European that the entire continent isn't part of Germany :)

The US handily beats all those countries when it comes to per-inhabitant alcohol related traffic fatalities.

> risk aversion will lead us

Not wanting to crash into random things when rolling at 120 km/h is not "risk aversion". It's just common sense.

I think you're making OPs point for them. Real drivers also crash into things. Self-driving cars don't have to be perfect all of the time. Inebriated and distracted drivers already cause disproportionate problems: self-driving, even one that makes a mistake once in a blue moon, is preferable than some dude on their phone who hasn't noticed the traffic in front of them has slowed down. (And 120 km/h sounds like highway cruising: precisely the sort of place where self-driving cars have a relatively easy time and "better than humans" is not very far off from where we are today.)

The dude on their phone is not comparable to the an AV carrying a family of 5 unpredictably veering into a concrete divider. One is negligent, the other has done nothing and could have done nothing, they only trusted the system. How do you reconcile it as merely a question of numbers then? So you trade 100 human-error accidents for 5 "blue moon" AV accidents, and this is good because it's statistically much safer. But that's also 5 accidents that wouldn't have happened to safe, diligent drivers.

Nice clip. The quote was:

> risk aversion will lead us to demand perfect

And no, perfection is not a reasonable bar.

> And no, perfection is not a reasonable bar.

It's the only bar. Considering the regular person overconfidence in their ability they will either want something that doesn't crash ever or if it crashes it has to bring about other advantages such as speed.

Eg. Same rate of self driving crashes with an avg. speed of 100mph as human 40mph.

Like putting your Mercedes in the hands of Lewis Hamilton. People won't have any problem doing that, because they understand that Hamilton is a much better driver than them. If it's close people won't relinquish control, at least when sober.

If perfection is the bar for being allowed to drive, then nobody is allowed to drive because there is no such thing as a perfect driver.

Robo-Perfection or Robot Lewis Hamilton is the bar for a sober person (especially guys) to let go of the wheel.

If it's close I'd rather bet on myself. Many people feel the same way.

people discount the psychological effects of letting go of the wheel, the advantage has to be crystal clear

> Robo-Perfection or Robot Lewis Hamilton is the bar for a sober person (especially guys) to let go of the wheel.

It obviously isn't as there are many people who have jumped through many hoops to get access to self-driving software that is much worse than Lewis Hamilton (i.e. Tesla FSD beta). Clearly different people have different standards for what they consider safe enough to let it drive for them.

It seems like you are redefining "perfection" to be whatever your personal bar is for adopting a self driving car (which would make your argument a tautology if you weren't also overgeneralizing your personal bar to everyone.)

I would also point out that the bar for personal adoption is not necessarily the one that we should use to determine which self-driving solutions are allowed to operate at what level on public roads. While this is a complicated topic, I don't think "Lewis Hamilton" is the only reasonable place to set those bars.

I am not talking about these people using FSD on and off like it happens now with Tesla. AS it stands that would be a failure, it's just a glorified cruise control

I am talking about fully giving control to the car and preventing humans from interacting, after clear statistical evidence of autopilot being better than the avg. driver. Given that by definition the majority of drivers are avg. then society would be better off summoning Skynet and putting it at the wheel. It's a clear cut reasoning that works in theory.

Better than avg. doesn't mean that accidents won't happen though. Accidents will still happen and as soon as they start to happen the whole thing will be reversed. That's because people don't consider themselves the "avg. driver" and would rather bet on themselves being better than the avg. driver than the computer being better than that .

Even 95 yr old people consider themselves the local Lewis Hamilton.

You raised the example of FSD purchases, I cite you the counterexample of vaccines. Vaccines are much much much better than the immune system against COVID, if it were to be close you'd have much less adoption because skepticism is not linear.

When in doubt , people bet on themselves or the status quo. In this case the status quo is literally betting on themselves so you have a double effect there too

You are shifting your own goalposts here. You were specifically arguing that perfection is the only bar. You have now redefined "perfection" as meaning "above average", but even with that redefinition, your argument as stated still doesn't match reality.

People are already letting cars drive for them. They are doing it even when they are not allowed to take over for the car (i.e. Waymo in AZ). Clearly some people have lower bars so your claim that the above average safety is required for anyone to give up control of the vehicle they are riding in to a computer is false.

Reading between the lines of what you are saying, is seems that what you are actually trying to argue is more along the lines of "achieving (significantly?) above-average safety for self-driving systems is crucial to achieving mass adoption of self-driving technology." That's a much hard to disprove statement (and one I suspect it is at least partly true given varying levels of "cruciality").

> A car manufacturer might not be willing to accept 100% liability

It won't be the car manufacturer, but their insurance underwriter who has the final say (unless the car manufacturer self-insures, which, let's face it, is a non-starter).

I'm not sure if you've ever dealt with business insurance, let alone underwriters.

Underwriters tend to be, by definition, fairly boring risk-averse types.

If you catch them on a good day, they might be willing to make a few relatively small adjustments to their standard wording in order to relax the scope a bit.

However this assumes you are lucky enough to be dealing with one underwriter. If you're having to pool at Lloyds, then the chances of you being able to get significant wording relaxation drops dramatically because everyone in the pool has to agree, not just one underwriter.

You'll never find an underwriter willing to cover 100% liability for anything under the sun. That's just not how it works. Especially with new and little-understood risks such as self-driving.

Its about control, if the car can drive itself and the manufacture is always held responsible then there is no incentive to selling cars. The incentive to charge for transport is still there Mercedes would become the next Uber and the World Economic Forum would get the dystopian future it has always dreamed of.

You will own nothing and like it.

I'm fine with a company saying "We don't think we can do X safely, therefore we don't devote as much to research doing X, therefore we don't want to be penalized in the market because people who do X unsafely can obfuscate the risks and sell it to the market." And then attempt to create standards to do X safely. That seems reasonable to me.

Drunk driving has been solved and is on the horizon. Soon manufacturers will be required to include the technology in the cars somewhere around 2026 in North America and possibly sooner in Europe. There might be a combination of technology used such as at wheel breath test, sensors on the wheel that detect alcohol excretion in your skin, eye sensors that detect impairment and drowsiness, sensors that detect impaired driving based on how well you stay in your lane. Unsure what tech will be most common but change is on the horizon.

> I don't know what the right solution is, probably some mixture of the two. Clearly you don't want manufacturers to be incentivized to ignore the risk associated with their systems, but you also don't want these systems not to be offered when they'd be a net gain in safety.

The right solution has always been public transportation. It's just, you won't hear that from car companies. The right solution to self driving cars is not to have any cars.

You’re looking at the problem wrong.

There are 1.35 million deaths per year attributed to car crashes. I don’t know about you, but I would rather companies play loose and fast rather than take forever to figure out the perfect solution. If it takes five years longer, that’s more than 7 million deaths.

Even if self driving cars are responsible for 1000 deaths per year, which they won’t be, it would still be well worth playing fast and loose.

It took mankind a long way to learn that security (EDIT: I meant safety, it does apply to security as well so IMHO) and "fast and loose" don't go together. That's why traffic related death are as low as they have ever been.These lessons are codified in all the regulation around that stuff.

That being said, the number you stated is world wide? If so, it's not the one to use. And just ignoring the overall trend, in death per km / mile driven, is just disengenious.

Why not use worldwide stats? Self driving cars will take many years to propagate to all the worlds cars (which will eventually happen), but it still holds true, if it takes 5 extra years that is 7 million deaths

Also, traffic related injuries and deaths have been rising in recent years due to distracted driving

One, deaths are measured per driven mile, they are a relatibe stat not an absolute one.

Two, driving conditions have to factor in to make it comparable, including traffic deaths in Africa and India (global) is kind of pointless

Three, I'd like a source that per driven mile injuries and deaths are rising, all numbers I know of show the opposite trend (including pedestrians and cyclists).

Does this mean that the CEO or board members will be held liable for criminal manslaughter charges if their vehicle runs someone over?

Thats a good question. What does it mean to take responsibillity? I cant imagine that someone of mercedes will be accused of manslaughter, but this is taking responsibillity

Edit: if something happens you have 10 seconds to react . I don’t know if in that 10 seconds those responsibility counts.

> Realistically we're not going to be able to pick "well, don't drive drunk then!", it'll happen

I don't think legislators will ever accept the safer criminal activity argument.

You want millions of cars on the level of drunk drivers?

There are probably millions of sober drivers on the level of drunk drivers.

So Boeing should not be responsible for their software failures?

Is Mercedes behind or are fanboys overestimating Tesla/Musk?

German cars are designed for cities American cars are designed for LA.

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