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Comment by bostonpete | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense, but that still doesn't explain why we ignore tens of thousands of auto deaths per year but talk about one Uber ATG death for 5 years...

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If a careless driver crashes into me, I've been wronged by an individual who made some bad decisions. If a self-driving car hits me, I've been wronged by a corporation that probably cut corners and sold a shitty product for profit. I have some sliver of sympathy for the culprit in the first case, but zero sympathy in the second.

10-15% of car accidents are cause by mechanical failure. Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners, so my question still stands.

> Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners

I think most of them are probably caused by deferred maintenance, which may either be the result of the owner making poor decisions, or a circumstance forced on them by poverty. In cases where the car is defective as manufactured, I have no sympathy for the company that made it. If that happens, I want the car company to pay for it. Which I believe generally happens. Car airbags blow up in your face because of a detective design? The car company has to pay to fix that. So your question has a false premise; we don't ignore deaths caused by faulty manufacturing. Usually anyway, some car companies seem to get away with more than others..

How do you figure the self-driving car was built by cutting corners? Just to be devil's advocate... usually its a small team of people that genuinely care about making self driving better. What prevents it from simply being an accident?

probably because self-driving has fuzzy accountability and is the same driver in all vehicles.

if a taxi driver crashes, youve got a bad taxi driver somewhere you will probably never interact with. If a self-driving car crashes, you've got possibly hundred of thousands of potential accidents waiting to happen from the same "bad driver"

the regular car accident conversations have all been had. what else is there to say?

My guess is just because self driving cars are new and rare. Once there are millions on the road, we will stop getting reports about each individual accident involving them.

It's because self-driving cars have alternatives, like automated trains or streetcars, that are safer and less resource intensive. Self-driving cars aren't just competing against human-driven cars. Unless you think cars are the only form of allowed infrastructure.

If a train or streetcar isn’t an effective alternative to a human-driven car (as is the case in the overwhelming majority of car trips in the US), how are they an effective alternative to a self-driving car?

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