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Comment by isityouyesitsme | Hacker News Reader

Based on personal experience, yes if an AV is susceptible to a problem, then all of them are susceptible on at least the same software and hardware configuration. This is the same in every safety-critical field.

The comment is a bit naive though.

What is your statistical model for such failures? let's go with the example and assume that from now henceforth forevermore, all AVs will run through caution tape (which is obviously not true).

What is the frequency of caution tape being drawn across the road in front of an AV vs. the frequency of JUST drivers driving drunk, or JUST speed violations, or JUST texting violations, or JUST distracted driving, etc.?

Though, we definitely ought to hold companies' feet to the fire when they are liable for incidents like this. Which we aren't really doing.

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> we definitely ought to hold companies' feet to the fire

To clarify my position, even though I oppose SFMTA's reactionary stance on this topic, I do think Cruise should be sent to the penalty box. Most of these incidents and all of the serious ones like driving through the caution tape were Cruise incidents. I think they should produce a public post-mortem report on that and demonstrate in virtual and practical simulation on closed courses that their thing doesn't do that any more. And I am sure Waymo already incorporates Cruises failure scenarios into their simulations. Call me a Waymo partisan but I don't think Cruise is up to Waymo standards.

The Waymo "incidents" are that it stopped somewhere it should not have, which I view as much less serious.

The reality is that in order to make the technology safe, you need to be able to expose it to the conditions under which it will operate. To me, this is not the issue. The issue is whether companies have the requisite technology in place to prevent a minor problem from becoming a major problem.

The optics to me look as though most of them are scaling their fleets too quickly and assuming they are capable of more generalized problems than they actually are. I believe that they know this and, in essence, nobody is seriously capable of stopping them because there is not enough interest to do so. Part of that is because the companies are so secretive of their technologies and capabilities.

Voluntary reports are not the answer to this. They will always find a way to fudge them. The only answer that will work without stifling innovation with uninformed laws is to simply hold them to a high standard and give them the stiffest penalties the law allows in each infraction. I think this will have the natural effect of forcing them to have smaller fleets they can better control, or at least have safety drivers (which also would reuse fleet size).

IANAL, so I don't know how to make this actually have teeth since I think traditionally the driver bears the liability.

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