Driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers

It’s kind of like the whole rust vs C++ debate. Rust proponents say that Rust as a language just eliminates a whole class of errors(memory errors). They’re just nonexistent anymore. Sure there are new problems, but they’re hopefully less commonplace. Your argument would be like a C++ programmer saying, “can we see some statistics on how many security vulnerabilities show up in code written by a modern C++ developer using smart pointers and RAII? That way they can make more informed decisions over whether rust is necessary.”

I think it would be interesting to see some alternative statistics, but I’m looking forward to the day nobody gets killed by an irresponsible drunk driver because cars don’t allow people to drive at all. Plus, once all the humans are off the road, I presume new technology can be made to reduce traffic patterns and other cool things.

> * Sleep deprived driving

* Driving after having an emotional argument or any other serious emotional stress

Those are all things that we're all probably going to do at the low points in our lives.

We conveniently edit those out of our perception of ourselves, though, because we had excuses for them (possibly quite good ones, but in reality those all count towards how good or bad of a driver you are).

> You want the car to be safer than you, rather than safer than the average.

You probably aren't as good of a driver as you think you are.

And half of you out there are just chronic tailgaters who incorrectly believe that you have to do that in order for traffic to flow faster, or just believe that people "cutting you off" will significantly increase the time it takes to get to your destination. If you don't keep about a semi-trailers worth of distance between you and the car in front of you, then an AI probably would be a safer driver.

[ Or just the passive-aggressive shithead that wasn't going to slow down for me in the crosswalk the other night ]

> * Driving very late at night

> * Sleep deprived driving

The above look to me like things of life that you would have preferred to avoid, but you'll end up doing anyway.

Driving a kid/spouse to an hospital in the middle of the night while you're also under your flu medications is a thing that happens. You could call a doctor/cab/ambulance but more often than not it's either not an affordable option, or you're too tired to have thought about it.

> * young, dumb and reckless

Could be a guaranteed Nobel price if you find the cure to this.

Which itself can be drilled down to drunk motorbiking, first timers on 200hp bikes, idiots without helmets etc. An average motorcyclist dies 14x as often per km driven as car drivers, however it seems to just attract idiots.

That said, if drunk/distracted/too old drivers switch to self-driving cars that could be a positive change for everyone earlier than general population.

What exactly is your algorithm to avoid that stuff? You realize that there are other people on the roads, right? This is like arguing we don't need to bother buying defibrilators because 70% of heart disease is preventable with diet.

When the automobile was first introduced it couldn't drive far from gas stations, it needed oil changes at garages that didn't exist yet and you couldn't drive to a far away town that didn't have a gas station. It got better.

I could tell that same story about laptops, or airplanes or boats or washing machines or even the electrical and water supply to your house.

All products get better over time, but even now there are hundreds of millions of people that live in places that simply don't need all the stuff you mentioned, so for them a self-driving vehicle is already extremely useful.

It's even possible the product will be "finished" and your use case will never be satisfied, because it isn't deemed important enough to include. For example, I recently drove a vehicle 1,050 miles on the world's most remote road [1]. 99.99999% of all vehicles sold in the entire world can't make that drive because they can't carry enough fuel. Just because I wanted to do it with a vehicle, that doesn't mean auto manufactures are going to suddenly add duel fuel tanks to all vehicles.

(FWIW, the Land Cruiser 70 series comes from the factory with dual 90 liter diesel tanks, and can drive the road end to end no problem directly form the factory. So ONE manufacturer decided it was worth satisfying that hyper specific use case, but obviously the others do not)

Yes, you have a use case that the product doesn't do yet.

Yes, it likely will in the future.

Yes, you will have to wait.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UR6agkRbT4

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=d6tgmGqXysM

First, this is a fallacy: "products have no value unless they meet the performance of their competition in every possible use case" is simple not true and never has been.

And it's wrong anyway. FSD on my Model Y does great on unlit night time roads in the mountain west. So unless you're positing something special about the "Midwest" I don't see the issue here.

And in fact it's wrong in silly ways. That's not the hard part! Following the pavement is the easy bit, and the car does it more or less perfectly. Where it has trouble is in urban traffic. It's timid[1], it makes poor long-term lane planning choices (i.e. if there's a long line waiting for a left turn it will try to "go around" in the right lane and then get stuck), it will occasionally refuse to pass construction cones if it can't model out what's supposed to happen, it sometimes will slow down to "avoid" cars that are technically on collision courses but will "obviously" stop (e.g. cars on the opposite side of the road pulling into middle turn lanes -- the Tesla hates that).

There's clearly work to do. But it's not the work you think needs to happen, and in particular it's not in areas that impact "safety" in the way you're imagining.

Frankly at this point I'm more comfortable on the roads, especially on the highways, with FSD doing the microdriving for me than I am driving myself. The contention of this article matches my experience more or less perfectly.

[1] A recent regression is that it really doesn't like oncoming motorcycles and will slow down inexplicably for them where it's just fine with the cars in the same lane.

You raise a good point but surely it's at least possible to compare the safety records of driverless cars vs. human operated cars within the domain that driverless cars typically operate. One way to do that would be to only examine all trips, human and driverless, that occur entirely within a bounded area that driverless cars are known to operate. Another option would be to look at the total safety record of a city like SF in the years prior to widespread driverless car usage and in the years after common adoption and see if there is a broad reduction in accidents generally.

Apropos of this, the other day I was thinking about the adoption of mobile devices. Originally the unadorned word "phone" referred to a wired home/office telephone, and if you needed to refer to a mobile device, you'd say, call me on my mobile/cellphone. Over the course of a generation it's now that if you say "phone," the assumption is that you are talking about a mobile device, and the exceptions become either landline or office phone. It makes me wonder how long, if ever, it will be until "car" almost universally refers to driverless vehicles, and you'll need to say "manual car," "meatmobile," or something similar to those to refer to a human-driven vehicle.

Until self driving cars have been deployed internationally in a huge range of driving environments I'll take my chances behind the wheel.

https://highways.dot.gov/research/research-programs/safety/i...

reason being you can’t really get t-boned on the driver side on a highway

I don't understand how you can believe that if you watch a few videos of self-driving cars navigating complex situations. Here's a good one: https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1641123102858919953

They can't do this everywhere or under all conditions, and they still make plenty of mistakes. Still, if a Cruise car can navigate through a crowd of drunks who walking in the street, they're certainly capable of managing complex situations.

Humans have a lot of problems dealing with those states! It's why they're so difficult; funny enough a big reason why car insurance is a must but health insurance isn't. It's also why I believe we should aggressively push for driverless ecosystems, as fewer humans actually making decisions on the road = fewer potential problems due to the perplex human states.

Of course we are still a long ways from that goal, but it's hard to imagine a future where human drivers are still a thing. Makes more sense for the transportation network to be exclusively driverless and all following the same exact ruleset precisely. Again, thinking long term here not the next 20 years.