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Comment by jmugan | Hacker News Reader

Human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US. It's a catastrophe, but we are all just used to it. Because of that, I'm willing to give self-driving cars some slack. People put cones on them. What would happen if you tried to put a cone on a drunk driver's car?

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46% of those fatalities are from multi-vehicle crashes (versus single-vehicle crashes).

Self-driving cars can communicate more effectively. It's so hard to merge because we can't communicate well with the other drivers.

In a world with only self-driving cars on the road, I definitely agree.

I think things will be worse in a mixed human and self-driving environment, though. I say this as someone who lives in a zip code where Waymo has been testing for years. The only reason those cars are even able to integrate at all is because they are so incredibly conspicuous. If their sensors were entirely stealth, accidents would be incredibly common.

That is a good point that it is a challenge to mix robots and humans. That to me has been the most obvious failure so far.

Does that mean half are from single vehicles smashing into stationary objects?

I guess so! I got that number from the PDF linked here: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

The point of the article is that there is no such thing as self driving cars. Cruise cars operate with regular, routine human intervention — albeit remote. You don’t need to cut them any slack.

This sounds perfect.

To be clear, every autonomous car company has human intervention.

It's a very good idea.

Yet we call it fraud. Perhaps it is when you claim not to use humans ...

Of course, you need to walk before you run.

To be fair, there is such a thing as self-driving cars - just not from Cruise. Waymo seems to be doing much better across the board.

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