Why would you allow some tech company to develop its technology at the risk of pedestrian safety? What benefit does this have to the people living in these neighborhoods?
(Visalia is especially far, but I had a driver in SF tell me once that's where he drove in from.)
LA Times re: SF " On average, 30 people die and more than 500 are severely injured in the city's streets each year"
Cruise severely injured 1 pedestrian this year, so sounds like it's 2x worse than human drivers at least. Since there are 1000x more of them and they've only caused 500x the severe injuries. When Cruise causes its first fatality it will immediately be 33x worse.
A person playing Russian Roulette for 1 round successfully may extrapolate that there is zero risk. A person who has played 1000 rounds doesn't exist.
And humans get confused and have people pinned under their cars all the time. Nobody wants to continue running over a person (even if it’s the best course of action in hindsight), and they often get out of the vehicle to check before even noticing that someone is underneath.
Curious why they didn't share all the video if they think they did such an excellent job?
I know there's nothing that will ever convince you that autonomous vehicles are safe, but please think about what safe autonomous vehicles would look like if they were rolled out. These sorts of stories get tons of eyeballs, so journalists are trying to find any example of an autonomous system harming people. Even better if you can blame tech companies for being negligent or irresponsible. So every single incident, even if it's caused by a psychopath hit-and-run driver, is blamed on the machine. And every detail is exaggerated and misconstrued to make the machine (and the manufacturer) seem as terrible as possible. So the stories simply don't matter. The figure of merit is fatalities per passenger mile. Currently, Cruise's is zero.
Cruise employees are riding in these vehicles, as are their family members. They walk near these vehicles every day. If they actually believed they were unsafe, they'd deploy the vehicles far away from their homes.
Well, according to the article they are often human-driven.
Anyhow, Caltrans estimates 8.8 million miles traveled by vehicles in SF daily. That's 6.4 billion miles during the 2-year period that Cruise did less than 700,000 miles.
In California there's 1.38 deaths per 100,000,000 miles traveled. Cruise doing ~1% of the mileage in which one would expect a death to occur doesn't seem like enough of a sample to declare a comparative safety advantage.
If we cared about pedestrian safety, we wouldn't let ~half[1] the drivers on the roads drive.
[1] I kid, it's more like 5-10%.
We can address both things. The "but people are statistically worse" argument is a horrible, thoughtless "gotcha" in the form of whataboutism that makes light of people's lives.
It's also laughably unproven, unless it was to be scaled up, exposed to the full range of driving conditions, and measured for a long time.
It's just that nobody cares about enforcing low-level violations, and we just let them keep trying, keep rolling the dice, until their lack of consideration for other people kills someone.
But maybe it aligns with their vision of a free-for-all libertarian paradise, I am not sure.