Hacker News Reader

Comment by smallpipe | Hacker News Reader

Anothe proof that self-driving cars with human backups should never be allowed on public roads. It's going to be used unsafely because it encourages such behaviour.

View on HN

Specifically, SAE level 3 should be explicitly prohibited. Humans have proven, over and over, that they can’t handle that level of alertness while also not driving.

I'm not sure level 3 is a problem. In L3, the car is required to initiate handover and be able to give you a long time to take over. This may or may not end up OK. (Witness the Mercedes eyes-off, hands-off Traffic Jam Assist). If the car can do something reasonable 85% of the time when the human is unavailable, dead, or drunk and can't take over in 25 seconds that would probably be OK.

Level 2+, though, is a big worry. It fails enough to be dangerous, but many of these systems fail too little for humans to effectively monitor them.

Waymo has been operating near-flawlessly for years now in some busy, complicated cities. I don't see self-driving tech as the problem. It's been proven to work. I see irresponsible companies as the problem.

You didn't read where he said "self driving cars with human backups"

If it needs a human backup then that's not a self-driving car though is it? That's an already-obsolete concept.

Waymo has conditionals (type of car, what roads it will drive on, range, etc) on how and where it can operate, FSD's conditionals are much less stringent.

I'm still waiting for Waymo to safely drive in the snow.

Waymo is level 4 while FSD is level 3. Waymo won't drive in the snow, because they know they cannot fully automate it safely in all situations. FSD will yolo any situation and just suddenly hand you the wheel whenever it likes, resulting in situations like the linked article.

> I'm still waiting for Waymo to safely drive in the snow.

I'm not, at least not especially. Technology doesn't need to be flawless to transform society. We put up with lots of limitation when we live in places with serious winters. Why should driverless cars be impervious?

I wouldn't say "never", however it's clear we're not there yet.

if you want to see the true horror, check out https://comma.ai. $2000 and plugs into most cars made in the past few years, works by using cracked security for the cars it is "compatible" with. These people are on the road next to you with a car being driven by a single smartphone camera. They sell it as "chill driving" but they have a discord where people just flash custom FSD firmware.

By "cracked security" do you mean something more than the fact that it plugs into the CAN bus?

At least they are not pretending to offer anything more than level-2 adaptive cruise control and lane centering.

Ah yes, the compensating behavior theory all over again. Replace "seat belts" with "driver assist"

> This paper investigates the effects of mandatory seat belt laws on driver behavior and traffic fatalities. Using a unique panel data set on seat belt usage rates in all U.S. jurisdictions, we analyze how such laws, by influencing seat belt use, affect traffic fatalities. Controlling for the endogeneity of seat belt usage, we find that it decreases overall traffic fatalities. The magnitude of this effect, however, is significantly smaller than the estimate used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Testing the compensating behavior theory, which suggests that seat belt use also has an adverse effect on fatalities by encouraging careless driving, we find that this theory is not supported by the data. Finally, we identify factors, especially the type of enforcement used, that make seat belt laws more effective in increasing seat belt usage.

[0] http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/3...

It's clearly not comparable, as wearing a seat belt might make you feel more safe, but it doesn't actively encourage you to pay less attention to the road by its design. The act of driving is roughly the same with or without seat belts. Driver assist or self driving drastically alters how you drive.

And yet FSD and even lane assist are going to be safer than the driver near you who is scrolling and typing away on their smartphone

Don’t mistake my post as a defense of FSD or Tesla. They’ve been lying about their capabilities for what feels like a decade.

I don’t want to see FSD and human drivers share a road. I want all cars to be meshed and communicating their intents with vehicles around them to avoid collisions. We will never see that in our lifetime

Judging by how often people press the emergency stop button on the escalators where I live, I fear that relying on the sincerity of strangers (and their cars) is maybe not a viable solution.

Allocating dedicated FSD roads is a terrible future. It will basically kill cities. I find myself agreeing with most of the arguments here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

We already have dedicated FSD roads, and they work quite well; we just usually call them "subways" or "light rail".

I don't see much point in building additional FSD roads for the inefficient, non-platooned, low-capacity, rubber-wheeled trolleycars Tesla makes, though.

I wish people would just write down their arguments instead of making a 53 minute video of it. I don't have time to watch all that :(

It's terrible that cell phone distraction is not prosecuted as harshly as DUI. Consequently, it's totally normalized. Get drunk and plow your car into a bunch of people, killing them? Many states treat this as a serious felony, up to and including charges like "DUI Murder." Plow into the same bunch of people while scrolling Instagram? It's "Oopsie-doopsie! Accidents happen!" The worst you'll get is something like "negligent vehicular manslaughter" which is less than a year in jail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com