Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

I politely disagree. Having driven next to self-driving cars for the past few years in the bay area, in my opinion they are far more competent than most drivers. They don't stop tracking the road to put on makeup or check their phone. They don't get distracted by the kids in the back seat. They have their sensors on the road constantly, and not just in front of them. They don't have blind spots.

Will bugs happen eventually? Yes, then they'll be patched. New bugs will be found, but every accident that happens will make the cars safer. Each error improves how safe they are, and since they're currently safer than humans based on accident statistics, I'm more than happy to see something that's already safer get even more safe over time.

View on HN

A problem I see is every car manufacturer building his own system, maybe with a standardized communication channel to speak to other cars but the control software in itself will be bound to a certain manufacturer. This means different bugs in each car, fixing a bug in one car doesnt mean the error doesnt exist in other cars and so on. New players entering the market are facing pretty much impossible hurdles to enter.

Some kind of Android for autonomous cars would be quite nice I guess.

Self driving cars sound like a slam dunk for the U.S. driving conditions (Bay Area, etc..). I'd buy one in a heartbeat there.

But what about Latin or Asian messes of countries? Say Rome, Buenos Aires, Lima, Hanoi or Bangkok? Lots of motorcycle and bycicle and human traffic (and in the case of my native Montevideo, horse-drawn carriages!).

Driving in some of those countries is more psychology and playing chicken than anything else (and yes, accident rates are apalling)

I don't think you read what I wrote.

I said people are terrible drivers. I think likely a fleet of all automated cars will be safer than a fleet of human drivers.

The problem comes in the interaction between automated drivers and human drivers. Among other things.

The thing is, you're trying to say that automated cars are a bad idea, but all the arguments you make actually militate for getting rid of the humans ASAP!

If you were going to pass a law against humans driving cars I'd be the first to vote for it.

But as long as humans are driving cars, solving the issue of having an automated car driving alongside them is a non-trivial task which people seem to be underestimating.

I still don't get it. Maybe a computer could react to an erratic human driver faster. But more importantly, it can react more consistently than a human driver who gets tired or distracted (or confused by other humans' behavior).

Edit: To put it another way, a computer that avoids common-case crash scenarios most of the time outweighs humans avoiding edge-case scenarios sometimes.

By watching faces or body language, human drivers can sometimes predict sudden moves before they happen. Example: children playing on the sidewalk and suddenly running into the road.

Still, I believe autonomous cars can be made better than human drivers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com