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Comment by dan00 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's easy for technology-minded folks to overestimate the impact of the weaknesses, and underestimate the deep complexity of the strengths.

I'm also really astounded when I'm reading the answers about self driving cars here on HN.

If you have ever worked on algorithms that are mostly based on heuristics, then you know all of these ugly edge cases, and this uncertain feeling, that you most likely don't have covered all edge cases.

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I think the risk here is that you're aiming the bar for 100% perfection (very high) when the accurate bar to compare it against is human drivers (far from 100%) So self driving cars just need to be better than your average human driver. That's a much lower bar from the parking lot fender bender to the prevalence of speed in fatalities etc.

EDIT: Changed to "100% perfection" from 0% to remove any confusion.

How much higher than 0% though? Human still have a high number of accidents, but that's because we drive a lot. The 0% error for human driving is very, very, very, very low.

Logically, it makes sense that self-driving cars just need to be safer than humans, but the political and consumer decisions that shape the self-driving car industry will not be based on logic. Realistically, self-driving cars will need to be damn near perfect before regulations and consumers get behind them.

I know what you're saying. I think Tesla is a great example. When they had car fires it was front page news. And the first deaths that happen in self driving cars will also be front page news. But just like those fires had no impact on Tesla sales or interest in electric vehicles the same thing will happen here is my guess.

Why do you think that human drivers are "far from 100%"?

Anecdotally, I can only recall a handful of car crashes involving myself or any friends or family. I can't recall any injuries or deaths due to car crashes among any friends or family. Is it a regular occurence in your circles?

U.S. government data I could find quickly reported that the death rate per 100 million vehicle miles travelled in 2010 was 1, which is a per-mile success rate of 99.999999%. The injury rate was 75, which drops the success rate to 99.999925%.

edit: speling

A person will be in a crash every 15 years or so. At 10,000 miles per year, that's about 150,000 miles per crash.

Six months ago Google said they've logged 700,000 miles, with 0 accidents.

The failure mode for the self-driving car isn't that you crash into a tree. It's that there are newspapers blowing across the road and it says "nope, not going anywhere" and you sit and wait.

The linked article details several failures that would be real accidents on an actual street.

Google's cars are just one, very carefully controlled, experiment in self-driving cars.

They don't even need to be better than "the average" human. They need to be better than some subset of humans we let drive. Replace those humans with computers, and iterate up from there.

I could see within not too long people with DUIs being restricted from self-driving. The elderly are another demographic, but there are social forces working both ways there. (AARP will reject any calls to restrict driving rights of seniors, but self-driving cars will be awesome for some seniors who just can't cut it.)

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