Elon Musk: human drivers are 'too dangerous' | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk: human drivers are 'too dangerous'

wired.co.uk

45 pointsriaface78 comments

I'm a little bit confused about why there's such a negative reaction to this on HN - it seems like a pretty reasonable statement to make, no? Sure, I don't think there's any firm idea of when 'robotic' drivers will overtake humans in terms of safety. But it does seem pretty clear that it will eventually happen.

Self-driving cars have a few massive potential advantages relative to humans, such as faster reaction times, no distractions, the ability to directly communicate car-to-car, and so on. It certainly seems likely that those advantages will far outweigh the adaptability of humans – after all, aren't most accidents caused by distraction, driving too fast for the conditions and the like?

Because HN'ers are results based people in general and the results on autonomous cars are currently terrible. Still no solution to driving in the snow, heavy rain, and other poor visibility conditions. Still no solution to weirdo edge cases like a madman running up to your car with a bat (I used to live in a poor neighborood and had this happen once and accelerated away. My dumb smartcar would have stopped to avoid hitting him and let me be victimized).

Personally, I'd rather take my chances with the occasional drunk than worry about Google's bugs killing me because some H1B engineer with 4 hours of sleep was forced to write some really junky code that didn't understand some edge case. I look at what Google is able to do practically like Android and am not impressed. Even the best code quality for automation, for example NASA's work on rovers, is wrong occasionally and those things move at a snail's pace with almost nothing around them! The state of AI itself is in shambles. Its healthy to be skeptical of extraordinary claims like Musk's. We just aren't there yet and may never get there considering the fuzzy logic that driving requires.

Not to mention the anti-progressive thinking that better cars are the solution to our transportation woes and refusing to accept that we will reach a post-car age in urban centers sooner than later. This is like building a better horse drawn carriage. Sure its technically impressive, but its just not the real solution here.

the results on autonomous cars are currently terrible

Sure, they're not there yet. But in 20 years they'll probably be much better. Might not happen, but it does seem pretty likely that technology will continue improving.

Still no solution to weirdo edge cases

So that might be one of things that are traded off against the benefits. How often does a car get attacked by a baseball-bat-weilding maniac? Is that risk worth ignoring the improvement in safety? Are there other solutions to the problem?

Not to mention the anti-progressive thinking

I can't agree with this. It's something common to hear from green-leaning movements around the world – that the car should be retired altogether in favour of public transport.

That's true to some extent, but public transport (and it's excellent in many cities around the world) can't completely replace individual vehicles. Regardless of how much it improves, it does not offer point-to-point connections, or the ability to transport goods, for example.

In any case, what would be the difference between a city centre populated by electric vehicles (let's say owned by Uber or Tesla or some other company) and one populated by public transport - simply the efficiency? It might be better to think of a city full of electronic cars as being the first implementation of something like personal rapid transport.

> But in 20 years they'll probably be much better.

Historically when people play the "wait, in 20 years it'll be here" they're universally wrong. According to futurists from the 1990s we'd have the immortality pill, jet packs, Mars colonies, cancer cure, diabetes cure, extinct animal revival, etc by now.

In 2035 Musk will be at retirement age, so why is he selling us on this concept now? Obviously, these guys want to push a product out soon and that product is flawed and not remotely ready for, say, Chicago traffic. I'm sure its wonderful on the Google campus, but that's not my world.

I think Musk, being a business man, has an agenda here. Its to keep Tesla's largely failed experiment in electric cars going via hype and promises. Everything he says exists to raise the value of his company. The same way he ironically badmouthed "strong" AI recently to discredit robotic space mission funding that would challenge the manned launches SpaceX plans to profit from.

I think its funny that Musk flip-flops on AI so easily. Good in cars, bad in space, when in reality the opposite is true. I think the more extremist Musk gets in the pressm the more we're seeing problems at Tesla and his other companies. Take at look a TSLA stock from a 1 year perspective, not to mention their $108m losses this past quarter and $300m loss in the past year. Things have been very bad there. Musk is just trying to keep it alive via hype and showmanship.

Tesla is really starting to feel like Segway. Musk, for all his merits, is probably best as a space guy and should stick to that. Space needs big thinkers and big disruptors. This is a field where we need good AI and a cost cutting approach, not cars. Focusing on making the best car, in this day and age, is like focusing on making the best horse and buggy 100 years ago. Shame he is wasting so much talent and capital on this quixotic endeavor, especially considering Detroit and Tokyo have their own affordable electrics, if anyone is interested in buying them in the age of the BRICS nations demanding less oil and the price of oil falling to historic lows.

I'm a little bit confused about why there's such a negative reaction to this on HN - it seems like a pretty reasonable statement to make, no?

"Too dangerous" is sophistry that is rightly derided when used for unquantified fear-mongering elsewhere and this is barely different.

I can't wait for the future where I don't have to drive, and safer is an attractive selling point too. But there is a level of risk associated with road travel, a level society has largely deemed acceptable (otherwise speed limits would be lower). Musk putting this in his cross-hairs is a disappointing choice of sales tactic.

I don't think I agree with this.

Road traffic accidents are something like the 10th most common cause of death worldwide. It's clearly a rather dangerous activity.

The idea that we have 'deemed acceptable' the risk involved is only the case where the risk cannot be lowered without compromising other goals (e.g. fast travel).

In a hypothetical future where autonomous cars are widespread and much safer, the tradeoff changes – it suddenly becomes possible to have both fast and safe travel, with the proviso that humans can't be in change cars.

I'm not going to argue that this is a good thing, because I don't know. But it's not fair to say that it's fear-mongering – it's objectively true that cars kill loads of people, and quite possible that non-autonomous vehicles will be banned or at least heavily regulated in the future.

> Road traffic accidents are something like the 10th most common cause of death worldwide. It's clearly a rather dangerous activity.

I just want to note here that if you look at the same statistics in countries that have implemented better driver training programs, its clear that there is still leaps and bounds of efforts we can take to address the concerns of safety without outlawing the practice completely.

Lower speed limits will not reduce the number of deaths, unless all traffic is reduced to 40km/h or less.

Inattentive drivers, confusing road signage, insufficient separation of pedestrians and cars, drivers not following established rules and guidelines: these are the contributing factors which can be addressed to reduce road fatalities with greater reduction of fatalities than simply reducing speed limits.

Autonomous cars won't speed for thrills, they won't cut lanes or run red lights. They will be far safer, if more annoying, than most drivers: just like the more conservative human drivers we already have.

The only thing I am concerned with is how secure / exploitable they are from a computer security perspective. I assume there will be some kind of link between the vehicular peripherals to vehicle control and configuration. Then I worry about who is actually controlling the car. I'm open to AI driven cars with redundant intelligent networks, but people are smart too, and some people are not nice people. How do you know that the entire system is functioning as expected? I'm pretty sure that's NP hard.

> people are smart too, and some people are not nice people.

What did you do to these people? Because there are two reasons these people aren't going to be nice to you: you offended them, or you're a random target of violence that we already experience, but now it takes the form of a homicidal self driving car instead of a boy in a movie theater with automatic weapons.

Are you advocating we stop pursuing self driving cars just because security is an open ended problem?

I expressed my own personal concern.

This conversation will not be about equivocating one tragedy to another. That is a red herring.

Definitely a concern, but I'm not sure what can be done about that – except for "let's develop the technology so that can't happen", even though that seems unlikely.

I think the reason you're confused is because you're under the impression that people are arguing against the very obvious practical benefits of having only self driving cars: congestion, safety, etc. This is obvious to everyone.

However, there are other human concerns. I personally enjoy driving. I often go on drives where I'm simply exploring, not knowing which turn I might take next. It's my personal belief that driving is not just my privilege, but my right. If you want a self driving car, you're well within your rights to do as I am to drive my self.

Moreover, there's a huge scope of privacy issues and increased amount of control being put in the government. I am one of those individuals who is inherently distrusting of government policies that can restrict us under the guise of safety, etc.

That's an interesting concern – I suppose we end up, like with most issues of public policy, trying to draw a balance. I imagine it's much like gun control: while most gun owners are going to be responsible, that damage that can be caused by those who aren't means that many jurisdictions prefer to restrict firearm ownership.

Sure, and there's good reason for that. The privacy issue is orthogonal and must be set to one side (though it's legitimate).

How would you feel about a move to regulate non-autonomous vehicle ownership more closely? Driver licensing could become much more rigorous, for example. Combined with the essential outlawing of non-autonomous vehicles in urban centres (almost inevitable in the long run), that would ideally assuage most safety concerns while still allowing people the freedom to drive.

> How would you feel about a move to regulate non-autonomous vehicle ownership more closely? Driver licensing could become much more rigorous, for example.

I'm very much in favor of a far more thorough practical driver training programs before being licensed. The issue is less with people not knowing their theory as apposed to not being capable drivers. I think we should model our own driving training programs closer to Finland's for example.

In California, at least, the training, the theory, the test itself is a complete joke. It's the definitive example of bureaucratic incompetence.

However, I'm not in favor of a rigorous licensing program which simply aims to dissuade one from obtaining a license because of various background checks, fingerprinting, paper work, and encyclopedic knowledge of vague and obscure laws.

> Combined with the essential outlawing of non-autonomous vehicles in urban centres (almost inevitable in the long run), that would ideally assuage most safety concerns while still allowing people the freedom to drive.

I'm extremely skeptical and, on the whole, against this. This is exactly where lawmakers would find gray enough lines to outlaw humans drivers from the majority of road networks from laws that give the impression that only a handful of metropolitan cities would initially be effected.

The right to travel is a very ancient right, from a time when people only walked, rode horses, or used draft animals to travel. The introduction of mechanical vehicles in the late 19th century changed things.

Especially, motor vehicles are so uniquely hazardous to their operators, passengers, and bystanders than operating them quickly became a privilege, not a right. http://www.bicyclelaw.com/road-rights/a.cfm/road-rights-cycl...

I did say that "my personal belief" is that it is my right?

Not sure what your point is since I'm not going to disagree that from the perspective of the law it is not my right.

Mobility should be a right, driving shouldn't be a right. If someone is too old, too young, too poor, disabled, or otherwise unable to drive, and unfortunate enough to live in a car dependent area (as most inhabited areas are) then their rights are being infringed upon by your driving and others. For most of those who are victims of vehicle accidents- which number in the millions annually- what about their rights? Most of them did not cause the accident- they were passengers, other drivers, cyclists, pedestrians etc.

I can't see a ban coming anytime soon, but I can see self-driving cars only roads. If you really want to/have to drive yourself feel free to take the 40-50 mph speed limit side roads. Or you can take engage the auto-drive and hop onto the speed limit free express way.

The thing I keep emphasizing in this conversation is how terribly good human drivers are, on average. In the US, there are three fatalities for every 10 billion passenger miles traveled. That's tremendous. A machine that is currently incapable of driving in rain and unable to see a child in the street has a long way to go to hit this mark.

Musk is here to sell his car. He'll say all sorts of bullshit to make it look sexier.

What could be tremendous about that statistic? It seems like you are trying to contrast a small number with a big number to give a sense of some false magnitude. I could say people only murder other people once in every 100 billion seconds - thats tremendous!!

That's a load of FUD.

Modern Self driving cars track people on sidewalks not just the street. As to driving in the rain, they can do it, but like poeple there less safe at highway speeds in the rain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk (6:45, 9:00) Also, 3:52 demos stopping for someone in the road.

They even read stop lights (8:00).

PS: If you actually look at that left turn on @9:00 the car has a much better idea what's around it than people do.

Miles per passenger depend on too many factors. I'd stick with 1 death per 6,200 driver's licenses (US, 2009)

Deaths per mile is more useful because it compares the cost (deaths) with the benefit (miles traveled per passenger). Additionally, we can compare directly against alternatives, such as buses, air travel, and self-driving cars.

Deaths per driver's license doesn't tell us the benefit we are getting, and doesn't give us a way to make comparisons with alternatives.

I'd argue that deaths per mile is also misleading, however, as it misstates the actual benefit; people don't directly benefit from a particular number of miles, but rather from a particular set of trips, whose length will tend to vary by mode. People who choose a car-oriented lifestyle will tend, on average, to make longer trips than those who choose lifestyles built around transportation by walking, biking, or using transit, but I would argue that the urban cyclist biking two miles to work derives the same benefit (getting from home to work) as the suburban car commuter driving twenty miles. For comparing cars to bikes, in particular, the relative safety depends on whether you go with a per-mile or per-trip metric, with the winners being car and bike, respectively.

I mostly agree, but that's true any time you wrap a complex problem up into a single number. I am merely arguing that, if we pick a single number, deaths-per-passenger-mile is much better than deaths-per-licensed-driver.

I guess you are saying that deaths-per-trip is an even better number. That would be interesting to see, I agree, but as an additional number, not a replacement.

I haven't looked to see where they got it, but Wikipedia gives a figure of 7.6 deaths / billion km, in terms of vehicle miles, not passenger miles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

That's ~ 12 deaths / billion miles. So there is a big discrepancy with the figure stated by astazangasta. Passenger vs vehicle will make up for some if it, but even an assumption like 4 people per vehicle mile still puts it at 3 vs 30.

(this isn't really a response to your comment, but it seems like a good place in the thread to put it)

Self-driving cars seem to be ~1:1 with driver licenses. A licenced driver drives at most one car at a time.

There's obviously a connection between driver's licenses and miles traveled, but if you have the latter number, why use the former? It makes the benefit more obscure and reduces the accuracy (for instance, if passengers of self-driving cars drive more or less than passengers of human-driven cars).

Also, it doesn't offer a good way to compare against things like air travel.

There is a sense in which the part of a self-driving car that is licensed will be driving many cars at once.

(There will of course be something like 1 instance of it per vehicle, I'm commenting on the semantic awkwardness, not trying to be pedantic)

A better measure would be deaths per driver decision, if you could estimate such a thing.

That may measure the average driving ability; but it doesn't give you any hint as to the benefits (more driver decisions don't seem like a benefit to me), and it also doesn't give a good way to compare with alternatives.

That statistic is orders of magnitude off. There are 30,000 driving fatalities per year. At the ratio you stated the number of miles driven per person per year would be absurd.

FWIW, Elon Musk did say the following on Twitter:

> To be clear, Tesla is strongly in favor of people being allowed to drive their cars and always will be. Hopefully, that is obvious.

> However, when self-driving cars become safer than human-driven cars, the public may outlaw the latter. Hopefully not.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/577946893646364673

So his goal isn't to shore up support for legislation against non-autonomous cars anytime soon.

He made that clarification because he was met with unexpectedly large audience which was critical of his statements.

He was quite obviously supporting future legislation against humans driving cars:

> In fact, in the distant future, I think it's probably going to be... people may outlaw driving cars, because it's too dangerous.

> You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine.

Heh, I have a friend who is all rah-rah for self-driving cars. He also likes to go camping. So I asked him, when you show up at the site and the farmer says, top field, past the sheep, turn left at the tractor, what's your self-driving car going to do? Hmm, he said, well it would need some sort of touch screen interface for that. Or I said, some sort of "steering wheel"...

I don't think "self-driving car" and "driveable car" are mutually exclusive. Self-driving mode for roads, highways, parking, commuting... manual override for the countryside.

> Heh, I have a friend who is all rah-rah for self-driving cars. He also likes to go camping. So I asked him, when you show up at the site and the farmer says, top field, past the sheep, turn left at the tractor, what's your self-driving car going to do?

I don't see any problem with that, even with no direct controls. That's probably a situation that requires more detailed navigational input from a driver than providing a destination for road driving and letting the system handle the routing, but doesn't necessarily require actually manual driving. And, even if it did, even fully automated cars that are designed for personal ownership and (especially) for off-road use are likely to have full-control overrides available for some time.

Of course, camp sites and other destinations that people are expected to drive to will probably also have navigation information or guides available that self-driving cars can follow when self-driving cars are common, rendering the whole hypothetical largely moot.

I can imagine the look on the average farmer's face when some city folk in their self driving car ask him to lead them up to the field himself. He'd probably just leave them there and drive off in his tractor, chuckling to himself.

> I can imagine the look on the average farmer's face when some city folk in their self driving car ask him to lead them up to the field himself.

I think you've badly misunderstood what "nagivational information or guides" means.

And I think you've badly misunderstood what driving in the British countryside means :-p

And I think you've badly misunderstood what "when self-driving cars are common" means.

Its not a change that leaves the rest of the world the same as it is today.

Humans are not going to stop needing sleep, get distracted, or react slowly. All we can really do (and have done) is mitigate. Seat belts, driver training, etc.

Whatever problems a machine has, we can improve on them gradually. We can spend loads of time looking at test cases, and improvements are ratcheting.

I can't wait for self-driving cars. It will be a massive change to be able to go to sleep in your own comfy bed and wake up in time for a meeting in another town.

I also imagine traffic will be smoother, as tolerances don't have to be so wide.

Sensationalist bs. It'd take some pretty impressive programming to deal with issues like road construction, missing or faded road markings, unmarked dirt roads, and potentially outdated or incorrect maps.

I don't think we'll go straight from total human control to total automation directly. I imagine that the first versions of automated cars will require some supervision and only work in certain conditions. This will likely require some sort of system to detect the driver is paying attention, like steering wheel sensors, to prevent people from just going to sleep.

The first versions of automated cars already exist. Mercedes, BMW, and Audi have versions of their cars that maintain a safe distance from the cars in front of you. Mercedes also has a system which will automatically steer the car to keep it in a lane for you. Prius and Lexus have cars that'll automatically parallel park themselves.

I don't think those are programmed into the driving software as much as it has learned them through machine learning. Most of these systems have gone through the equivalent of millions of years of humans driving so I'd trust it over a human driver any day.

Well these systems weren't ever human, so I'm not sure a million human years would help them as much as you hope.

I don't think any of the systems really use machine learning. It's more classical stats and control theory.

Maybe the object recognition stuff uses some trained classifiers, but the higher level systems doing the driving to my knowledge do not.

They're gonna cover 98% of cases. The rest can be picked up be remote operators.

Remote operators work for flying drones, since those don't have to evade children running onto the road with sub-second reaction times.

For cars there is no way electron-based signal transmission technology can control them with an even marginally acceptable latency.

What do you mean by electron-based signal transmission technology? If you're talking remote control, those signals will be photon based. If you're talking internal control, electrons on wires move pretty fast and many cars already utilize them. Is there much latency difference between mechanically closing the throttle with your foot and signaling a servo to close the throttle? Presumably some situations can be analyzed by a processor and trigger the servo before the human controller has even been able to consciously perceive a scene.

One question:

How do you plan to remote control a moving car with photons?

Edit: Huh, ok. I didn't know radio signals are also photons. Still, the speed of light is significant with sub-second decisions. So even for photon transmission remote control of a moving car in live traffic is not feasible.

Latency doesn't matter. What matter is the final outcome. Better skill, software, data etc can compensate that.

Drone pilots can have several seconds of latency. This means remote operators are useless as a backup to the machine if a split second reaction is required.

So a remote operator is going to be given command of a vehicle which has encountered an unusual situation that the automatics have bailed out of?

Ask the pilots of Air France 447 how well that works out (and they weren't even remote). Oh you can't... they're dead.

You still need an algorithm to decide when it's time to handle control to a remote driver. Who's going to handle the edge cases of that algorithm?

I remain extremely skeptical that 95 % will be good enough and its the edge cases that really matter. It doesn't matter that they're better most of the time because the failure modes are different.

However since Elon is a really smart guy who has mastered multiple disciplines , I'll take his word. I'm waiting for my self driving car.

The way I see it - it's hard to "transfer" all the learnings we get from our everyday driving experiences to other fellow drivers but a machine can do that. It's going to be a sum total of all of its learnings and its neighbours (all over the world). I like the idea of it.

He's right. Driving a car is something like 1000 times riskier than commercial aviation. We still have about 30,000 vehicle fatalities per year.

1000 times more risky as measure by what? People drive a car far more often than fly in a plane. I'm sure flying is still safer, but the comparison should take into account the differences.

The comparisons I've seen are usually on a person-mile basis. Commercial aviation can move more people a further distance with fewer fatalities.

Musk is pretty self-serving here. He writes about how advanced AI will "destroy humanity" to keep interest in manned space and to discredit robot and science missions. Now he's cheerleading automotive AI because Tesla wants to sell it.

I really am starting to see him as an empty suit. He just does PR for his companies' current projects. That's fine, but he's not a visionary. He's salesman. I can't wait for his celebrity to wind down. Its more than a bit over the top now. Tesla seems like a failure to launch an affordable electric or an electric with realistic range at a sane pricepoint. SpaceX is doing well, but LEO theatrics are boring considering the SLS is geared to take us way past that.

I wish he'd buy into causes that don't personally enrich him once in a while. I'd love to see someone of his caliber stump for a radio telescope on the far side of the moon or on replacing cars with more efficient tram systems powered by electric wires instead of the unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problem of batteries that can compete with the convienance of gasoline.

This just seems needlessly picky, and I can't help but feel that you're expecting a little much.

Of course Elon Musk is self-serving, in the sense that he's talking about and promoting the benefits of projects that he's working on.

They're more impressive than you seem to be implying; Tesla's approach to tackling the existing automotive industry and introducing affordable vehicles is a long-term project, and considering we're about 11 or 12 years in, they seem to be making good progress. It's not something that many other companies have had the vision and drive to execute.

Likewise with SpaceX. There's a long-term plan to colonise Mars – that does seem pretty visionary, no?

And in terms of other projects, look at something like Hyperloop. You seem to imply that "efficient tram systems powered by electric wires" (a technology used everywhere throughout the world) would be more 'visionary' or something? That seems like an odd claim to make.

People treat Musk like a bit of a celebrity because he talks unashamedly of large-scale, long-term visions for things he wants his projects to achieve. That's amazingly attractive in a world where there is so much focus on the short term, and what can't be achieved. I'm not sure why you react so badly to that.

The problem is that you're not a visionary if you're selling yesterdays solutions just sexed up a bit. An electric car is like selling a robotic horse. Urban areas need public trans solutions, not more cars.

SpaceX's offerings are underwhelming unless your goal is to stick to LEO forever.

The problem is, people just keep thinking of yesterdays problems (better cars, more LEO theatrics) and think better versions of that is "visionary." Its not. Its practically archaic. His flip-flopping on AI just cements his reputation as marketing entity who only exists to provide PR for his companies, some of which are just trying to solve yeterday's problems instead of todays.

I'll repeat - SpaceX literally has a goal of colonising Mars. The technology to get there requires small steps, and I have to think of that goal as pretty visionary.

You seem to be defining 'visionary' in a way I don't quite understand. What's 'visionary' about better public transport solutions? There are comprehensive public transport networks across the world, for example. We could definitely improve them, but it would hardly be visionary to do so.

>I'll repeat - SpaceX literally has a goal of colonising Mars.

This is like saying that Facebook's goal is to give the 3rd world free internet. Its lofty PR speak. SpaceX only exist as a COTS beneficiary from NASA welfare to build rockets to LEO. It is literally incapable of doing anything else as it doesnt have the customers (who is paying $200 billion for that on way ticket to Mars exactly)?

Again, this is the marketing sci-fi smokescream Musk is good at. He fanservices what manboys wants to hear and they delightfully repeat his marketing for him as he sells luxury electric cars with poor range to the 1% and does the occasional LEO lift.

Years from now there will be a lot research into Muskmania. Why people bought into such a self-promoter and how well marketing works, especially on people who think they're immune to it is going to spill a lot of ink. It won't matter, we'll just move onto the next guy who promises things we refuse to cast a critical eye towards.

You are really overstating the degree to which 'Muskmania' exists.

It's pretty much just that people are excited about someone who appears to be genuinely interested in putting his money into some long-term, pie-in-the-sky projects. In a rather short-term-focused world, that's a refreshing thing. It's totally understandable that people want to hear about that, and certainly it looks pretty encouraging to me (free nationwide network of car chargers? re-usable rockets? Hyperloop? All pretty cool. Maybe not the salvation of humanity, but a nice change.)

However, I can see you clearly have an intense dislike of Musk for some reason, and won't be convinced by that. Probably better to leave it at that.

Here are some facts and figures about driving versus flying for travel safety per passenger mile over a time period carefully measured by official statistics. "In absolute numbers, driving is more dangerous, with more than 5 million accidents compared to 20 accidents in flying. A more direct comparison per 100 million miles pits driving's 1.27 fatalities and 80 injuries against flying's lack of deaths and almost no injuries, which again shows air travel to be safer."[1] I thought everybody knew that airline travel is by far the safest form of travel.[2]

The basic issue about self-driving cars is that setting the standard of performance at "better than most human drivers most of the time" is a moderately low technical bar to clear, but would still result in a HUGE reduction of deaths, injuries, and damage to vehicles and roadside property. But I'm still not sure how soon self-driving cars will be good enough to drive on snowy roads (Google's self-driving cars have never been tested in snowy conditions, as of the last time I checked) or even in rain.[3] The story posted today is more nuanced than a story posted yesterday about Elon Musk's predictions, and reports, "He said he believed that we're still 20 years out from the roads being full of autonomous cars."

[1] http://traveltips.usatoday.com/air-travel-safer-car-travel-1...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/flying-is-still-the-safest-wa...

[3] http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/adva...

Regarding poor-weather performance, I'm assuming self-driving cars will outperform human drivers sooner than in good conditions, rather than later (as long as it is made a priority). The information a self-driving car can gather and process about wheel traction is far more detailed than can be gathered by human drivers.

We're largely talking about only the US market here -- in which only (and I say that word relatively) 32,000 people died in any sort of automobile related accident last year.

To put this in perspective, the common Flu (a totally vaccinatable, preventable, and treatable illness) killed more than 52,000 people in the US last year alone.

In reality, automobiles in the US are the safest they have ever been since 1949, and automobile related deaths have dropped more than 26% since 2005 alone. According to the CDC, automobile related deaths are not even in the top 10 leading causes of death in the US.

Last year, heart disease was responsible for 596,577 US deaths last year alone. Stroke claimed 128,932 US lives. Diabetes took 73,831 american lives. Suicide robbed 39,518 people their life last year -- in excess of 7,000 more than died by automobile related accidents.

In 2009, approximately a grand total of 2,436,652 died in the US of all causes (including natural causes). Of that number, automobile related deaths only accounts for 1%. Of the entire US population, we're talking about 0.0096%...

According to the CDC, in 2012, 10,322 people (or 31%) of all automobile related deaths were alcohol-related deaths. Another 18% of automobile related deaths are attributed to drugs other than alcohol in the same year. That accounts for just about 50% of all vehicle related deaths, leaving the true automobile related deaths due to accident at a shockingly low number (relatively) of about 15,000 people per year.

All of this is to say, relatively speaking, automobile related deaths are not a significant concern. It does not make sense to spend significant effort in this sector while ignoring or not increasing efforts in these other much more problematic areas.

Sources:

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/09/guns-tr...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/top-causes-of-death-united-st...

[5] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...

[6] http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impai...

Automobile-related deaths are the number one killer of healthy adults in the US, and the number one killer, period, of Americans between the ages of 5 and 34. (sources: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_the_walkable_city and http://www.cdc.gov/injury/overview/data.html respectively). They're not insignificant, especially when you look at their value in terms of dollars per life saved for prevention, or (even moreso) years of life lost per death, as automobile deaths disproportionately affect young people, as compared to, e.g., stroke.

Also, I have no idea why you exclude alcohol- and drug-related deaths from "true" automobile deaths. Humans are fallible. They get tired, get distracted, see poorly at night, misjudge speed, and make stupid decisions like texting while driving, and, yes, drinking and driving. Mitigating that fallibility is the entire value proposition of the self-driving car. Deaths due to drunk driving are absolutely among those that self-driving car advocates aim to prevent.

> Deaths due to drunk driving are absolutely among those that self-driving car advocates aim to prevent.

Instead of proposing legislation that everyone must own a self-driving vehicle (the path self-driving vehicle advocates seem to be heading towards), wouldn't a more reasonable, less expensive, and less obtrusive solution be to mandate breathalyzers in every vehicle? (I don't support this either, but it's less expensive and less of a burden).

Self-driving cars won't last as long due to the sheer amount of technology required to be in the vehicle. So instead of getting 5-20 years of out of your "dumb car" you'll get closer to 2-5 years before the electronics inside degrade to an unsafe state.

Can the electronics be upgraded/replaced when they become unsafe? Sure, but this is a significant cost burden on the consumer... The precision and reliability the electronics must provide has to be absolute. To achieve this level, they'll have to be better than military-grade sensors -- heck, military helicopters with some of the best sensors, ai, and electronics crash routinely... and they get regular maintenance before and after every flight. How long do we really expect the average consumer's self-driving vehicle to last when most drivers don't even change their oil once every year?

> Automobile-related deaths are the number one killer of healthy adults in the US, and the number one killer, period,

That's a disingenuous statement. People were healthy until they contracted the flu. They were healthy until they suffered a sudden heart attack. Those are the true leading killers of all Americans... healthy and not.

> Instead of proposing legislation that everyone must own a self-driving vehicle (the path self-driving vehicle advocates seem to be heading towards)

I think the path many advocates are headed towards is actually more radical: largely eliminating personal vehicle ownership entirely, with rides available as a service, Uber-like, as part of most people's multimodal transportation mix that might also include transit, more walking, etc. I don't expect either direction to occur via a mandate, though, but the economics of the more aggressive plan are interesting. Most cars sit unused for 22 hours a day, and there are enormous economies to be gained from improved utilization if cars are a shareable asset, especially with the labor taken out of the equation (as compared to current Uber), and I think the shift may well happen on its own, at least in part and in some places. And to be clear, it's not an all-or-nothing proposition; replacing some drivers still potentially improves everyone's safety.

As for the second bit: if you think my first stat is disingenuous, pay attention to my second, which you cut off halfway through. In that age bracket, automobiles are the top killer overall, including health-related causes. The flu disproportionately kills infants and the elderly (and for what it's worth, you vastly overstated the efficacy of the flu vaccine in your original post; it's totally worth getting, but still only decreased recipients' chances of contracting the flu by a bit more than half; "totally vaccinatable [and] preventable" it is not).

What about public transportation? We can make improvements to public transportation today.

Actually, human pilots are too dangerous as well. Analysis of airplane disasters consistently shows that human errors are responsible for majority of crashes.

I would feel much more comfortable flying in a completely automated airplane.

I'm glad they are working on this in general, however unfortunately the Model S is not able to slow or stop when encountering a car stopped in front of it.

I was quite disappointed when I found out they don't have this important technology, in a car packed to the hilt with it. http://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/collision-avoidance

No question, if robot cars will obey speed limits and not blow through red lights. The biggest safety improvements will come from convincing motorists/passengers that it's OK to travel just a bit slower.

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