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Every time a Google / Tesla / Ford / GM / Toyota self-driving car passes down a road in normal conditions, it will be mapping the surroundings in fairly intrica
by mikeyouse 11y ago
Every time a Google / Tesla / Ford / GM / Toyota self-driving car passes down a road in normal conditions, it will be mapping the surroundings in fairly intricate detail.
Based on GPS + Lidar + other sensors, the roadway and surroundings will be mapped to within centimeters -- which should make navigating during inclement conditions fairly straight-forward.
These systems might fail on snowy roads that have never been traversed previously, but what percentage of driving is performed on roads with hundreds/thousands of cars passing every day? 99.9%? 99.99%?
- akerro 11y agoIn 5 years I never had an accident, crash or any semi-dangerous or dangerous situtation during hard rains, snows, snowstorms. I'm not ok with 99.99%
- maxerickson 11y agoThe comparison to make is not with yourself, it's with the worst drivers that are already legally allowed to drive. Getting them replaced with a superior autonomous system makes you safer regardless of how your skill level compares to the system. (The only crash I've been in involved someone else losing control of their vehicle and crossing the center line on a major highway, which probably informs this perspective a little bit)
- serge2k 11y agoExcept the system will also replace safe drivers. So overall the safety level may be decreased.
- maxerickson 11y agoI think you are right about that being a possibility, but my personal judgment is that a lot of bad driving is rooted in poor decision making and concentrated, so I don't think an overall decrease in safety is a likely outcome.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago5 years is < 2000 days. 99.99 is one accident in 10,000 days. Post again in 20 years, and if still no accidents then that makes sense.
- ghaff 11y ago% isn't really a meaningful way to express an accident rate. You probably want to use some measure like accident rate per vehicle mile. I don't know the accident rate but the fatality rate in the US is about 1 death per 100 million miles.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoOn a similar note: We have our highway fatality posted every day on those over-the-freeway signs that I read each morning. It averages almost exactly one per day, statewide. But this year, here we are non day 11 and only 3 fatalities so far! I'm hopeful we can keep this rate through the spring.
- seanp2k2 11y agoUntil that number is 100, a car without controls will fail catastrophically at some point and can't be fully autonomous, or will need some huge disclaimers. It's an extreme long-tail problem.
- csours 11y agoI agree there will be a lot of failures in self driving cars, especially in the short term - but these should be in the nature of graceful degradation. In the long term, 4 or 5 nines will probably better than most drivers.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoFail catastrophically? The standard response to missing map data would be to safely pull over and stop.
- serge2k 11y agoWhich is safe, but still a massive failure.
- csours 11y agoI think he is referring to incorrect map data, which would be much more dangerous than missing map data. Leaving aside malicious map data for now, high-speed roadways would tend to be well mapped, and low speed roadways should be discoverable in real time. What could be very dangerous is bad map data in addition to a construction zone or road washout. I do think that places like construction zones will be the first to have V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) installed - to be extra sure that vehicles are aware of unusual conditions.
- shkkmo 11y agoI'm not sure why this is a problem. If a self-driving car encounters any combination of conditions / poorly-mapped roads where it cannot drive safely, it can: 1) Pull over / turn around 2) Pass full control to one of the passengers 3) Find a longer/slower route with sufficiently good conditions/mapping