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You are mixing things. Measuring safety of a human driven car with a human driven car with additional safety feature is not the same as measuring safety of auto

You are mixing things. Measuring safety of a human driven car with a human driven car with additional safety feature is not the same as measuring safety of autonomous vehicle. Contrary to its name, autopilot is not autonomous driving feature. It is a "smarter" cruise control. And if the drivers remain attentive it can improve safety as seen in the statistics you cite. If the drivers are not attentive (and treat it like "autonomous" feature) they end up like Joshua Brown. And BTW, I'm not saying I'm measuring what is available on the market. I simply point out, that there is no evidence yet that _fully_ autonomous vehicles had exceeded human safety level by any stretch of imagination.

deleted 9y ago
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Retric 9y ago
"Fully" autonomous cars (by your definition) have zero fatalities to date. Considering miles driven that is significant better than human drivers even paid human drivers if you look at trucking death statistics. Now, driving a semi may be more dangerous than a car, but it's hard to argue it's vastly more dangerous. Further, people are not uniformly good drivers, a self driving car is vastly better than someone that so drunk they have trouble standing.
- felippee 9y ago
  I'm sorry to disappoint you, but again the data does not support your claim. The cumulative number of miles driven by autonomous test fleet to date is nowhere near 100 million miles, which is where one should expect the first fatality from an average human. So no, your claim is empty.
  - Retric 9y ago
    First US numbers are greater than 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles. Self driving cars are well over 10 million miles but not 80 million. Even then 0 < 0.1 even if it's not great evidence it is still evidence. However US is not the only country, they have easily passed the accident rate in Brazil.
    - felippee 9y ago
      It is 0.99 deaths/100 mil in California, but fair enough. I'm not sure where you got your "well over 10mil miles" data. Last time I checked, Waymo clocked 3mil, Uber 2mil, Cruise <0.5mil, and the rest are small potatoes, so it looks more like maybe 6-7 million miles to date at best (though if you can provide a reference that would be great). But that aside, you are missing one more important point: Current autonomous cars still have a backup driver. So what we are measuring here is a compound safety level of autonomous tech + attentive, professional, sober human. The real data of interest is the safety level of autonomous vehicle alone. We don't have that data. We can proxy it, by looking at the numbers of disengagements and their severity, and that data currently does not look particularly good. But nonetheless it is just proxy data. Once a larger scale tests without backup drivers are concluded, we will get a better picture. Until then, I advise to withhold from any statements such as "autonomous vehicles are much safer than humans", because they are simply not supported by any data. As for you final statement, I bet there are many undeveloped countries or particular cities with huge number of deaths per mile. But exceeding their death rate on US roads is not anything to be celebrated.
      - Retric 9y ago
        https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self-driven-miles-b28f32de495a https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self... 4 million in early November 2017 with 1 million miles taking 6 months. https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/27/waymo-autonomous-cars-drove-4-million-miles/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/27/waymo-autonomous-cars-dr... While it took the company 18 months to reach one million, then 14 to reach two, then 8 months to reach three and finally six months to reach the four million mile marker. Call it 4.7 to 4.9 million miles today. Uber went from 1 to 2 million miles in 100 days and where over 2 million in December. So they are likely around 2.5 million today unless they slowed down significantly. However, their are actually a surprisingly large number of self driving car initiatives world wide. Though apparently EasyMile which sells slow level 4 automation busses to 20 countries is only at ~100,000 miles which surprised me. Sill there are several competitors in that space.
    - deleted 9y ago
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Retric 9y ago

"Fully" autonomous cars (by your definition) have zero fatalities to date. Considering miles driven that is significant better than human drivers even paid human drivers if you look at trucking death statistics. Now, driving a semi may be more dangerous than a car, but it's hard to argue it's vastly more dangerous. Further, people are not uniformly good drivers, a self driving car is vastly better than someone that so drunk they have trouble standing.

felippee 9y ago
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but again the data does not support your claim. The cumulative number of miles driven by autonomous test fleet to date is nowhere near 100 million miles, which is where one should expect the first fatality from an average human. So no, your claim is empty.
- Retric 9y ago
  First US numbers are greater than 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles. Self driving cars are well over 10 million miles but not 80 million. Even then 0 < 0.1 even if it's not great evidence it is still evidence. However US is not the only country, they have easily passed the accident rate in Brazil.
  - felippee 9y ago
    It is 0.99 deaths/100 mil in California, but fair enough. I'm not sure where you got your "well over 10mil miles" data. Last time I checked, Waymo clocked 3mil, Uber 2mil, Cruise <0.5mil, and the rest are small potatoes, so it looks more like maybe 6-7 million miles to date at best (though if you can provide a reference that would be great). But that aside, you are missing one more important point: Current autonomous cars still have a backup driver. So what we are measuring here is a compound safety level of autonomous tech + attentive, professional, sober human. The real data of interest is the safety level of autonomous vehicle alone. We don't have that data. We can proxy it, by looking at the numbers of disengagements and their severity, and that data currently does not look particularly good. But nonetheless it is just proxy data. Once a larger scale tests without backup drivers are concluded, we will get a better picture. Until then, I advise to withhold from any statements such as "autonomous vehicles are much safer than humans", because they are simply not supported by any data. As for you final statement, I bet there are many undeveloped countries or particular cities with huge number of deaths per mile. But exceeding their death rate on US roads is not anything to be celebrated.
    - Retric 9y ago
      https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self-driven-miles-b28f32de495a https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self... 4 million in early November 2017 with 1 million miles taking 6 months. https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/27/waymo-autonomous-cars-drove-4-million-miles/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/27/waymo-autonomous-cars-dr... While it took the company 18 months to reach one million, then 14 to reach two, then 8 months to reach three and finally six months to reach the four million mile marker. Call it 4.7 to 4.9 million miles today. Uber went from 1 to 2 million miles in 100 days and where over 2 million in December. So they are likely around 2.5 million today unless they slowed down significantly. However, their are actually a surprisingly large number of self driving car initiatives world wide. Though apparently EasyMile which sells slow level 4 automation busses to 20 countries is only at ~100,000 miles which surprised me. Sill there are several competitors in that space.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]