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if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, righ

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

ubernostrum 9y ago
The expectation is that a car that can "see" in a broader part of the spectrum than a human should have, y'know, detected a person in the street ahead, when there were no obstructions between the car and the person. There have been cars on the market for years now that can detect a dangerous situation ahead, even in the dark, and auto-brake. If they haven't caught up to several-years-ago's consumer model of car, then what on earth are they doing putting these things on public roads?
notahacker 9y ago
I think it's fair to set the minimum expectation of not being much, much worse in a situation where decision making is utterly straightforward and where sensors ought to give it a significant advantage over humans. It also would appear that the vehicle fell well short of that minimum standard on this occasion.
simion314 9y ago
There are only 16 cars (or something like that) + safety drivers in the car, so 16 cars we have 1 death, normalize this to the number of human driven cars and you will get a lot of deaths, I do not have the numbers but 1 in 16 cars killing a person is a large number, now remove the safety driver and you get even more deaths. The point is that it is to early to test this cars on public roads. The fact that self driven cars will kill less is just a hope, we may never achieve that(there is no proof we can do it with current tech) or it will take more time, and we need some actual numbers that are not tampered with before letting this self driven cars on the road, the security drivers seem to not pay attention so this car testing are a risk.
bobthepanda 9y ago
From the article: > But zooming out from the specifics of Herzberg's crash, the more fundamental point is this: conventional car crashes killed 37,461 in the United States in 2016, which works out to 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States. We have a sample size of 1, granted, but it's not looking very good. At the very least they were expected not to be less safe than humans.
- roenxi 9y ago
  You have a sample size of 1. Acknowledging that doesn't suddenly make the sample evidence of anything, good or bad :P. Almost all the miles driven are going to be in near-ideal circumstances (daylight, no rain, good road surface, driver familiar with normal road traffic conditions and drives the route regularly). I have nearly no insight into the uber death, but I gather it happened at night. It could easily be that humans are also an order of magnitude more dangerous at night.
  - simion314 9y ago
    I am not the OP, but this numbers are not confirming the optimistic view that self driving cars are better, so if we do not have numbers that show that are better and even with a human driver inside we had a few incidents then the number without human driver inside would have been larger, so how should we determine that the self driving car X is ready to be released on public roads for testing? At least we should have some basic tests done by an impartial authority.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    I'm not sure that's the point you want to make, an order of magnitude making Uber 2.5x more dangerous still.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9y ago
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Driverless car programs should really not be having more than 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Uber is currently at 1 per 3 million miles.
- mr_toad 9y ago
  A sample size of 1 is completely meaningless.
  - TillE 9y ago
    It's not, because we have considerable detail about that one sample. This wasn't simple bad luck, it was performance on par with a completely distracted driver.
  - XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
    Why do you say it's a sample size of 1? They've been driving AVs for a while.
PinguTS 9y ago
Almost all current assitance systems in luxury cars, which are not design for automated driving, could have avoided this situation with activation of the emergency brake. But this car didn't even brake at all? It will be interesting when Volvo pulls back from that relationship, because even the uptodate emergency brake assistent should have catched up. Except Uber as deactivated those in favor for their own technology (because it is superior). EDIT: German Automotive Club did tested full sized cars in 2016, which means decaded old technology in IT. The results where that the Subaru Outback was the only one detecting persons in the dark. But was very poor with biclysts. https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/tests/assistenzsysteme/fussgaengererkennung_2016/default.aspx?ComponentId=270750&SourcePageId=31956 https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/tests/assistenzsysteme/fussg...
- neffy 9y ago
  I think a lot of us are of the opinion that it wasn´t as dark as the camera makes it look. But let´s say it was... a human driver under those conditions would have full beam headlights on, and I´ve never personally experienced any issues spotting cyclists and dark clad pedestrians with those on.
mannykannot 9y ago
That general statement does not give Uber a pass on this particular incident, any more than this particular incident casts aspersions on the autonomous vehicle industry as a whole.

ubernostrum 9y ago

The expectation is that a car that can "see" in a broader part of the spectrum than a human should have, y'know, detected a person in the street ahead, when there were no obstructions between the car and the person. There have been cars on the market for years now that can detect a dangerous situation ahead, even in the dark, and auto-brake. If they haven't caught up to several-years-ago's consumer model of car, then what on earth are they doing putting these things on public roads?

notahacker 9y ago

I think it's fair to set the minimum expectation of not being much, much worse in a situation where decision making is utterly straightforward and where sensors ought to give it a significant advantage over humans. It also would appear that the vehicle fell well short of that minimum standard on this occasion.

simion314 9y ago

There are only 16 cars (or something like that) + safety drivers in the car, so 16 cars we have 1 death, normalize this to the number of human driven cars and you will get a lot of deaths, I do not have the numbers but 1 in 16 cars killing a person is a large number, now remove the safety driver and you get even more deaths. The point is that it is to early to test this cars on public roads. The fact that self driven cars will kill less is just a hope, we may never achieve that(there is no proof we can do it with current tech) or it will take more time, and we need some actual numbers that are not tampered with before letting this self driven cars on the road, the security drivers seem to not pay attention so this car testing are a risk.

bobthepanda 9y ago

From the article: > But zooming out from the specifics of Herzberg's crash, the more fundamental point is this: conventional car crashes killed 37,461 in the United States in 2016, which works out to 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States. We have a sample size of 1, granted, but it's not looking very good. At the very least they were expected not to be less safe than humans.

roenxi 9y ago
You have a sample size of 1. Acknowledging that doesn't suddenly make the sample evidence of anything, good or bad :P. Almost all the miles driven are going to be in near-ideal circumstances (daylight, no rain, good road surface, driver familiar with normal road traffic conditions and drives the route regularly). I have nearly no insight into the uber death, but I gather it happened at night. It could easily be that humans are also an order of magnitude more dangerous at night.
- simion314 9y ago
  I am not the OP, but this numbers are not confirming the optimistic view that self driving cars are better, so if we do not have numbers that show that are better and even with a human driver inside we had a few incidents then the number without human driver inside would have been larger, so how should we determine that the self driving car X is ready to be released on public roads for testing? At least we should have some basic tests done by an impartial authority.
- rhizome 9y ago
  I'm not sure that's the point you want to make, an order of magnitude making Uber 2.5x more dangerous still.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 9y ago

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

Driverless car programs should really not be having more than 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Uber is currently at 1 per 3 million miles.

mr_toad 9y ago
A sample size of 1 is completely meaningless.
- TillE 9y ago
  It's not, because we have considerable detail about that one sample. This wasn't simple bad luck, it was performance on par with a completely distracted driver.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  Why do you say it's a sample size of 1? They've been driving AVs for a while.

PinguTS 9y ago

Almost all current assitance systems in luxury cars, which are not design for automated driving, could have avoided this situation with activation of the emergency brake. But this car didn't even brake at all? It will be interesting when Volvo pulls back from that relationship, because even the uptodate emergency brake assistent should have catched up. Except Uber as deactivated those in favor for their own technology (because it is superior). EDIT: German Automotive Club did tested full sized cars in 2016, which means decaded old technology in IT. The results where that the Subaru Outback was the only one detecting persons in the dark. But was very poor with biclysts. https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/tests/assistenzsysteme/fussgaengererkennung_2016/default.aspx?ComponentId=270750&SourcePageId=31956 https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/tests/assistenzsysteme/fussg...

neffy 9y ago
I think a lot of us are of the opinion that it wasn´t as dark as the camera makes it look. But let´s say it was... a human driver under those conditions would have full beam headlights on, and I´ve never personally experienced any issues spotting cyclists and dark clad pedestrians with those on.

mannykannot 9y ago

That general statement does not give Uber a pass on this particular incident, any more than this particular incident casts aspersions on the autonomous vehicle industry as a whole.