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What kinds of accidents is autopilot going to prevent that automated accident avoidance cannot? Why does it have to drive the car to achieve the safety benefits

• SilasX 7y ago
  >What kinds of accidents is autopilot going to prevent that automated accident avoidance cannot? Why does it have to drive the car to achieve the safety benefits? Accidents from people who shouldn't have been driving in the first place. Part of the benefit of self-driving cars is not needing a qualified human, so the blind, elderly, children, drunk, etc can [still be] drive[n around].
  • blowski 7y ago
    And people who are not very good at driving! Myself included.
    • Jamwinner 7y ago
      Thats why taxis and mass transit exist. If you suck at driving, please don't.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • linuxftw 7y ago
    Maybe society should invest in providing services for these people rather than enriching more corporations. There are plenty of unemployed people, we can ferry a lot of passengers, no need for robots on the streets.
    • damnyou 7y ago
      Hmm, unemployment in the US is very low. What is happening is underemployment through gig economy jobs like Uber. You seem to be advocating for more of that.
  • rhino369 7y ago
    There is no reason to believe that a shitty driver with good automated accident avoidance would be worse than a self-driving car. Especially since no self-driving car is better than a shitty driver in 2019.
• mschuster91 7y ago
  > What kinds of accidents is autopilot going to prevent that automated accident avoidance cannot? Many accidents in stop-and-go traffic jams, people falling asleep due to being tired or bored (yes, that is a real issue) and veering off course, pedestrians stepping in front of the vehicle...
  • sz4kerto 7y ago
    These are all present (in one way or another) in many cars that don't drive themselves otherwise. (They're not that great at the moment, but these are part of accident avoidance, not self driving.)
  • braythwayt 7y ago
    Automated accident avoidance covers accidents in stop-and-go traffic jams. My 2012 Volvo already a rudimentary system along these lines that is designed specifically for stop-and-go traffic. Other Volvos have tools for detecting drivers losing alertness. Technology for helping to keep cars in their lanes already exists. Technology for stooping cars when pedestrians and bicycles appear in front and/or on the side when making a turn at an intersection already exists. Most of these systems need to get much, much better, but I think it's very reasonable to separate them from the general capability of driving a car autonomously from point A to point B. If we can develop a car to drive autonomously from point A to point B, and if we are granting that this system can also solve the problems you list above, I believe we can also develop most of the safety features that do not involve driving the car autonomously from A to B. I think this is more than a minor point to quibble over, as there are many extremely difficult problems to solve for fully autonomous driving that are unrelated to this kind of safety. For example, autonomous driving involves recognizing when the map is wrong. Despite driving maps being a so-called mature technology, a variety of map programs tell me to turn left on certain streets during prohibited times. There is a road that was closed at one end more than a decade ago, and when summoning a ride-share to an address on that street, we have to always text them not to follow the map directions, because it tries to send the car down the closed road, and today's ride-sharing drivers are terrible navigators and literally get lost. Solving autonomous driving solves problems like those AND safety problems, true. But if we just want to solve the safety problems, we can, and we can solve them faster and sooner by focusing on them.
• notus 7y ago
  If you have all the cars driving themselves they can function more like a swarm/grid of vehicles managed externally vs individual agents working against each other. This means you can have cars going like 80-100 mph but driving bumper to bumper.
  • jliptzin 7y ago
    We will have flying cars long before that happens
  • beojan 7y ago
    You mean like a train? Why not have trains instead?
    • lallysingh 7y ago
      Stops.
    • beerandt 7y ago
      Rails are expensive and limiting.
    • smachiz 7y ago
      Because trains can't take exits... unless the whole train wants to.
    • naavis 7y ago
      All cars are not going to the same place.
    • standyro 7y ago
      I love trains but for some stupid reason >$200 million per mile is the average cost for urban rail. We already sank a huge upfront investment into the interstate highway system, so we'll have to settle for a private enterprise solution with semi-autonomous vehicles. At least, until the US Congress becomes less dysfunctional...
  • dopylitty 7y ago
• Robotbeat 7y ago
  The automated accident avoidance systems will never become advanced enough without something like autopilot driving them.
• siliconc0w 7y ago
  Tesla wouldn't be where it is if it just had mere accident avoidance. Fewer would buy their cars and so they'd have worse training data and less money/viability. They probably wouldn't exist. The author is essentially correct but you don't see the whole picture because there aren't news articles when a Toyota or BMW LKAS system fails and causes an accident. We'd just have incumbent car manufacturers with worse systems. In fact I'd probably go the other way and advocate for requiring these systems on cars similar to seatbelts. At the very least collision accident avoidance and blind spot detection. Some manufacturers still make them options or, worse, reserve them for the highest premium trims which is kinda bullshit given the technology really isn't that expensive.
  • mantap 7y ago
    I don't think Tesla can claim credit for development of collision avoidance. They have been vocal proponents of it, but so have Volvo. Tesla just happened to start manufacturing mass market vehicles around the time of the ML revolution in the 2010s.