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Probably regulators, because insurance companies are better at statistics.

by rconti 5y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
This. Self-driving risk is likely already comparable, if not significantly better, than human-driving risk, but even if it isn't, why would insurance companies care? They're the bookmakers, they don't really care which horse wins as long as they can reasonably accurately predict the odds. At worst insurance for cars with self-driving features becomes expensive. The one thing I could see insurances worry about is correlated risk. Imagine if an accidental push installs a bad development version of the autopilot on all cars instead of the 2 test vehicles with extra sensors, causing a much higher crash rate. Add a broken auto-update mechanism preventing a rollback, and it could take a day to mitigate and a week to fully stop the crashes, and during that time a lot of cars could crash. As long as it's no worse than the crashes resulting from e.g. a day with severe weather, it'll probably be fine, but if it significantly exceeds that, insuring self-driving cars could become too unpredictable, and thus too risky for insurance companies.
- deschutes 5y ago
  How do you come to the conclusion that autopilot is safer? The Tesla press releases? It's the kind of uncritical analysis that you would expect from a company trying to market something. Food for thought: By considering only automated and mnual driving you exclude basically all possibilities. Hybrid systems that are designed around the limitations of humans and machines seem to be a much more promising but less flashy solution if safety is the goal. This approach has a long history if you consider things like ABS and the traffic fatality statistics suggest it actually works. (Crash mitigation technologies surely muddy the waters.)
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    Reported accident statistics in self driving mode. I said "likely" because I have no statistics for human drivers that are granular enough to allow a precise comparison. > By considering only automated and mnual driving you exclude basically all possibilities. I'm not comparing Autopilot to some hypothetical future system. I'm trying to determine whether the risk from Autopilot is comparable to human drivers as they drive now, because insurance companies have clearly shown that this is something they're willing to put up with.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  It doesn’t matter if it is safer. You can’t hold a human liable for not having superhuman qualities. Humans make mistakes and those mistakes are accepted. A computer making mistakes isn’t acceptable, every instance will be seen as a liability and a huge one. computers will not be given the benefit of the doubt that humans have
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    That's likely to be Tesla's problem, not the problem of the car insurance company though.
  - rconti 5y ago
    > A computer making mistakes isn’t acceptable [citation needed] Insurance companies will just look at the stats. And you better believe they'll jack up your rates if your self driving car crashes. You'll be held responsible, like it or not.

Probably regulators, because insurance companies are better at statistics.

by rconti 5y ago

Probably regulators, because insurance companies are better at statistics.

This. Self-driving risk is likely already comparable, if not significantly better, than human-driving risk, but even if it isn't, why would insurance companies care? They're the bookmakers, they don't really care which horse wins as long as they can reasonably accurately predict the odds. At worst insurance for cars with self-driving features becomes expensive. The one thing I could see insurances worry about is correlated risk. Imagine if an accidental push installs a bad development version of the autopilot on all cars instead of the 2 test vehicles with extra sensors, causing a much higher crash rate. Add a broken auto-update mechanism preventing a rollback, and it could take a day to mitigate and a week to fully stop the crashes, and during that time a lot of cars could crash. As long as it's no worse than the crashes resulting from e.g. a day with severe weather, it'll probably be fine, but if it significantly exceeds that, insuring self-driving cars could become too unpredictable, and thus too risky for insurance companies.

deschutes 5y ago
How do you come to the conclusion that autopilot is safer? The Tesla press releases? It's the kind of uncritical analysis that you would expect from a company trying to market something. Food for thought: By considering only automated and mnual driving you exclude basically all possibilities. Hybrid systems that are designed around the limitations of humans and machines seem to be a much more promising but less flashy solution if safety is the goal. This approach has a long history if you consider things like ABS and the traffic fatality statistics suggest it actually works. (Crash mitigation technologies surely muddy the waters.)
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Reported accident statistics in self driving mode. I said "likely" because I have no statistics for human drivers that are granular enough to allow a precise comparison. > By considering only automated and mnual driving you exclude basically all possibilities. I'm not comparing Autopilot to some hypothetical future system. I'm trying to determine whether the risk from Autopilot is comparable to human drivers as they drive now, because insurance companies have clearly shown that this is something they're willing to put up with.
colechristensen 5y ago
It doesn’t matter if it is safer. You can’t hold a human liable for not having superhuman qualities. Humans make mistakes and those mistakes are accepted. A computer making mistakes isn’t acceptable, every instance will be seen as a liability and a huge one. computers will not be given the benefit of the doubt that humans have
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  That's likely to be Tesla's problem, not the problem of the car insurance company though.
- rconti 5y ago
  > A computer making mistakes isn’t acceptable [citation needed] Insurance companies will just look at the stats. And you better believe they'll jack up your rates if your self driving car crashes. You'll be held responsible, like it or not.