6 ms·

Are self-driving cars safer than human drivers?

24 points by atg_abhishek 5y ago

oblib 5y ago
Without a nationwide Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Infrastructure to Vehicle (I2V) communication system the answer is probably "No" and that's the elephant in the room no one is really talking about yet. That's because the I2V would be hugely expensive to implement and maintain. Car companies are not going to pay for it, and it'd be a tough sell to taxpayers. More expensive cars and roads are not a great move right now. When we need is more efficient and less expensive cars and better driver training programs.
- de6u99er 5y ago
  I agree about V2V and I2V. But I don't agree about costs being the biggest issue atm. A lack of V2V/I2V standards is currently the largest issue.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >When we need is more efficient and less expensive cars and better driver training programs. I bet human drivers are already mostly safe - I think most accidents are broadly in 3 categories, (1) impairment (drinking, age, sleep) or (2) distraction (cell phone, makeup) or (3) weather. The first two wont be solved by better training programs and the last would be really hard to make a requirement (how do you train people to drive in the snow in Los Angeles)?. If you want safer roads, it would be more wise to spend that money on public transportation. On a per capita basis it would be cheaper and safer. That said I don't think the rush to autonomous driving is as altruistic as the developers claim. For $250B you could massively overhaul the transportation systems for major cities. However there is little upside to capture by doing do; while autonomous driving has the potential to create a last-mile autonomous transportation system that would massively reduce the costs of transporting goods and people (by removing labor costs). Capturing that upside is far more lucrative. I think the question is less "we will only see AV commonplace when it's unilaterally safer than humans", and more "we will see AV commonplace when the value generated exceeds the potential costs of fatal accidents". It's after AV is commonplace will the value captured from human drivers be used to reduce costs in the failures of AV. For example, if UPS were to convert their 50% fleet to AV, then they would use the money saved to then invest in V2V or I2V infrastructure in order to accelerate the transition of the rest of their fleet.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Human death rate is 1 in 100 mil. miles driven (all conditions) iirc, AD rate is 1 in 1mil (ideal conditions).
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    What we “need” is hard to say, but what we will get is what will sell more cars. Maybe those two align, but there might not beer a strong connection between them. For example ambient lighting inside the car is largely a gimmick, but a fun one. Clearly not something benefiting society, but it seems to sell cars.
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    I see you're looking at this mostly from a business value perspective and I guess in the end that's what it all comes down to, but I feel there is so much more value added than just "less drivers needed." The cost of I2V for example can be offset by less waste in both space used to park cars, drive cars and maintain cars. You can utilize roads much better by having a lot of tiny single passenger vehicles that park themselves outside of the city when traffic is low. Also, travel time with public transportation is always longer than point-to-point, so people save time over that. There's too much for a HN comment that I can think of as benefits of AV.
  - bzzzt 5y ago
    Since you're allowed to drive in the snow when you have a driver's license it should be part of the training. You can get skid training courses where a slippery road is 'simulated' on a wet plate which should be possible in LA ;) Also, aren't steep fines a good "training program" for distractions like holding your phone and messaging when driving?
    - kristiandupont 5y ago
      >You can get skid training courses where a slippery road is 'simulated' on a wet plate This is mandatory in Denmark. Most fun part of getting the license!
      - 5y ago
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Do you think it's (near-)impossible for computers to at least equal an awake human driver without that? If SDCs can "simply" achieve near-human capabilities, then they've already exceeded human safety simply by virtue of not being subject to the same distractions and impairments as humans. Mind you, this is a hypothetical argument. If any of the major players thought they could make a strong statistical safety case, they'd already be publishing press releases and scaling.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  > More expensive cars and roads are not a great move right now. When we need is more efficient and less expensive cars and better driver training programs. You’re making a good faith argument. Would increasing minimums for car insurance make us more or less safe? I believe it would make us more safe, intuitively, and the effect would be reinforced by taking people off the road who can’t really afford to drive.
- rhizome 5y ago
  The elephant in the room is public transportation motivating bad drivers to stay away from the car. "Oh but they won't," and maybe, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who would like to have someone else drive, not to mention bypassing the tickets and accidents (and repairs) that bad drivers experience.
- mikejb 5y ago
  I have my doubts about V2V and I2V communications. They'd simplify the task for automated systems, but come with a rat tail of problems. I2V is incredibly hard to scale, and is a duplicated implementation of a pre-existing system (road markings & signs). Any system with duplicated implementations will grow inconsistencies. In those situations, the automated driver will be driving based on a differently perceived environment than the human driver - and it'll be hard to know. The automated system would also need to read lane markings & signs to recognize these inconsistencies and act accordingly, at which point the I2V communication is just a crutch to help the automated vehicle, reducing it's utility and hence the cost-value ratio (which is already insanely high). V2V communication is unreliable by the fact that older vehicles won't support it, so automated vehicles won't be able to communicate with some (initially: most) cars. They'll need to be able to drive safely without communicating with nearby vehicles, so V2V is again just a "bonus" system a vehicle must not rely on. Automated drivers will be safer than human drivers with time. It's an incredibly hard problem to solve, but it will be solved. Technology is improving continuously, and different companies are trying different approaches to solve the problem - which makes me optimistic in terms of automated drivers. Becoming safer than human drivers is mostly a matter of being able to drive with an automated system based on infrastructure optimized for humans. Sources of accidents will shift: From driver impairment, distraction and ignorance of rules, to misinterpretation of the environment. Additionally, and I think this is the key: If an accident happens, at best the involved human drivers improve their reaction to the specific situation. Automated drivers can share this new knowledge across the entire fleet.
transportguy 5y ago
It's also not good enough for them to be better than average human drivers. There are many bad drivers and if you are a good driver, you wouldn't want to switch to anything less safe than your driving
- bzzzt 5y ago
  Because about 80% of all drivers consider themselves above-average I expect that bar to be placed unrealistically high.
  - transportguy 5y ago
    It's plausible that 20% of drivers crash enough for 80% to be above average
    - transportguy 5y ago
      'According to the AA Charitable Trust, 40% of UK drivers have crashed by the time they are 23 years old, and 26% of drivers have crashed within two years of obtaining their licence. (Source: https://m.toptests.co.uk/driving-statistics/ https://m.toptests.co.uk/driving-statistics/)' Although maybe not
      - toast0 5y ago
        I was a pretty crap driver before I was 23 (regardless of what I would have said then), but I'm not too bad now. Although, it depends on what you measure, I suppose; I've driven behind a Waymo vehicle, and they stay in the lines a lot more than me (which could be a positive for following rules, or a negative for increased drive times), but I also didn't ever change lanes into a bus expecting it would move, and I can avoid some of the annoying driving behaviors I used to see with Waymo (signal a lane change, decide not to do it, loop); not sure where they're at with that since I no longer live in their test areas.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    Could you share your source?
moralestapia 5y ago
AI driving at a human level is equivalent to AGI, so I wouldn't hold my breath for it.
- kristiandupont 5y ago
  I don't think I would say that. Such an AI wouldn't need to pass a Turing test or be able to reason in any other situation than traffic. And for traffic, it will have a highly specialized sensory system which is going to be (or already is) vastly better than our eyes and ears.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    >which is going to be (or already is) vastly better than our eyes and ears Not even close, you underestimate what our sensory system is capable of. Scenario 1: You're driving on a highway and you notice people on the opposite lane are coming in slowly, with hazard lights on and waving at you. Because of this you slow down and drive more carefully, to discover that there's been an accident/landslide/whatever right around the corner. Your whole lane is then, closed, but cars are going both ways using the other lane by taking turns, the whole thing is orchestrated by a few guys making signs at cars with their hands/flags, which you naturally follow. (This has happened to me at least 10 times in the past) Scenario 2: Light rain is pouring down, you also know the temperature is quite close or below 0ºC, you slow down and drive with extreme caution as you're about to enter a stretch of road that is known to be prone for black ice formation. Scenario 3: You're driving under crosswind when suddenly, the truck in front of you does this, [1]. None of the cars recording crashed with the truck, what do you think is the reason for that? I could go on and on ... Forget the dumb Turing tests, driving >= AGI. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOwbbsgaRaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOwbbsgaRaQ
    - dagw 5y ago
      At least Scenario 2 should be much easier for self driving cars to manage than humans since they can (at least in theory) monitor the dampness, temperature and traction of the road they are on in real time. There are camera systems today that can detect black ice with combination of IR and image recognition, and in the future there might be systems like that along most roads that can send real time updates about upcoming hazards directly to the car. Scenario 3 is functionally no different than a truck driving slowly and weaving back and forth erratically, something that should be part of the standard scenarios any self driving car should handle. Scenario 1 is almost certainly the hardest one and the one that will take longest to solve.
rhizome 5y ago
This is the wrong question, and a loaded one besides. Self-driving cars do not (and will not, if you ask me) exist, and can't work within current asphalt traffic practices. Create a non-human driver who can drive equally as safely as a human (and not your grandma), then we'll talk about comparing strengths.
- mikejb 5y ago
  To be fair: Self-driving cars that can drive safer than some drivers already exist. Simply due to the nature how unsafe some humans drive. (Some of these drivers are elderly, some of these drivers are racers who think everyone slower than them drives like a grandma). I'd be interested though why you think self-driving cars will not exist. Care to elaborate?
  - zzzpaz 5y ago
    I'm more or less of the same opinion and honestly. The fact that human drivers are unsafe adding new "automated" drivers in the road would automatically make the human one safer? I don't think so. Before you can reach a point where all the cars are fully autonomous you'd need decades if not century and we're here discussing that having them on the road would be better. Well, we'd see what data once this cars are around brings to us, but human machine mixture in a road sounds like a mess that we'd want to be saved from. Reason why self driving cars are rather hard to be mainstream: - they're freaking expensive, currently, even the "normal cars" are not always accessible to everyone in this planet, yet we assume that the entire world population has enough money to buy Teslas and sleep while going to work like is an extension of California. - despite having common traffic rules, people drive how they want to. If you've drove long enough and in different places of the world you'd notice that: traffic rules are an opinion, driving style changes from city to city within the same country, if not district to district. "Exception" are the norm: people park where they're not supposed to, people go where they're not supposed to, people stop where they're not supposed to like all the time. - self driving cars make economical sense only under certain conditions, and even then the time spent automating that is yet to be proven effective. Of course you can argue that we've something working, but at this stage is rather a prototype that handle base cases. If we want to have self driving car, just have them only. Not mix them with human to create a perfect condition to have new accidents were the insurance would have challenging time on defining who's fault. I'd rather invest money on mass transportation systems (eg. Metro, train, buses)
KaiserPro 5y ago
> Levels 3-5 are considered Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) in which the driver does not need to pay attention to the road. I'm going to say that's patently wrong. as the article points out at level 3, the control system is likely to drop out and punt hard decisions over to the driver at any time. This is exceptionally dangerous because there is almost never enough time to react properly (unless the driver was actively paying attention) at level 3 you really still need to pay attention.
- remus 5y ago
  I think you're being a little selective with your quoting there, as the article goes on to say > One big issue for Level 3 vehicles is that a crash might occur in the 10 seconds the driver spends taking over, so Level 3 vehicles will probably need to include an ODD [operational design domain] where 10 seconds is reasonably safe (e.g. low-speed highway traffic jams).
- mikejb 5y ago
  I think Lvl3 is one of the most dangerous levels a car can be at, based on the experience Waymo (back then Chauffeur) made: Humans are even worse at monitoring than they are at driving. It's incredibly boring. Their test-drivers (who got extensive training for what to do and what not to do) started to do anything but pay attention, including taking a nap, before they pulled the plug on the incremental approach. And we see this partially with Tesla now. Some drivers start to trust the system so much that they start to do anything but pay attention - partially even bypassing the pesky systems that remind them that they are required to take over at any moment.
dogma1138 5y ago
Safer != better at driving. Higher safety can be achieved by them being simply “as good” or even worse to some extent but the removal of the driver from multi passenger rides reduces casualties sufficiently to make them safer on average.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
Well, the biggest elephant in the room is ...there are no self driving cars out there in the wild. Any near future self driving car will not be safer than a sobar, alert human driver any time soon, unless they have a directive to halt the vehicle at any difficult scenario. We will not know before such a car exists and is tested under the exact same circumstances vs a human driver.
crocal 5y ago
James Bond, sitting in the night train, is having dinner with Vesper Lynd. "Wait a minute, you're saying self-driving cars are not safer than human drivers?". Bemused, James takes a sip of Bordeaux, and quips "You've noticed?". I am a signalling engineer, with experience in design and delivery of autonomous trains (really autonomous, no driver, no nothing). Seriously, the conclusion makes me want to scream: > Shouldn’t ADS developers be required to prove an ADS is at least as safe as a human driver for a specific ODD before allowing it out onto public roads? To deliver an ADS thou shall: 1/ Identify the standards you are going to comply to (and I am talking about real standards, like EN 50126, SMS compliant with AS9100, not a Waymo brochure) 2/ Define your safety objectives (hint: for an ADS, it's going to be way way waaaaaay higher than human error rate). You don't self-define these. You need to talk to the safety authorities of the area were you intend to circulate. 3/ Build a safety case explaining how you achieve credibly these objectives (spoiler: testing will not be enough) 4/ Have your case examined by an independant safety assessor, accredited by a relevant national or trans-national authority 5/ Put your ego on a shelf. Otherwise, thou shall kill people. Simple. But it seems the automotive industry is ready to go to any length to avoid going through the concept of an independant safety assessor. EDIT: Bullet points syntax
BrissyCoder 5y ago
It's almost as if the author hasn't watched Knight rRider.
kazinator 5y ago
The edge cases are problem not only because they actually are a technical problem (which is undeniable) but because edge cases are an optics problem. When self-driving goes wrong due to mishandled edge cases, people will be willing to ignore massive amounts of statistical evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans on average, and obsessively focus on the the failed edge cases. "I don't care if self-driving cars have N times fewer accidents per kilometer, what about how that one one time when the Wile E. Coyote painted a picture of a tunnel on a cliff, and then a self-driving car tried to go into it and blew up in a giant ball of fire? It was all over the news man; self-driving is a joke."

24 points by atg_abhishek 5y ago

Without a nationwide Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Infrastructure to Vehicle (I2V) communication system the answer is probably "No" and that's the elephant in the room no one is really talking about yet. That's because the I2V would be hugely expensive to implement and maintain. Car companies are not going to pay for it, and it'd be a tough sell to taxpayers. More expensive cars and roads are not a great move right now. When we need is more efficient and less expensive cars and better driver training programs.

de6u99er 5y ago
I agree about V2V and I2V. But I don't agree about costs being the biggest issue atm. A lack of V2V/I2V standards is currently the largest issue.
nemothekid 5y ago
>When we need is more efficient and less expensive cars and better driver training programs. I bet human drivers are already mostly safe - I think most accidents are broadly in 3 categories, (1) impairment (drinking, age, sleep) or (2) distraction (cell phone, makeup) or (3) weather. The first two wont be solved by better training programs and the last would be really hard to make a requirement (how do you train people to drive in the snow in Los Angeles)?. If you want safer roads, it would be more wise to spend that money on public transportation. On a per capita basis it would be cheaper and safer. That said I don't think the rush to autonomous driving is as altruistic as the developers claim. For $250B you could massively overhaul the transportation systems for major cities. However there is little upside to capture by doing do; while autonomous driving has the potential to create a last-mile autonomous transportation system that would massively reduce the costs of transporting goods and people (by removing labor costs). Capturing that upside is far more lucrative. I think the question is less "we will only see AV commonplace when it's unilaterally safer than humans", and more "we will see AV commonplace when the value generated exceeds the potential costs of fatal accidents". It's after AV is commonplace will the value captured from human drivers be used to reduce costs in the failures of AV. For example, if UPS were to convert their 50% fleet to AV, then they would use the money saved to then invest in V2V or I2V infrastructure in order to accelerate the transition of the rest of their fleet.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Human death rate is 1 in 100 mil. miles driven (all conditions) iirc, AD rate is 1 in 1mil (ideal conditions).
- kmonsen 5y ago
  What we “need” is hard to say, but what we will get is what will sell more cars. Maybe those two align, but there might not beer a strong connection between them. For example ambient lighting inside the car is largely a gimmick, but a fun one. Clearly not something benefiting society, but it seems to sell cars.
- donkeyd 5y ago
  I see you're looking at this mostly from a business value perspective and I guess in the end that's what it all comes down to, but I feel there is so much more value added than just "less drivers needed." The cost of I2V for example can be offset by less waste in both space used to park cars, drive cars and maintain cars. You can utilize roads much better by having a lot of tiny single passenger vehicles that park themselves outside of the city when traffic is low. Also, travel time with public transportation is always longer than point-to-point, so people save time over that. There's too much for a HN comment that I can think of as benefits of AV.
- bzzzt 5y ago
  Since you're allowed to drive in the snow when you have a driver's license it should be part of the training. You can get skid training courses where a slippery road is 'simulated' on a wet plate which should be possible in LA ;) Also, aren't steep fines a good "training program" for distractions like holding your phone and messaging when driving?
  - kristiandupont 5y ago
    >You can get skid training courses where a slippery road is 'simulated' on a wet plate This is mandatory in Denmark. Most fun part of getting the license!
    - 5y ago
AlotOfReading 5y ago
Do you think it's (near-)impossible for computers to at least equal an awake human driver without that? If SDCs can "simply" achieve near-human capabilities, then they've already exceeded human safety simply by virtue of not being subject to the same distractions and impairments as humans. Mind you, this is a hypothetical argument. If any of the major players thought they could make a strong statistical safety case, they'd already be publishing press releases and scaling.
an_opabinia 5y ago
> More expensive cars and roads are not a great move right now. When we need is more efficient and less expensive cars and better driver training programs. You’re making a good faith argument. Would increasing minimums for car insurance make us more or less safe? I believe it would make us more safe, intuitively, and the effect would be reinforced by taking people off the road who can’t really afford to drive.
rhizome 5y ago
The elephant in the room is public transportation motivating bad drivers to stay away from the car. "Oh but they won't," and maybe, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who would like to have someone else drive, not to mention bypassing the tickets and accidents (and repairs) that bad drivers experience.
mikejb 5y ago
I have my doubts about V2V and I2V communications. They'd simplify the task for automated systems, but come with a rat tail of problems. I2V is incredibly hard to scale, and is a duplicated implementation of a pre-existing system (road markings & signs). Any system with duplicated implementations will grow inconsistencies. In those situations, the automated driver will be driving based on a differently perceived environment than the human driver - and it'll be hard to know. The automated system would also need to read lane markings & signs to recognize these inconsistencies and act accordingly, at which point the I2V communication is just a crutch to help the automated vehicle, reducing it's utility and hence the cost-value ratio (which is already insanely high). V2V communication is unreliable by the fact that older vehicles won't support it, so automated vehicles won't be able to communicate with some (initially: most) cars. They'll need to be able to drive safely without communicating with nearby vehicles, so V2V is again just a "bonus" system a vehicle must not rely on. Automated drivers will be safer than human drivers with time. It's an incredibly hard problem to solve, but it will be solved. Technology is improving continuously, and different companies are trying different approaches to solve the problem - which makes me optimistic in terms of automated drivers. Becoming safer than human drivers is mostly a matter of being able to drive with an automated system based on infrastructure optimized for humans. Sources of accidents will shift: From driver impairment, distraction and ignorance of rules, to misinterpretation of the environment. Additionally, and I think this is the key: If an accident happens, at best the involved human drivers improve their reaction to the specific situation. Automated drivers can share this new knowledge across the entire fleet.

transportguy 5y ago

It's also not good enough for them to be better than average human drivers. There are many bad drivers and if you are a good driver, you wouldn't want to switch to anything less safe than your driving

bzzzt 5y ago
Because about 80% of all drivers consider themselves above-average I expect that bar to be placed unrealistically high.
- transportguy 5y ago
  It's plausible that 20% of drivers crash enough for 80% to be above average
  - transportguy 5y ago
    'According to the AA Charitable Trust, 40% of UK drivers have crashed by the time they are 23 years old, and 26% of drivers have crashed within two years of obtaining their licence. (Source: https://m.toptests.co.uk/driving-statistics/ https://m.toptests.co.uk/driving-statistics/)' Although maybe not
    - toast0 5y ago
      I was a pretty crap driver before I was 23 (regardless of what I would have said then), but I'm not too bad now. Although, it depends on what you measure, I suppose; I've driven behind a Waymo vehicle, and they stay in the lines a lot more than me (which could be a positive for following rules, or a negative for increased drive times), but I also didn't ever change lanes into a bus expecting it would move, and I can avoid some of the annoying driving behaviors I used to see with Waymo (signal a lane change, decide not to do it, loop); not sure where they're at with that since I no longer live in their test areas.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Could you share your source?

moralestapia 5y ago

AI driving at a human level is equivalent to AGI, so I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

kristiandupont 5y ago
I don't think I would say that. Such an AI wouldn't need to pass a Turing test or be able to reason in any other situation than traffic. And for traffic, it will have a highly specialized sensory system which is going to be (or already is) vastly better than our eyes and ears.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  >which is going to be (or already is) vastly better than our eyes and ears Not even close, you underestimate what our sensory system is capable of. Scenario 1: You're driving on a highway and you notice people on the opposite lane are coming in slowly, with hazard lights on and waving at you. Because of this you slow down and drive more carefully, to discover that there's been an accident/landslide/whatever right around the corner. Your whole lane is then, closed, but cars are going both ways using the other lane by taking turns, the whole thing is orchestrated by a few guys making signs at cars with their hands/flags, which you naturally follow. (This has happened to me at least 10 times in the past) Scenario 2: Light rain is pouring down, you also know the temperature is quite close or below 0ºC, you slow down and drive with extreme caution as you're about to enter a stretch of road that is known to be prone for black ice formation. Scenario 3: You're driving under crosswind when suddenly, the truck in front of you does this, [1]. None of the cars recording crashed with the truck, what do you think is the reason for that? I could go on and on ... Forget the dumb Turing tests, driving >= AGI. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOwbbsgaRaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOwbbsgaRaQ
  - dagw 5y ago
    At least Scenario 2 should be much easier for self driving cars to manage than humans since they can (at least in theory) monitor the dampness, temperature and traction of the road they are on in real time. There are camera systems today that can detect black ice with combination of IR and image recognition, and in the future there might be systems like that along most roads that can send real time updates about upcoming hazards directly to the car. Scenario 3 is functionally no different than a truck driving slowly and weaving back and forth erratically, something that should be part of the standard scenarios any self driving car should handle. Scenario 1 is almost certainly the hardest one and the one that will take longest to solve.

rhizome 5y ago

This is the wrong question, and a loaded one besides. Self-driving cars do not (and will not, if you ask me) exist, and can't work within current asphalt traffic practices. Create a non-human driver who can drive equally as safely as a human (and not your grandma), then we'll talk about comparing strengths.

mikejb 5y ago
To be fair: Self-driving cars that can drive safer than some drivers already exist. Simply due to the nature how unsafe some humans drive. (Some of these drivers are elderly, some of these drivers are racers who think everyone slower than them drives like a grandma). I'd be interested though why you think self-driving cars will not exist. Care to elaborate?
- zzzpaz 5y ago
  I'm more or less of the same opinion and honestly. The fact that human drivers are unsafe adding new "automated" drivers in the road would automatically make the human one safer? I don't think so. Before you can reach a point where all the cars are fully autonomous you'd need decades if not century and we're here discussing that having them on the road would be better. Well, we'd see what data once this cars are around brings to us, but human machine mixture in a road sounds like a mess that we'd want to be saved from. Reason why self driving cars are rather hard to be mainstream: - they're freaking expensive, currently, even the "normal cars" are not always accessible to everyone in this planet, yet we assume that the entire world population has enough money to buy Teslas and sleep while going to work like is an extension of California. - despite having common traffic rules, people drive how they want to. If you've drove long enough and in different places of the world you'd notice that: traffic rules are an opinion, driving style changes from city to city within the same country, if not district to district. "Exception" are the norm: people park where they're not supposed to, people go where they're not supposed to, people stop where they're not supposed to like all the time. - self driving cars make economical sense only under certain conditions, and even then the time spent automating that is yet to be proven effective. Of course you can argue that we've something working, but at this stage is rather a prototype that handle base cases. If we want to have self driving car, just have them only. Not mix them with human to create a perfect condition to have new accidents were the insurance would have challenging time on defining who's fault. I'd rather invest money on mass transportation systems (eg. Metro, train, buses)

KaiserPro 5y ago

> Levels 3-5 are considered Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) in which the driver does not need to pay attention to the road. I'm going to say that's patently wrong. as the article points out at level 3, the control system is likely to drop out and punt hard decisions over to the driver at any time. This is exceptionally dangerous because there is almost never enough time to react properly (unless the driver was actively paying attention) at level 3 you really still need to pay attention.

remus 5y ago
I think you're being a little selective with your quoting there, as the article goes on to say > One big issue for Level 3 vehicles is that a crash might occur in the 10 seconds the driver spends taking over, so Level 3 vehicles will probably need to include an ODD [operational design domain] where 10 seconds is reasonably safe (e.g. low-speed highway traffic jams).
mikejb 5y ago
I think Lvl3 is one of the most dangerous levels a car can be at, based on the experience Waymo (back then Chauffeur) made: Humans are even worse at monitoring than they are at driving. It's incredibly boring. Their test-drivers (who got extensive training for what to do and what not to do) started to do anything but pay attention, including taking a nap, before they pulled the plug on the incremental approach. And we see this partially with Tesla now. Some drivers start to trust the system so much that they start to do anything but pay attention - partially even bypassing the pesky systems that remind them that they are required to take over at any moment.

dogma1138 5y ago

Safer != better at driving. Higher safety can be achieved by them being simply “as good” or even worse to some extent but the removal of the driver from multi passenger rides reduces casualties sufficiently to make them safer on average.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

Well, the biggest elephant in the room is ...there are no self driving cars out there in the wild. Any near future self driving car will not be safer than a sobar, alert human driver any time soon, unless they have a directive to halt the vehicle at any difficult scenario. We will not know before such a car exists and is tested under the exact same circumstances vs a human driver.

crocal 5y ago

James Bond, sitting in the night train, is having dinner with Vesper Lynd. "Wait a minute, you're saying self-driving cars are not safer than human drivers?". Bemused, James takes a sip of Bordeaux, and quips "You've noticed?". I am a signalling engineer, with experience in design and delivery of autonomous trains (really autonomous, no driver, no nothing). Seriously, the conclusion makes me want to scream: > Shouldn’t ADS developers be required to prove an ADS is at least as safe as a human driver for a specific ODD before allowing it out onto public roads? To deliver an ADS thou shall: 1/ Identify the standards you are going to comply to (and I am talking about real standards, like EN 50126, SMS compliant with AS9100, not a Waymo brochure) 2/ Define your safety objectives (hint: for an ADS, it's going to be way way waaaaaay higher than human error rate). You don't self-define these. You need to talk to the safety authorities of the area were you intend to circulate. 3/ Build a safety case explaining how you achieve credibly these objectives (spoiler: testing will not be enough) 4/ Have your case examined by an independant safety assessor, accredited by a relevant national or trans-national authority 5/ Put your ego on a shelf. Otherwise, thou shall kill people. Simple. But it seems the automotive industry is ready to go to any length to avoid going through the concept of an independant safety assessor. EDIT: Bullet points syntax

BrissyCoder 5y ago

It's almost as if the author hasn't watched Knight rRider.

kazinator 5y ago

The edge cases are problem not only because they actually are a technical problem (which is undeniable) but because edge cases are an optics problem. When self-driving goes wrong due to mishandled edge cases, people will be willing to ignore massive amounts of statistical evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans on average, and obsessively focus on the the failed edge cases. "I don't care if self-driving cars have N times fewer accidents per kilometer, what about how that one one time when the Wile E. Coyote painted a picture of a tunnel on a cliff, and then a self-driving car tried to go into it and blew up in a giant ball of fire? It was all over the news man; self-driving is a joke."