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>If they killed someone every 1,000,000 miles well there would be piles of bodies from these systems. If they killed someone every 10,000,000 miles, they would

>If they killed someone every 1,000,000 miles well there would be piles of bodies from these systems. If they killed someone every 10,000,000 miles, they would still be "drastically worse" than the average driver - virtually an order of magnitude. But these are made up numbers. What data is there to work with? It seems like disengagement numbers from testing are on the order of 10-20K miles. This article says that "everyone hates" these statistics and people claim they are easy to game: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21142685/california-dmv-self-driving-car-disengagement-report-data https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21142685/california-dmv-s... But that doesn't matter, in my opinion, for our discussion, because even if they are gamed to the hilt, they provide a relevant upper bound of what is possible for self-driving in the best possible environments. I don't know if you can see it my way, but I think switching to a safety driver, aka disengagements, are what we need to be comparing to fatal accidents, if the context is transporting people incapable of monitoring, let alone driving. I am willing to estimate the worst habitual drunk drivers may well cause a fatal accident roughly every 100K miles. That's really bad! But I seriously think that it would be foolhardy to plan on self-driving vehicles helping, when they punt about ten times as often as the worst drunks. Sure, there is some uncertainty, not every disengagement has to be a fatality, but as a matter of public policy, nobody should be betting thousands of lives on that just because they would like it to be true. Comparing fatalities of a self driving system combined with a safety driver, with fatalities of drunk drivers alone, is just not valid. Unless you evaluate the drunks with a safety driver at dual controls as well. Something I can't judge, and you will probably have an opinion on, is how much "low hanging fruit" remains with current approaches to self-driving. If we were to agree that it needs to be ten or a hundred times better to be better than the worst drunks, can that be done without a radical revolution in the technology, through incremental refinement? I'm skeptical, I think we probably are at least past the proverbial easy 80%, but don't have specific reasoning for that.

Retric 5y ago
> It seems like disengagement numbers from testing are on the order of 10-20K miles. That’s no longer the case. Waymo is over 30k miles per disengagement, however it’s also a meaningless number. The point of disengagement’s isn’t a proxy for accidents it’s to avoid cars simply shutting down in traffic and make it really clear the car is confused. Waymo is operating driverless taxis with as I said over 20 million miles often with an empty car and they’re using a call center to handle edge cases. People remotely pilot the car at very low speeds when needed, but the car must come to a safe stop on it’s own. Having someone handle an edge case every 30k miles hours for is cheap enough to be bundled into a new car’s price. Worse case they pull off the road and call a tow truck, but more normally they can get the car to a place or can safely drive. Put a drunk driver in a car with that behavior and you don’t get accidents every 30k miles.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >it’s also a meaningless number Saying something is meaningless doesn't make it so. Often things don't mean what people would like them to mean, but every observation means something. If Waymo is operating in particularly easy environments, then it's plausible that it's not as good as a 30K mile interval would imply. But that number definitely implies an upper bound, because if they could go longer, they would. Do you have a source for there being no safety driver physically in the car and the car always finding a safe state on its own?
  - Retric 5y ago
    It’s the Wamo one service in a very limited area of Phenix that’s operating without a safety driver. They started in 2020 with 10% of the rides without a safety driver and it’s been ramping up. There’s been a fair amount of coverage for example: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-car https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-... The safe state thing is inferred based on the list of crashes so far. Clearly it’s not going to always work perfectly to the end of time, but it’s good enough that their testing it without a safety driver in the car which says quite a bit.

Retric 5y ago

> It seems like disengagement numbers from testing are on the order of 10-20K miles. That’s no longer the case. Waymo is over 30k miles per disengagement, however it’s also a meaningless number. The point of disengagement’s isn’t a proxy for accidents it’s to avoid cars simply shutting down in traffic and make it really clear the car is confused. Waymo is operating driverless taxis with as I said over 20 million miles often with an empty car and they’re using a call center to handle edge cases. People remotely pilot the car at very low speeds when needed, but the car must come to a safe stop on it’s own. Having someone handle an edge case every 30k miles hours for is cheap enough to be bundled into a new car’s price. Worse case they pull off the road and call a tow truck, but more normally they can get the car to a place or can safely drive. Put a drunk driver in a car with that behavior and you don’t get accidents every 30k miles.

perl4ever 5y ago
>it’s also a meaningless number Saying something is meaningless doesn't make it so. Often things don't mean what people would like them to mean, but every observation means something. If Waymo is operating in particularly easy environments, then it's plausible that it's not as good as a 30K mile interval would imply. But that number definitely implies an upper bound, because if they could go longer, they would. Do you have a source for there being no safety driver physically in the car and the car always finding a safe state on its own?
- Retric 5y ago
  It’s the Wamo one service in a very limited area of Phenix that’s operating without a safety driver. They started in 2020 with 10% of the rides without a safety driver and it’s been ramping up. There’s been a fair amount of coverage for example: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-car https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/04/waymo-driverless-... The safe state thing is inferred based on the list of crashes so far. Clearly it’s not going to always work perfectly to the end of time, but it’s good enough that their testing it without a safety driver in the car which says quite a bit.