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> A car manufacturer might not be willing to accept 100% liability, but their system might still be a lot safer than a drunk driver returning home from the bar.

> A car manufacturer might not be willing to accept 100% liability, but their system might still be a lot safer than a drunk driver returning home from the bar. I don't care what they're willing to accept. It's a total cop-out to not "accept 100% liability" for a self-driving system they built, and instead avoiding responsibility by insisting on an inhuman-level of human monitoring. If they're not willing to build a reliable system (or buy enough insurance to pay out the claims when their system crashes), then they simply shouldn't be selling production self-driving cars, period. The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case.

rhino369 5y ago
I'm skeptical they could even avoid liability in the first place. Products liability is hard to avoid.
darkwater 5y ago
> The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case. It hasn't be solved at all, there are still too many deaths on road due to drunk/high drivers.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > It hasn't be solved at all, there are still too many deaths on road due to drunk/high drivers. More precisely: it's got a solution better than a current-generation, unsupervised self-driving car.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    Or you can just let someone else drive, or you can just not drink or get high if you have to drive a long way back home, or take public transportation. These all are also "solutions" that don't work all the time. So a vehicle that can safely drive itself is yet another solution that can be added to mitigate the issue.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  It has been solved in other countries, but the U.S. is ok with the right people driving while drunk so has decided to not solve it. For example in Norway you can drink 1/4 of the amount that you can do in CA while driving, you get jail penalties at .05 and right from the start at .02 the fine is one month salary, meaning even if you are rich you will pay a meaningful amount. So in general Norwegians don’t drink and drive.
  - exciteabletom 5y ago
    I love that the fines are scaled to income, makes so much more sense than a flat rate.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      That's a Scandinavian thing I love as well. I remeber that a Nokia CEO once paid the equivilant of a new Porsche 911 for a speeding ticket in Helsinki. On the other hand, I like it when my tickets are basically only table change for me. Egoistics aside, scaling tjose fines with income would be much fairer than a flat fee.
      - mywittyname 5y ago
        Kind of gives police departments justification for profiling wealthier people. The country already has a serious problem with policing for profit, and you can bet it will only get worse if they can issue $10k+ tickets to individuals. As it stands now, if you get a BS ticket from one of these towns[1], you're out a few hundred bucks. Scale it up to a month's wage. In a lot of these places, you can't even get a fair trial because the local court is in on the action. https://www.thrillist.com/cars/nation/the-worst-speed-traps-in-every-state https://www.thrillist.com/cars/nation/the-worst-speed-traps-...
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        cgriswald 5y ago
caddemon 5y ago
Yes drunk driver is not the right bar, but I think he still has a point. If the accident rate is less than overall human accident rate we should want to use the self driving cars, but the accident rate might still be high enough that a car company wouldn't want to claim 100% liability for every single accident. Car accidents are one of the top causes of premature death in the US. Self driving cars aren't there yet, but when they are an improvement on human driving they should be encouraged, even if the absolute numbers are still not amazing.
- bseidensticker 5y ago
  The problem is that it's a different set of people who will die with self driving cars. Imagine the trolley problem but instead of 5 vs 1 it's 30,000 vs 29,000. The 30,000 people get hit by the trolley and die if you don't pull the lever, and a completely different set of 29,000 people die. People who did not do anything wrong. People who had no chance to fix the situation. Sure, it's 1,000 fewer people, but none of those 29,000 people did anything wrong. They were all killed by the self driving systems made by car manufacturers. Regardless of whether or not you personally would pull the lever, you have to admit it's not the same as saving 1,000 lives.
  - antoinealb 5y ago
    I just want to point out that drunk driving also kills innocent bystanders: pedestrians, cyclists, sober drivers around, etc.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    This is completely absurd reasoning. If we knew who was going to die, we'd let them know beforehand, so they could pick a safer spot on the street at their "death time". There's no such thing as a deterministic future, as you suggest. We can't stop doing things because a theoretical future will be changed. This is absurd.
    - enragedcacti 5y ago
      While it is a whiff, one grain of truth is that its possible that pedestrian deaths increase with self driving vehicles, even if overall deaths decrease. Is it fair to trade lives of people who choose not to drive a car at all for those who do? As of now NHTSA weighs weighs them identically which I think is a huge mistake. That said its hugely dependent on the technology involved. I think a Waymo is safer than your average driver already for pedestrians. FSD Beta if unmonitored would be drastically worse than your average driver for pedestrian safety.
donatj 5y ago
> It's called a taxi Try finding a taxi in about 99% of the US more than a few miles out from big cities. I live just outside Minneapolis and we were SOL until Lyft arrived. Lyft and Uber still aren't available in most small towns. This is not "solved".
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Try finding a taxi in about 99% of the US more than a few miles out from big cities. > I live just outside Minneapolis and we were SOL until Lyft arrived. Lyft and Uber still aren't available in most small towns. This is not "solved". You can call for a taxi, even "just outside Minneapolis." Also, taxis aren't the only solution to drunk driving that's better than unsupervised self-driving cars. You also have things like designated drivers, etc. It would have been silly for me to enumerate every single one in my original comment.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  Unless things have drastically changed from my youth, a taxi is just a phone call away anywhere within about 40 miles of the Twin Cities.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Then have a designated driver. It's not complicated. If you go out to a bar and cannot arrange for a designated driver than don't drink.
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    easy to say, and not hard to do yourself. nearly impossible to convince the general public.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Make the bar identify a DD (or not if you're in an area with taxis) or lose their liquor license (like with serving underage kids). Or have them confiscate keys of people who drive into the parking lot and only give them back after a breathalyzer. It seems easy enough to do if we're serious about it.
avar 5y ago
> If they're not willing to [...] buy enough insurance to > pay out the claims [...] they [...] shouldn't be selling > [these] self-driving cars, period. The problem with this view is that you're assuming that the current risk created by drivers that society would benefit from moving to self-driving systems is priced into their current driving, or into their insurance. Western countries have mostly decided that society should simply eat that cost. If a child gets killed by a negligent driver the driver or their insurance is almost certainly not going to be "fairly" compensating anyone, to the extent that such a thing is even possible when it comes to losing a human life. There was a case in The Netherlands[1] where a grossly negligent driver killed 2 year old and her grandparents by rolling their car over them in a turn they were speeding through. The driver got probation, and a bit of community service. On reflection I don't even think that's a bad outcome per-se. Very few people could truthfully report that they've never broken the traffic law in a similar manner even once. It's mostly just moral luck that decides the difference between that being something stupid you did in your 20s with no repercussions, and another equally irresponsible person being unlucky enough to kill a child. So should that person spend 20 years in prison and be subject to wage slavery for the rest of their life as a result? Probably not. Now, imagine the same outcome, except this time the CEO of Tesla or Mercedes is going to have to answer in court for it. "Mr. Musk, why isn't your company paying out these parents fairly?". Of course a self-driving car is unlikely to accidentally make that specific mistake, but statistically the outcomes might be comparable. My point upthread is that we're almost certain to end up over-pricing the risk caused by self-driving vehicles, while directly and indirectly subsidizing the continued operation of motor vehicles by even more flawed human beings. People are simply bad at reacting to diffuse v.s. concentrated risk, and are inherently conservative when it comes to evaluating the risk of something new, v.s. an even riskier activity they've gotten used to. 1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-father-throw-chair-judge-4671450 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-father-throw-...
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > The problem with this view is that you're assuming that the current risk created by drivers that society would benefit from moving to self-driving systems is priced into their current driving, or into their insurance. That's neither here nor there. Liability shouldn't be separated from the driver, since that's incentive for them to drive better. However, with self-driving vehicles, the driver is the manufacturer, full stop. > My point upthread is that we're almost certain to end up over-pricing the risk caused by self-driving vehicles, while directly and indirectly subsidizing the continued operation of motor vehicles by even more flawed human beings. 1. You're making the flawed assumption that self-driving vehicles will be better drivers than humans. Maybe they will be, maybe they won't. It's yet to be seen. We'll know once the manufactures can't cherry-pick driving conditions or rely on backup humans to smooth over their defects. 2. If the problem you outline is an issue, the solution of pushing liability onto people who are not actually driving is a bad one.
viscanti 5y ago
What if the person doesn't maintain their car? What if they drive through mud that partially covers some sensors? It seems like there are lots of things outside the control of the manufacturer. It's probably best to see if any future accidents are because of errors with the system or end user errors. Anything else is doomed to failure.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  The manufacturer controls the only thing that matters: whether the autonomous driving system will engage. If the sensors are covered in mud or the tires are detected to be bald, the system can choose not to engage, disengage with a window for a human driver to take over, or pull over and disengage.
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    having a system that can detect the current state of all safety-related components of the car seems like an unreasonably high bar. humans are driving around right now with bald tires, loose lug nuts, bumpers held on by scotch tape and a dream, the list goes on.
    - mitchdoogle 5y ago
      It's probably easier to test for bald tires and loose lug nuts than you think. Don't know about bumpers, but I doubt something like that would be covered by the manufacturer's liability. I assume any collision involving the self-driving systems would have an investigation to determine fault, much the same way they do already
      - leetcrew 5y ago
        should be easy to test for loose lug nuts, I agree. bald tires (or inappropriate tires for the season, just as bad) I'm not so sure of though. afaik, limit of traction can only be determined by exceeding it. > I assume any collision involving the self-driving systems would have an investigation to determine fault, much the same way they do already agreed. specifically, I feel the manufacturer should design the system against some minimum level of maintenance and publish that. they would be liable for any mishaps that occur within design parameters. the driver/owner should be responsible for actually keeping the vehicle within that envelope. I don't feel that's an unreasonable burden.
buu700 5y ago
Since you brought up insurance, here's a third option: leave it up to manufacturers and consumers to determine how liability is structured in their private agreements, but make self-driving car insurance mandatory. This could even be enforced by mandating that new vehicles refuse to activate self-driving mode without a valid token as proof of insurance. With a system like that, the market would ultimately work out an optimal solution. Vehicles with safer technology and greater manufacturer liability would be subject to lower insurance rates, while on the other end of the spectrum consumers would be responsible for paying for the externalities of their choices. No one is going to use a self-driving mode that costs more than the vehicle itself to insure, so in theory manufacturers will be more strongly incentivized to get this right. Edit: A follow-up thought: self-driving car insurance should be independent of manual car insurance. They could be bundled together for savings, but someone who doesn't intend to drive manually shouldn't be required to purchase two types of insurance. Eventually, as the technology improves, self-driving insurance will become cheaper than manual insurance. This model also neatly solves the current issue of enforcing insurance requirements. If self-driving mode can require a valid insurance token, then so can manual driving mode.
- TrainedMonkey 5y ago
  This. Insurance is how liability should be handled because that aligns incentives for everyone. Tesla's approach "it's drivers responsibility to pay attention" is a cop out and "manufacturers are responsible for 100% of everything that happens when automation is active" will stifle tech development. Insurance can set premiums based on number of accidents in the area and let market find most efficient solution.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Insurance is about shifting risk. Sometimes shifting the risk aligns incentives and/or efficiently allocates the costs of the risk but it’s far from guaranteed.
    - buu700 5y ago
      It's not guaranteed, but there's money to be made for anyone who can accurately assess the risks and determine optimal rates. Price too low and the payouts will put you out of business; price too high and the competition will eat your lunch.
thrwy_ywrht 5y ago
>The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case. This is just wishful thinking. This is a description of what people should do, not what people actually do, and I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion. Millions of people drive while over the limit of alcohol consumption [1]. It is totally plausible that self-driving cars could radically reduce that number and improve overall safety even if they are not perfectly safe and occasionally cause accidents. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-americans-admit-to-drunk-driving-cdc-finds/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-americans-admit-to-...
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
You can say that "drunk driving is solved" if you speak from the point of view of the driver, because of course one can avoid it. But that's not too relevant. Getting killed by a drunk driver (which is actually the real problem) is far from solved. It's something that can happen to anyone.
chmod600 5y ago
"The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved." No, it has not. Taxis have been around as long as cars, and people are still dying. Drowsy driving hasn't been solved, either.
wolverine876 5y ago
> self-driving system they built It's not 'self-driving', it's driven by Mercedes's developers.
TheKarateKid 5y ago
> It's a total cop-out to not "accept 100% liability" for a self-driving system they built And what exactly is the liability for anyone produces cars that go well above and beyond every legal speed limit? By your logic, any car made that can go above the highest legal limit in a country should be held 100% liable for any accident occurring in that condition. A certain level of data should be collected and available upon every crash like with airplanes. If the manufacturer is found at fault due to a flaw in their design, then they should be liable.

rhino369 5y ago

I'm skeptical they could even avoid liability in the first place. Products liability is hard to avoid.

darkwater 5y ago

> The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case. It hasn't be solved at all, there are still too many deaths on road due to drunk/high drivers.

tablespoon 5y ago
> It hasn't be solved at all, there are still too many deaths on road due to drunk/high drivers. More precisely: it's got a solution better than a current-generation, unsupervised self-driving car.
- darkwater 5y ago
  Or you can just let someone else drive, or you can just not drink or get high if you have to drive a long way back home, or take public transportation. These all are also "solutions" that don't work all the time. So a vehicle that can safely drive itself is yet another solution that can be added to mitigate the issue.
kmonsen 5y ago
It has been solved in other countries, but the U.S. is ok with the right people driving while drunk so has decided to not solve it. For example in Norway you can drink 1/4 of the amount that you can do in CA while driving, you get jail penalties at .05 and right from the start at .02 the fine is one month salary, meaning even if you are rich you will pay a meaningful amount. So in general Norwegians don’t drink and drive.
- exciteabletom 5y ago
  I love that the fines are scaled to income, makes so much more sense than a flat rate.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    That's a Scandinavian thing I love as well. I remeber that a Nokia CEO once paid the equivilant of a new Porsche 911 for a speeding ticket in Helsinki. On the other hand, I like it when my tickets are basically only table change for me. Egoistics aside, scaling tjose fines with income would be much fairer than a flat fee.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      Kind of gives police departments justification for profiling wealthier people. The country already has a serious problem with policing for profit, and you can bet it will only get worse if they can issue $10k+ tickets to individuals. As it stands now, if you get a BS ticket from one of these towns[1], you're out a few hundred bucks. Scale it up to a month's wage. In a lot of these places, you can't even get a fair trial because the local court is in on the action. https://www.thrillist.com/cars/nation/the-worst-speed-traps-in-every-state https://www.thrillist.com/cars/nation/the-worst-speed-traps-...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - cgriswald 5y ago

caddemon 5y ago

Yes drunk driver is not the right bar, but I think he still has a point. If the accident rate is less than overall human accident rate we should want to use the self driving cars, but the accident rate might still be high enough that a car company wouldn't want to claim 100% liability for every single accident. Car accidents are one of the top causes of premature death in the US. Self driving cars aren't there yet, but when they are an improvement on human driving they should be encouraged, even if the absolute numbers are still not amazing.

bseidensticker 5y ago
The problem is that it's a different set of people who will die with self driving cars. Imagine the trolley problem but instead of 5 vs 1 it's 30,000 vs 29,000. The 30,000 people get hit by the trolley and die if you don't pull the lever, and a completely different set of 29,000 people die. People who did not do anything wrong. People who had no chance to fix the situation. Sure, it's 1,000 fewer people, but none of those 29,000 people did anything wrong. They were all killed by the self driving systems made by car manufacturers. Regardless of whether or not you personally would pull the lever, you have to admit it's not the same as saving 1,000 lives.
- antoinealb 5y ago
  I just want to point out that drunk driving also kills innocent bystanders: pedestrians, cyclists, sober drivers around, etc.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  This is completely absurd reasoning. If we knew who was going to die, we'd let them know beforehand, so they could pick a safer spot on the street at their "death time". There's no such thing as a deterministic future, as you suggest. We can't stop doing things because a theoretical future will be changed. This is absurd.
  - enragedcacti 5y ago
    While it is a whiff, one grain of truth is that its possible that pedestrian deaths increase with self driving vehicles, even if overall deaths decrease. Is it fair to trade lives of people who choose not to drive a car at all for those who do? As of now NHTSA weighs weighs them identically which I think is a huge mistake. That said its hugely dependent on the technology involved. I think a Waymo is safer than your average driver already for pedestrians. FSD Beta if unmonitored would be drastically worse than your average driver for pedestrian safety.

donatj 5y ago

> It's called a taxi Try finding a taxi in about 99% of the US more than a few miles out from big cities. I live just outside Minneapolis and we were SOL until Lyft arrived. Lyft and Uber still aren't available in most small towns. This is not "solved".

tablespoon 5y ago
> Try finding a taxi in about 99% of the US more than a few miles out from big cities. > I live just outside Minneapolis and we were SOL until Lyft arrived. Lyft and Uber still aren't available in most small towns. This is not "solved". You can call for a taxi, even "just outside Minneapolis." Also, taxis aren't the only solution to drunk driving that's better than unsupervised self-driving cars. You also have things like designated drivers, etc. It would have been silly for me to enumerate every single one in my original comment.
cgriswald 5y ago
Unless things have drastically changed from my youth, a taxi is just a phone call away anywhere within about 40 miles of the Twin Cities.
HWR_14 5y ago
Then have a designated driver. It's not complicated. If you go out to a bar and cannot arrange for a designated driver than don't drink.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  easy to say, and not hard to do yourself. nearly impossible to convince the general public.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Make the bar identify a DD (or not if you're in an area with taxis) or lose their liquor license (like with serving underage kids). Or have them confiscate keys of people who drive into the parking lot and only give them back after a breathalyzer. It seems easy enough to do if we're serious about it.

avar 5y ago

> If they're not willing to [...] buy enough insurance to > pay out the claims [...] they [...] shouldn't be selling > [these] self-driving cars, period. The problem with this view is that you're assuming that the current risk created by drivers that society would benefit from moving to self-driving systems is priced into their current driving, or into their insurance. Western countries have mostly decided that society should simply eat that cost. If a child gets killed by a negligent driver the driver or their insurance is almost certainly not going to be "fairly" compensating anyone, to the extent that such a thing is even possible when it comes to losing a human life. There was a case in The Netherlands[1] where a grossly negligent driver killed 2 year old and her grandparents by rolling their car over them in a turn they were speeding through. The driver got probation, and a bit of community service. On reflection I don't even think that's a bad outcome per-se. Very few people could truthfully report that they've never broken the traffic law in a similar manner even once. It's mostly just moral luck that decides the difference between that being something stupid you did in your 20s with no repercussions, and another equally irresponsible person being unlucky enough to kill a child. So should that person spend 20 years in prison and be subject to wage slavery for the rest of their life as a result? Probably not. Now, imagine the same outcome, except this time the CEO of Tesla or Mercedes is going to have to answer in court for it. "Mr. Musk, why isn't your company paying out these parents fairly?". Of course a self-driving car is unlikely to accidentally make that specific mistake, but statistically the outcomes might be comparable. My point upthread is that we're almost certain to end up over-pricing the risk caused by self-driving vehicles, while directly and indirectly subsidizing the continued operation of motor vehicles by even more flawed human beings. People are simply bad at reacting to diffuse v.s. concentrated risk, and are inherently conservative when it comes to evaluating the risk of something new, v.s. an even riskier activity they've gotten used to. 1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-father-throw-chair-judge-4671450 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/watch-father-throw-...

tablespoon 5y ago
> The problem with this view is that you're assuming that the current risk created by drivers that society would benefit from moving to self-driving systems is priced into their current driving, or into their insurance. That's neither here nor there. Liability shouldn't be separated from the driver, since that's incentive for them to drive better. However, with self-driving vehicles, the driver is the manufacturer, full stop. > My point upthread is that we're almost certain to end up over-pricing the risk caused by self-driving vehicles, while directly and indirectly subsidizing the continued operation of motor vehicles by even more flawed human beings. 1. You're making the flawed assumption that self-driving vehicles will be better drivers than humans. Maybe they will be, maybe they won't. It's yet to be seen. We'll know once the manufactures can't cherry-pick driving conditions or rely on backup humans to smooth over their defects. 2. If the problem you outline is an issue, the solution of pushing liability onto people who are not actually driving is a bad one.

viscanti 5y ago

What if the person doesn't maintain their car? What if they drive through mud that partially covers some sensors? It seems like there are lots of things outside the control of the manufacturer. It's probably best to see if any future accidents are because of errors with the system or end user errors. Anything else is doomed to failure.

cgriswald 5y ago
The manufacturer controls the only thing that matters: whether the autonomous driving system will engage. If the sensors are covered in mud or the tires are detected to be bald, the system can choose not to engage, disengage with a window for a human driver to take over, or pull over and disengage.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  having a system that can detect the current state of all safety-related components of the car seems like an unreasonably high bar. humans are driving around right now with bald tires, loose lug nuts, bumpers held on by scotch tape and a dream, the list goes on.
  - mitchdoogle 5y ago
    It's probably easier to test for bald tires and loose lug nuts than you think. Don't know about bumpers, but I doubt something like that would be covered by the manufacturer's liability. I assume any collision involving the self-driving systems would have an investigation to determine fault, much the same way they do already
    - leetcrew 5y ago
      should be easy to test for loose lug nuts, I agree. bald tires (or inappropriate tires for the season, just as bad) I'm not so sure of though. afaik, limit of traction can only be determined by exceeding it. > I assume any collision involving the self-driving systems would have an investigation to determine fault, much the same way they do already agreed. specifically, I feel the manufacturer should design the system against some minimum level of maintenance and publish that. they would be liable for any mishaps that occur within design parameters. the driver/owner should be responsible for actually keeping the vehicle within that envelope. I don't feel that's an unreasonable burden.

buu700 5y ago

Since you brought up insurance, here's a third option: leave it up to manufacturers and consumers to determine how liability is structured in their private agreements, but make self-driving car insurance mandatory. This could even be enforced by mandating that new vehicles refuse to activate self-driving mode without a valid token as proof of insurance. With a system like that, the market would ultimately work out an optimal solution. Vehicles with safer technology and greater manufacturer liability would be subject to lower insurance rates, while on the other end of the spectrum consumers would be responsible for paying for the externalities of their choices. No one is going to use a self-driving mode that costs more than the vehicle itself to insure, so in theory manufacturers will be more strongly incentivized to get this right. Edit: A follow-up thought: self-driving car insurance should be independent of manual car insurance. They could be bundled together for savings, but someone who doesn't intend to drive manually shouldn't be required to purchase two types of insurance. Eventually, as the technology improves, self-driving insurance will become cheaper than manual insurance. This model also neatly solves the current issue of enforcing insurance requirements. If self-driving mode can require a valid insurance token, then so can manual driving mode.

TrainedMonkey 5y ago
This. Insurance is how liability should be handled because that aligns incentives for everyone. Tesla's approach "it's drivers responsibility to pay attention" is a cop out and "manufacturers are responsible for 100% of everything that happens when automation is active" will stifle tech development. Insurance can set premiums based on number of accidents in the area and let market find most efficient solution.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Insurance is about shifting risk. Sometimes shifting the risk aligns incentives and/or efficiently allocates the costs of the risk but it’s far from guaranteed.
  - buu700 5y ago
    It's not guaranteed, but there's money to be made for anyone who can accurately assess the risks and determine optimal rates. Price too low and the payouts will put you out of business; price too high and the competition will eat your lunch.

thrwy_ywrht 5y ago

>The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved. It's called a taxi. No need for defective self driving cars for that case. This is just wishful thinking. This is a description of what people should do, not what people actually do, and I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion. Millions of people drive while over the limit of alcohol consumption [1]. It is totally plausible that self-driving cars could radically reduce that number and improve overall safety even if they are not perfectly safe and occasionally cause accidents. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-americans-admit-to-drunk-driving-cdc-finds/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-americans-admit-to-...

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

You can say that "drunk driving is solved" if you speak from the point of view of the driver, because of course one can avoid it. But that's not too relevant. Getting killed by a drunk driver (which is actually the real problem) is far from solved. It's something that can happen to anyone.

chmod600 5y ago

"The "drunk driver returning home from the bar" problem has been solved." No, it has not. Taxis have been around as long as cars, and people are still dying. Drowsy driving hasn't been solved, either.

wolverine876 5y ago

> self-driving system they built It's not 'self-driving', it's driven by Mercedes's developers.

TheKarateKid 5y ago

> It's a total cop-out to not "accept 100% liability" for a self-driving system they built And what exactly is the liability for anyone produces cars that go well above and beyond every legal speed limit? By your logic, any car made that can go above the highest legal limit in a country should be held 100% liable for any accident occurring in that condition. A certain level of data should be collected and available upon every crash like with airplanes. If the manufacturer is found at fault due to a flaw in their design, then they should be liable.