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Beating the national average never should have been seen as the finish line. The average is dragged down into the gutter by a minority of drivers who choose t

Beating the national average never should have been seen as the finish line. The average is dragged down into the gutter by a minority of drivers who choose to engage in very poor behavior, like driving drunk, speeding, making unnecessary trips at night and bad weather, street racing, etc. By simply avoiding these few behaviors, it's easy to put yourself well above the average. (inb4 "everybody thinks they're better than the average"; most people who think this are correct. Bad driving doesn't have a normal distribution.) If you want to impose self-driving on everybody, it should be at least as good as the best drivers. It would be a grave injustice to force it on the best drivers if it can't match their performance. As for the bar to pass for simply allowing, not mandating, self driving: I think they should first exceed the skill of a student driver. If they can't then they don't belong on the road without supervision, just like a student driver.

dkarl 4y ago
> If you want to impose self-driving on everybody, it should be at least as good as the best drivers. I would gladly have self-driving imposed on me if it were also imposed on drunks, teenagers, and the elderly. Sounds like a great trade-off.
kube-system 4y ago
You can see this in actuarial data that the IIHS posts. Often, cars that perform comparably in crash tests have wildly different real world loss rates. The difference is likely explainable by differences in driver behavior. For example, look at any car also sold under a hybrid trim model, the hybrid almost always has lower rates of injury. For an identical chassis. Or, consider the brands that have good crash test rating, but target subprime buyers.... in comparison to brands that have similar crash performance but target higher incomes and/or higher credit profiles. Nissan and Kia vehicles often have good crash test ratings, but they consistently have bad real-world crash data. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/insurance-losses-by-make-and-model https://www.iihs.org/ratings/insurance-losses-by-make-and-mo...
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  I noticed the same thing. It seems pretty reasonable that the kind of person who drives a 350hp Volvo hybrid wagon is most often not the same kind of person who drives a 350hp Mustang.
TrevorJ 4y ago
I don't disagree, but that's not quite the problem space I am curious about. My thesis is that as a society we've accepted that humans make mistakes and will kill people on the road. I suspect that society will be much less willing to accept that sort of thinking when it's an AI-driven vehicle making the mistakes, no matter how much better at driving it is. I suspect we will always want, or need someone (as opposed to some thing) to blame when the worst happens.
- dkarl 4y ago
  It's also an exotic, scary risk, as opposed to a familiar risk we've come to accept, like the risks of nuclear power versus the risks of fossil fuel power. We'll never compare a death from one fairly with a death from the other because one feels extra and the other feels normal. A future in which self-driving cars kill 3,000 people per year in the U.S. sounds unimaginably grotesque to most people, even though that's less than a tenth of the number of people killed by human-driven cars.

dkarl 4y ago

> If you want to impose self-driving on everybody, it should be at least as good as the best drivers. I would gladly have self-driving imposed on me if it were also imposed on drunks, teenagers, and the elderly. Sounds like a great trade-off.

kube-system 4y ago

You can see this in actuarial data that the IIHS posts. Often, cars that perform comparably in crash tests have wildly different real world loss rates. The difference is likely explainable by differences in driver behavior. For example, look at any car also sold under a hybrid trim model, the hybrid almost always has lower rates of injury. For an identical chassis. Or, consider the brands that have good crash test rating, but target subprime buyers.... in comparison to brands that have similar crash performance but target higher incomes and/or higher credit profiles. Nissan and Kia vehicles often have good crash test ratings, but they consistently have bad real-world crash data. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/insurance-losses-by-make-and-model https://www.iihs.org/ratings/insurance-losses-by-make-and-mo...

alphabettsy 4y ago
I noticed the same thing. It seems pretty reasonable that the kind of person who drives a 350hp Volvo hybrid wagon is most often not the same kind of person who drives a 350hp Mustang.

TrevorJ 4y ago

I don't disagree, but that's not quite the problem space I am curious about. My thesis is that as a society we've accepted that humans make mistakes and will kill people on the road. I suspect that society will be much less willing to accept that sort of thinking when it's an AI-driven vehicle making the mistakes, no matter how much better at driving it is. I suspect we will always want, or need someone (as opposed to some thing) to blame when the worst happens.

dkarl 4y ago
It's also an exotic, scary risk, as opposed to a familiar risk we've come to accept, like the risks of nuclear power versus the risks of fossil fuel power. We'll never compare a death from one fairly with a death from the other because one feels extra and the other feels normal. A future in which self-driving cars kill 3,000 people per year in the U.S. sounds unimaginably grotesque to most people, even though that's less than a tenth of the number of people killed by human-driven cars.