4 ms·

> it's clear that human behavior and existing road design is still vastly worse Is that true? Those human statistics take every human car and driver into accou

by bmitc 4y ago

> it's clear that human behavior and existing road design is still vastly worse Is that true? Those human statistics take every human car and driver into account, not just Teslas. I have never seen data that shows self-driving cars anywhere close to human driving capability. If we replaced every car on the road with "self-driving" Teslas, it would be mayhem.

fallingknife 4y ago
If we replaced every car, it would be an easy problem. The issue is having to replace one at a time while everyone else on the road is still human.
- spookie 4y ago
  Or... Just make public transportation work? Is this just that difficult to get on the anglosphere or something? I still cannot grasp what people are trying to do with this, really. Why are they trying to do public transports... With cars? You guys do realize most of accidents come from urban/chaotic areas, right? You don't have to use a car to solve this.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    The percentage of people in the US that live in an area dense enough where even an ideally designed public transport system would match the convenience of a car is in the low single digits. When I go to European cities with these great public transportation systems everybody loves to talk about, what to I see on the road? Lots of cars. Cars aren't going anywhere.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
Most of the "teslas are safer than other cars!" stats are severely biased because: 1)Teslas are "luxury" vehicles, much higher-end than the average US car. A base Model S, or average model 3, costs twice the average US car cost. They are as a result significantly better equipped with safety features and have better crash engineering. In terms of driver assistance, the auto industry was pretty belligerent about backup cameras being mandated, just to give one example. 2)Teslas are on a whole significantly newer than the average US car. The average age of a car on the road in the US is twenty years old. Of course a Tesla with safety features not available until ~10 years ago (or less) is safer than a 1999 anything. If people said "my electric Mercedes is significantly safer than the average car, so Mercedes should be allowed to beta-test their software, which despite after many years of development is proven to randomly slam on the brakes, or drive into the back of emergency vehicles, and is shown on numerous videos to violate traffic laws, suddenly veer at poles and barriers and pedestrians and cyclists" ...they'd be laughed out of the room on a number of points.
- jtc331 4y ago
  One more big one related to your first point: the demographic driving Teslas is hardly a random sampling of the population, which probably impacts driving behavior _but also_ implies the driving done (e.g., where) is probably quite different from the population as a whole.
- spookie 4y ago
  So true, we're (unfortunately) going to see accidents more frequently as time goes on.
iso1631 4y ago
I guess it depends how you classify crashes when the automated car goes "Meh, I've got no idea, you take over" and then crashes 2 seconds later. But America isn't too concerned with road deaths (equivelant of one 9/11 per month, or 240 9/11s in the period of time the US occupied Afghanistan in response. Financially the response to 9/11 cost about $950b - $300m per death. By that reckoning the US government should be spending about $12.8 Trillion dollars a year on reducing road deaths, about half of the US GDP.

by bmitc 4y ago

fallingknife 4y ago

If we replaced every car, it would be an easy problem. The issue is having to replace one at a time while everyone else on the road is still human.

spookie 4y ago
Or... Just make public transportation work? Is this just that difficult to get on the anglosphere or something? I still cannot grasp what people are trying to do with this, really. Why are they trying to do public transports... With cars? You guys do realize most of accidents come from urban/chaotic areas, right? You don't have to use a car to solve this.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  The percentage of people in the US that live in an area dense enough where even an ideally designed public transport system would match the convenience of a car is in the low single digits. When I go to European cities with these great public transportation systems everybody loves to talk about, what to I see on the road? Lots of cars. Cars aren't going anywhere.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

Most of the "teslas are safer than other cars!" stats are severely biased because: 1)Teslas are "luxury" vehicles, much higher-end than the average US car. A base Model S, or average model 3, costs twice the average US car cost. They are as a result significantly better equipped with safety features and have better crash engineering. In terms of driver assistance, the auto industry was pretty belligerent about backup cameras being mandated, just to give one example. 2)Teslas are on a whole significantly newer than the average US car. The average age of a car on the road in the US is twenty years old. Of course a Tesla with safety features not available until ~10 years ago (or less) is safer than a 1999 anything. If people said "my electric Mercedes is significantly safer than the average car, so Mercedes should be allowed to beta-test their software, which despite after many years of development is proven to randomly slam on the brakes, or drive into the back of emergency vehicles, and is shown on numerous videos to violate traffic laws, suddenly veer at poles and barriers and pedestrians and cyclists" ...they'd be laughed out of the room on a number of points.

jtc331 4y ago
One more big one related to your first point: the demographic driving Teslas is hardly a random sampling of the population, which probably impacts driving behavior _but also_ implies the driving done (e.g., where) is probably quite different from the population as a whole.
spookie 4y ago
So true, we're (unfortunately) going to see accidents more frequently as time goes on.

iso1631 4y ago

I guess it depends how you classify crashes when the automated car goes "Meh, I've got no idea, you take over" and then crashes 2 seconds later. But America isn't too concerned with road deaths (equivelant of one 9/11 per month, or 240 9/11s in the period of time the US occupied Afghanistan in response. Financially the response to 9/11 cost about $950b - $300m per death. By that reckoning the US government should be spending about $12.8 Trillion dollars a year on reducing road deaths, about half of the US GDP.