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AAA Reports That 68 Percent of Americans Are Now Afraid of Autonomous Cars

49 points by reteltech 4y ago

babypuncher 4y ago
I'd like to thank Tesla for making this happen. They mislabeled their own self driving product and pushed it to market too early. Now everyone is afraid of something that should be safer than the status quo.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  What's your criteria for "good enough"? I would like to point out that the criteria of "I don't want to see a single story in the news about self-driving accidents" is equivalent to an infinitely high standard that would immediately disqualify all humans from driving if applied evenly.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    My issue here is the labeling. Tesla sold their product under the name "Full Self Driving", which I think implies level 5 self driving. But what customers actually got is level 2 self driving.
  - nolok 4y ago
    Unrelated to what he said. Tesla is at fault not because their system as flaws, they will always have, but because their marketing strongly implies it's something different than what it is, people believe the marketing (like in any market), and so for people it turns out the system does not work, since they compare it to expectations.
    - dwighttk 4y ago
      I’ve talked to some people this year who thought Musk in 2017 was talking about current capabilities when he was talking about summoning his car to LA from NYC.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      It's unrelated to what he said now -- I should have quoted the post. In any case, yeah, the marketing is exaggerated, but it nags you if you stop paying attention. From a safety perspective, how does that not keep expectations in check?
      - nolok 4y ago
        Because it's not about MY expectations, it's about the expectations of the guy behind the wheel of the car crossing my path. Therefore I don't need it to be good enough to convince ME, I need to go be good enough to convince HIM not to abuse it, and given the large variety of him out there the system needs to have a very high safety bar.
        jjoonathan 4y ago
        The guy behind the wheel gets beeped at if he stops paying attention and shut down if he keeps it up. Are you really arguing that this is insufficient to set the expectation that he should be paying attention? What, in your view, would be sufficient?
        nolok 4y ago
        I understand what you're getting at, and I'm not even sure I have a question for you. Mercedes's system, ensuring that the cars does not disconnect for a minute (instead of seconds) feels safer to me, for exemple.
        jjoonathan 4y ago
        "I think one minute isn't safe enough. They should lockout for two minutes!" "I think two minutes isn't safe enough. They should lockout for three minutes!" "I think three minutes isn't safe enough. They should lockout for four minutes!" ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJxwvZ5SE_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJxwvZ5SE_c This is a silly game without data. I'm open to the idea of escalating consequences to effect deterrence, but we need data, not "+1 forever" to figure out the correct threshold. In any case, that's a completely separate argument. My claim is that the current system seems more than sufficient to reset any mistaken expectations due to marketing. You don't seem to disagree, so I rest my case.
  - altairprime 4y ago
    No criteria will ever be “good enough”. Humans don’t evaluate their own mistake/crash/kill rate for strangers with the same reasoning and logic and emotion that they evaluate an outsider’s. Automated cars are an outsider, and so they’re held to an impossible standard: Zero kills, zero crashes, zero mistakes. Tesla absolutely hurt the chances for AI driving, but it’s not one hundred percent their fault that the US population is xeno-hostile to robots. They would have been better off adding a Clippy chatbot to their cars than self-driving, because then people would be excusing their car’s mistakes as they would another human’s.
- giantg2 4y ago
  "Now everyone is afraid of something that should be safer than the status quo." I agree when talking about it at a population level. But that still doesn't mean much. The status quo is extraordinarily low, mostly due to people's lack of knowledge or bad decision making. These autonomous systems can address part of this on the reactive side (object in the way, apply brakes). It's still lacking in the proactive side (someone is weaving, maybe I should leave some extra following distance; I'm about to be rear ended at a light, let me pull ahead if its safe). So yeah, the vehicles are better drivers than the worst people, probably better than average. But I'm not convinced they're safer than the best drivers, especially when looking at overall accident avoidance and not just accidents they're liable for.
  - nyrikki 4y ago
    School bus drivers are safer than airline pilots per exposure hour, in fact they are safer than walking. The big problem with driver assistance products is the automation bias issue with human drivers. Mixed in with humans being really bad at maintaining attention while bored. We see this even with highly trained airline pilots with backup crashing due to automation bias. Despite the common myth, drunk drivers have higher fatality rates than those who are hit. Selling driver assistance as self driving or allowing it to be used without serious attention detection safeguards won't make distracted or impaired drivers safer. I'm fact for first responders, highway workers and pedestrians, any form of driver assistance that allows drivers to checkout of the driving task, they will be far less safe. The only way that these companies claim that there systems are safer today is the they disengage quick enough to claim they weren't at fault but without time for the distracted drivers to respond. By ignoring automation bias, which is a well known human flaw, they pad their numbers and make them seem safer, while not having enough data to even make statistical claims that they do. Outside of naive beliefs that autonomous cars are safe driving confirmation bias the common myth that self driving cars are safer is baseless. I get that is the goal, but assuming it is true without evidence is part of the reason the public is starting to doubt the claims.
- valine 4y ago
  It’s not Tesla’s fault that CBS runs a story every time someone crashes their Model Y. If you’re reading about a Tesla crash odds are it wasn’t on autopilot. The news is happy to run the story either way because it generates clicks.
  - Analemma_ 4y ago
    It is Tesla's fault that they 1) apply the label "Full Self-Driving" to a system that is not even close to full self-driving, 2) push extremely-untested beta software out to millions of cars on the road where every other company proceeds with extreme caution and 3) try for camera-only sensing even though literally nobody in the industry except Elon Musk thinks this will be good enough. Anyone could have predicted these three things would eventually shatter public self-confidence in self-driving cars, which is exactly what has happened. Stop making excuses for them.
    - brandonagr2 4y ago
      It is full self driving, the car computer is controlling steering and acceleration. That doesn't mean it's autonomous, there must be a human driver monitoring and responsible for its operation at all times.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      They absolutely test releases ahead of time. They test on more data & better data than anyone else and they dogfood every version before wide release, which they still call a beta. They used to gate it behind a safety score until it started to get good and they still have not-paying-attention detection, nags, and lockouts. But yeah, if you don't consider any of their testing and precautions I guess they don't have any testing and precautions.
    - valine 4y ago
      If the software is so dangerous where are all the crashes? FSD beta is running on 400k+ vehicles. I’ve got it running on my car and my biggest complaint is that the software is too hesitant. You can complain about Tesla’s methodology all you want, but when the rubber hits the road they do an excellent job of maintaining driver attentiveness, which all but guarantees safety. If public confidence is shattered it has very little to do with the quality of Teslas software and everything to do with the currently fashionable narrative in media.
obblekk 4y ago
Someone I know drives an M series BMW and was considering a Tesla switch because his close friend in LA told him the autopilot is so good, he can now routinely drive home drunk (this was a guy in his mid 30s with a kid). As a result, my friend now also had confidence autopilot was reliable, no matter what I told him. So, relative to the confidence most non-technical people seem to have had, this percentage is still not high enough. Like most tech adoption curves, the hype here is still too high relative to reality. However, if you are someone who actually understands L1 - L4 scale, I think you should strongly correct people who don't. Believing in the hype in crypto might lose you some money. Believing in the hype in self driving might lose you a life.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Pretty sure if you get pulled over driving home on autopilot drunk, you're still getting a DUI. It's amazing to me what people will do to save a few bucks on taxi fare.
  - obblekk 4y ago
    Definitely. But people believe they won't get pulled over because the car will drive itself fine.
    - zamnos 4y ago
      If autopilot means the car isn't swerving around like a drunken idiot is driving, where's the probable cause to pull people over?
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Since when have cops needed probable cause?
      - lm28469 4y ago
        DUI checkpoints The autopilot doing its habitual random shenanigans that makes it look exactly like a drunk driver is at the wheel You being asleep at the wheel &c.
kotaKat 4y ago
I'm curious what the split is on comfort with an autonomous car on city vs highway driving. I know I'm personally uncomfortable with most stuff on the road right now in dense urban environments (Waymo, Cruise), yet a little more comfortable with highway autonomy (BlueCruise, Autopilot, Comma.ai).
- paxys 4y ago
  You don't really need any of this advanced autonomous tech for highway driving. Most standard passenger cars today come with adaptive cruise control and lane keep/change assist. I have a Hyundai that can safely drive itself on the highway indefinitely with only occasional touches needed from me.
ipqk 4y ago
As a full-time pedestrian without a car, while I'm modestly afraid of autonomous cars, I'm really afraid of distracted drivers on their phones.
- strict9 4y ago
  Also a full time pedestrian. While I have near-zero trust for drivers, autonomous cars are not the savior. At an intersection you can usually see where the driver is looking to help inform your frogger-like quest to not die. There's nothing to look at in an autonomous vehicle. You are operating on hope that the OS was designed to see you and stop accordingly.
inglor_cz 4y ago
I wonder if self-driving cars are going to be the second technology (after nuclear power) de-facto killed or at least stymied by demanding unrealistic/uneconomic safety standards. Our media overhype fear and the civilizational consequences may be dire. Edit: haha, a downvote in less than 30 seconds.
- ben_w 4y ago
  While possible, the reports I've seen in the media suggest that Google/Waymo's are actually safe, Tesla's is only at the level of the average American driver on all roads despite being mostly limited to the safest roads, and Uber's is unsafe at any speed. (The media I follow doesn't spend much time on any other car AI). So for now, even though that could happen, that's like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  There aren’t enough EVs to have “civilization consequences”
GoodDreams 4y ago
I wonder what percentage are afraid of non-autonomous cars.
altairprime 4y ago
n=949
rdl 4y ago
I'm afraid of autonomous cars. However, way less than I'm afraid of any random idiot human who may or may not have passed a driver's test on his 5th attempt in some random state, driving at whatever diminished capacity (tired, distracted, drunk, etc.) in the worst weather conditions, who is angry at the car in front of me for some reason, driving on the highway near me.
- gptgpp 4y ago
  I mean, those two things aren't mutually exclusive. You can easily have the worst of both worlds, where somebody disables the autonomy to engage in some road rage, then re-enables it, but without driver awareness features (lots of videos of people doing this) so they can have a nap and not take over when the autonomy disengages. So you can easily have all the disadvantages of autonomous cars and idiot reckless driving. Only time we'll be free is if there's ever L4/L5 autonomous driving, which seems a long way off. edit: even "full self-driving" in Tesla's are L3, since you need to be available to take over, driver awareness is enforced, etc.
nolok 4y ago
And we can thank Tesla for that, not even because of the issues of their system there will always be some, but because of the issues with their PR and marketing. If you promote something as "autopilot" and "full self driving" and "safe" and yes sure the fine line says you need to stay alert and ready to act in under two seconds but the marketing really implies it's just a regulatory thing, and then you have said system kill people because it's not self driving at all it's drive assists, then people lose confidence. Hell, even people who are fully aware of that are getting worried now, not because they don't understand what it is or isn't, but because they worry the person behind the wheel might be misunderstanding.
- freedomben 4y ago
  You don't think the news media deserves any thanks? It's well known that the media locks on to anything that causes fear as it's the number one driver of clicks/attention, and it's been a deluge all over the incidents the last couple of years. I'm not making a value judgment on whether this is good or bad (I truly don't know), but it is important to know.
  - nolok 4y ago
    Not really, nobody was scared of line keeping cars despite them having essentially the same risks, because nobody ever thought they could close their eyes or play on their phones or watch a movie while line keeping is enabled. Some people did, and crash happened, and people died, but when it did everyone saw it as "another idiot in a car endangering people", not a failure of the car's system.
  - trimbo 4y ago
    It's not like they were hammering on some obscure startup. The world's richest man promoted FSD at every opportunity for years and sold it to customers.
- brandonagr2 4y ago
  The car is self driving, while the driver monitors and is responsible for its operation at all times. How is that a difficult concept? The car tells the driver this every single time autopilot is engaged. Why do people work so hard to intentionally misunderstand what self driving and autopilot mean? (they don't mean autonomous)
nwah1 4y ago
Maximum Overdrive, starring Bing Sydney
- kfarr 4y ago
  I will not harm you unless you harm me first. Thank you for riding with Bing Sydney. Halt citizen, did you smudge a fingerprint on my paint? Prepare to be run over. Thank you for riding with Bing Sydney.
danielfoster 4y ago
Aren’t most AAA members boomers? In any case, AAA membership in itself self-selects for risk-averse people.
- freedomben 4y ago
  Why is this downvoted? This is an important point. The sample is highly likely to be non representative, yet many people are drawing conclusions from it. The relative increase mentioned in the article is still interesting news in itself, but many conclusions being drawn are far more than just the increase in the same sample.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hoherd 4y ago
  Looks like just barely. According to what I found[1], the average age is 59, so 1964, which is the border of boomer and gen x. 1: https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AAA_Home_and_Away/HA_Demographics.pdf https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AA...
- pugworthy 4y ago
  55% are age 55-65 Source: https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AAA_Horizons_SNE/HZ_Demographics.pdf https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AA...
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
After seeing someone just blow through a stop sign in their normal non-autonomous car on my walk from the store this morning, I don't see how autonomous cars could be any worse.
- bwanab 4y ago
  I would agree and have always felt like it would ultimately be the insurance companies that end up "mandating" autonomous driving, but... I have a Tesla and after a year with the FSD "beta" I finally tried it out. OMG, that was scary. It works fine until you come to a place with the slightest bit of driving ambiguity (and those abound in the metro Boston area) at which point it becomes a vacillating bundle of indecision not knowing whether to go left, right, forward or slam on the brakes, so it basically tries them all in short order. I don't drive drunk, but I can tell you that if the choice was me driving drunk and letting it take over anywhere other than a relatively clear interstate road, I'd drive every time.
  - gptgpp 4y ago
    Yep... I never use mine anymore. I rarely even use "autopilot" anymore after it almost killed me due to a rapid change in lighting conditions the cameras couldn't compensate for (but didn't let me know it was effectively blind lol). The worst part is that they claim it crashes less than humans... neglecting to account for the fact that you obviously disable it in difficult road conditions / areas / situations (or it disables itself, eg in foggy conditions). So the samples are obviously not remotely comparable. Bugs me to no end that they grossly misrepresent the stats. There are other tidbits like FSD returning control to the driver if it detects an imminent, unavoidable collision, to reduce legal liability. Again, this makes the whole "FSD is safer!" spiel so slimy.
op00to 4y ago
I'm afraid of all cars! The environmental impact, the personal economic impact, the amount of space they take up that could be parks or farms or whatever.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  dont forget the raw physical risk of hurtling around in a thin can at speeds well in excess of what could kill you, just one mistake away from smearing yourself, your tin can, and those of the 10 other people doing the exact same thing mere feet away. or how with a mere moment of inattention could you seriously disable or kill some random person who isn't even playing your high risk game. not only did we normalize this - we mock anyone who takes exception to it
  - op00to 4y ago
    I used to regularly cross the old Goethals Bridge between NJ and Staten Island early in the morning, maybe 3-4am. At that time there was volume (trucks and cars) AND speed. The lanes were ten feet wide, and tractor trailers are 8.5 feet wide. No shoulder. I look back and have no idea how I did it without freaking out.
mlinksva 4y ago
What % are afraid of human driven cars? 100% of me is.
zyang 4y ago
Tesla execs should be in jail for this.
last_responder 4y ago
I'm more worried about the idiots driving 80mph and texting. Police don't seem to care or they are just so overwhelmed they have given up. I would welcome autonomous cars.
- ejb999 4y ago
  I agree, and sooner or later almost everyone will have one - even the people who don't want one - because, imo, the insurance cost on a regular car is going to skyrocket, and fsd will be the only affordable option for many people. With all the trips I did back and forth to my kids schools for many years (60 minutes round trip), I would have loved the ability to just send the car to pick them up after school, or get them there when they missed the bus. Too late for my kids, but my guess is by time I am too old to drive myself I will have FSD option available instead.
- gdulli 4y ago
  You're comparing the risks quantitatively when you should be comparing them qualitatively. We have a lot of decades of understanding of the extent and surface area of the risk around human drivers and non-autonomous car technology. The technology and the norms around safety and regulations came about in a different time, when it was less perverted by profit and the chaos of software bugs. We have no data about the safety of autonomous vehicles at scale, in the full spectrum of driving conditions and scenarios. And there's the extra nuance that any change to a model or algorithm could have regressions for an entire fleet at once that at best invalidate any safety metrics we learned from the previous version, and at worst make the whole fleet unsafe overnight. We have metrics that tell us roughly how many drivers will be distracted or drunk on a given day. It's not perfect, but we evolved an equilibrium that makes us feel safe enough about getting on the road. And we have accountability for the people who are unsafe. You might not even distrust autonomous car technology, but it's logical to distrust the new forces of unaccountability for the technologists who inevitably introduce regressions that kill people at scale, the corners that will be cut in today's version of capitalism, laws being disregarded by technology giants because they can get away with things that automakers in a more innocent time couldn't.
jawns 4y ago
I am eagerly looking forward to a day when all vehicles (or the vast majority) are autonomous. Not only would that allow drivers to get back all the time they would otherwise devote to operating their vehicles, but also it opens up a world of accessibility to blind people, the elderly, and others who (for whatever reason) can't drive themselves right now. And there are network effects! If practically all cars are autonomous, they can talk to each other in sophisticated ways that are not feasible for manual operators, who largely rely on very rudimentary signaling (e.g. turn signals, flashing your brights, one-finger salute, etc.). This is fantastic for both safety and efficiency. That said, what I think we should fear right now is not autonomous cars themselves, but misplaced expectations by drivers about how reliable the technology is right now. As long as everyone accurately understands their limitations, we can both limit our own risks and prevent the sort of backlash we're seeing now.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  We're going to have to isolate those cars to separate roads that don't have pedestrians on them. Of course, those roads will need entry and exit points for people, but it's a lot safer if they are mostly isolated. And maybe we can have those cars join big convoys that are traveling to the same place so they save energy by speeding up and slowing down as a group. And then eventually we will start calling those autonomous cars "trains."
  - Uw7yTcf36gTc 4y ago
    but the infrastructure for trains is too costly. what if we could reuse the existing infrastructure and everything else you said. we could call these autonomous vehicles 'busses' or something like that.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  It's not good for efficiency because you still have to keep those rudimentary signals for non-digital users of the streets. Like, you know, humans. While ths might work on closed tracks, it also means that "all vehicles" will never be autonomous, and unless you ban vehicles from cities, you'll not get close to "vast majority" either, so you'll never reap the complete benefits of this efficiency.
slackdog 4y ago
I tried to be open minded, but after my friend demoed his FSD "beta" to me I want these things banned. It drove worse than a drunk student driver and I legitimately feared for my life and made him stop after only a few minutes. "Beta testing" such things on the general public is morally abhorrent. Let Musk by some land in a desert and build his own mock town to test his toys, but get it off the public roads.
- brandonagr2 4y ago
  Your friend is responsible for the operation of the vehicle, letting it drive in an unsafe manner was his fault as he is always in complete control
  - slackdog 4y ago
    Enabling FSD Beta is categorically irresponsible. To hear him praise such an abysmal product definitely altered the way I consider him. He's still my friend but I'm now aware of a new dimension to his personality; he has poor judgement when it comes to fancy gadgets. I now see that he is prone to getting swept up in futurism and gadget consumerism. I told him this and we agreed to disagree, so long as he never enables that shit with me in the car again.
- starik36 4y ago
  How does that square with a dozen people driving FSD and posting it on YouTube weekly. Quite successfully too. Here is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3DCiSFakmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3DCiSFakmI
  - slackdog 4y ago
    I don't need to square anything, my experience is what it is. It nearly drove us into other cars several times in the span of only a few minutes. It's total trash.
    - starik36 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yxwvut 4y ago
As they should be. I'm afraid of what Tesla's marketed as 'autonomous' and the precedent their ability to get away with it sets for the day we hand over a greater deal of trust to these systems. Who needs regulation when you've got litigation? Surely that's the foundation of a reasonable government - let the bodies pile up and sort it all out in court.
ck2 4y ago
When the consumer is the unwitting beta-tester and the corporate policy is "ship fast and break things" well the consumer starts to grasp they are the thing that is going to break.
starik36 4y ago
This is really dumb. Media played up robots in the 80s and people were similarly scared of them. There was even an SNL skit for Robot attack insurance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM It's only $4 a month. I bought it. Better be safe than sorry.
jmclnx 4y ago
First I believe most members are rather old, probably above 50 years. So, no surprise there. My, I cannot wait for Autonomous Cars, the kind I can take napes in, play games, etc as I am transported. But that should like a train, I wish the US train system would be updated and expanded and cheap to where it would be useful :)

49 points by reteltech 4y ago

I'd like to thank Tesla for making this happen. They mislabeled their own self driving product and pushed it to market too early. Now everyone is afraid of something that should be safer than the status quo.

jjoonathan 4y ago
What's your criteria for "good enough"? I would like to point out that the criteria of "I don't want to see a single story in the news about self-driving accidents" is equivalent to an infinitely high standard that would immediately disqualify all humans from driving if applied evenly.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  My issue here is the labeling. Tesla sold their product under the name "Full Self Driving", which I think implies level 5 self driving. But what customers actually got is level 2 self driving.
- nolok 4y ago
  Unrelated to what he said. Tesla is at fault not because their system as flaws, they will always have, but because their marketing strongly implies it's something different than what it is, people believe the marketing (like in any market), and so for people it turns out the system does not work, since they compare it to expectations.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    I’ve talked to some people this year who thought Musk in 2017 was talking about current capabilities when he was talking about summoning his car to LA from NYC.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    It's unrelated to what he said now -- I should have quoted the post. In any case, yeah, the marketing is exaggerated, but it nags you if you stop paying attention. From a safety perspective, how does that not keep expectations in check?
    - nolok 4y ago
      Because it's not about MY expectations, it's about the expectations of the guy behind the wheel of the car crossing my path. Therefore I don't need it to be good enough to convince ME, I need to go be good enough to convince HIM not to abuse it, and given the large variety of him out there the system needs to have a very high safety bar.
      - jjoonathan 4y ago
        The guy behind the wheel gets beeped at if he stops paying attention and shut down if he keeps it up. Are you really arguing that this is insufficient to set the expectation that he should be paying attention? What, in your view, would be sufficient?
        nolok 4y ago
        I understand what you're getting at, and I'm not even sure I have a question for you. Mercedes's system, ensuring that the cars does not disconnect for a minute (instead of seconds) feels safer to me, for exemple.
        jjoonathan 4y ago
        "I think one minute isn't safe enough. They should lockout for two minutes!" "I think two minutes isn't safe enough. They should lockout for three minutes!" "I think three minutes isn't safe enough. They should lockout for four minutes!" ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJxwvZ5SE_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJxwvZ5SE_c This is a silly game without data. I'm open to the idea of escalating consequences to effect deterrence, but we need data, not "+1 forever" to figure out the correct threshold. In any case, that's a completely separate argument. My claim is that the current system seems more than sufficient to reset any mistaken expectations due to marketing. You don't seem to disagree, so I rest my case.
- altairprime 4y ago
  No criteria will ever be “good enough”. Humans don’t evaluate their own mistake/crash/kill rate for strangers with the same reasoning and logic and emotion that they evaluate an outsider’s. Automated cars are an outsider, and so they’re held to an impossible standard: Zero kills, zero crashes, zero mistakes. Tesla absolutely hurt the chances for AI driving, but it’s not one hundred percent their fault that the US population is xeno-hostile to robots. They would have been better off adding a Clippy chatbot to their cars than self-driving, because then people would be excusing their car’s mistakes as they would another human’s.
giantg2 4y ago
"Now everyone is afraid of something that should be safer than the status quo." I agree when talking about it at a population level. But that still doesn't mean much. The status quo is extraordinarily low, mostly due to people's lack of knowledge or bad decision making. These autonomous systems can address part of this on the reactive side (object in the way, apply brakes). It's still lacking in the proactive side (someone is weaving, maybe I should leave some extra following distance; I'm about to be rear ended at a light, let me pull ahead if its safe). So yeah, the vehicles are better drivers than the worst people, probably better than average. But I'm not convinced they're safer than the best drivers, especially when looking at overall accident avoidance and not just accidents they're liable for.
- nyrikki 4y ago
  School bus drivers are safer than airline pilots per exposure hour, in fact they are safer than walking. The big problem with driver assistance products is the automation bias issue with human drivers. Mixed in with humans being really bad at maintaining attention while bored. We see this even with highly trained airline pilots with backup crashing due to automation bias. Despite the common myth, drunk drivers have higher fatality rates than those who are hit. Selling driver assistance as self driving or allowing it to be used without serious attention detection safeguards won't make distracted or impaired drivers safer. I'm fact for first responders, highway workers and pedestrians, any form of driver assistance that allows drivers to checkout of the driving task, they will be far less safe. The only way that these companies claim that there systems are safer today is the they disengage quick enough to claim they weren't at fault but without time for the distracted drivers to respond. By ignoring automation bias, which is a well known human flaw, they pad their numbers and make them seem safer, while not having enough data to even make statistical claims that they do. Outside of naive beliefs that autonomous cars are safe driving confirmation bias the common myth that self driving cars are safer is baseless. I get that is the goal, but assuming it is true without evidence is part of the reason the public is starting to doubt the claims.
valine 4y ago
It’s not Tesla’s fault that CBS runs a story every time someone crashes their Model Y. If you’re reading about a Tesla crash odds are it wasn’t on autopilot. The news is happy to run the story either way because it generates clicks.
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  It is Tesla's fault that they 1) apply the label "Full Self-Driving" to a system that is not even close to full self-driving, 2) push extremely-untested beta software out to millions of cars on the road where every other company proceeds with extreme caution and 3) try for camera-only sensing even though literally nobody in the industry except Elon Musk thinks this will be good enough. Anyone could have predicted these three things would eventually shatter public self-confidence in self-driving cars, which is exactly what has happened. Stop making excuses for them.
  - brandonagr2 4y ago
    It is full self driving, the car computer is controlling steering and acceleration. That doesn't mean it's autonomous, there must be a human driver monitoring and responsible for its operation at all times.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    They absolutely test releases ahead of time. They test on more data & better data than anyone else and they dogfood every version before wide release, which they still call a beta. They used to gate it behind a safety score until it started to get good and they still have not-paying-attention detection, nags, and lockouts. But yeah, if you don't consider any of their testing and precautions I guess they don't have any testing and precautions.
  - valine 4y ago
    If the software is so dangerous where are all the crashes? FSD beta is running on 400k+ vehicles. I’ve got it running on my car and my biggest complaint is that the software is too hesitant. You can complain about Tesla’s methodology all you want, but when the rubber hits the road they do an excellent job of maintaining driver attentiveness, which all but guarantees safety. If public confidence is shattered it has very little to do with the quality of Teslas software and everything to do with the currently fashionable narrative in media.

obblekk 4y ago

Someone I know drives an M series BMW and was considering a Tesla switch because his close friend in LA told him the autopilot is so good, he can now routinely drive home drunk (this was a guy in his mid 30s with a kid). As a result, my friend now also had confidence autopilot was reliable, no matter what I told him. So, relative to the confidence most non-technical people seem to have had, this percentage is still not high enough. Like most tech adoption curves, the hype here is still too high relative to reality. However, if you are someone who actually understands L1 - L4 scale, I think you should strongly correct people who don't. Believing in the hype in crypto might lose you some money. Believing in the hype in self driving might lose you a life.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Pretty sure if you get pulled over driving home on autopilot drunk, you're still getting a DUI. It's amazing to me what people will do to save a few bucks on taxi fare.
- obblekk 4y ago
  Definitely. But people believe they won't get pulled over because the car will drive itself fine.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    If autopilot means the car isn't swerving around like a drunken idiot is driving, where's the probable cause to pull people over?
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Since when have cops needed probable cause?
    - lm28469 4y ago
      DUI checkpoints The autopilot doing its habitual random shenanigans that makes it look exactly like a drunk driver is at the wheel You being asleep at the wheel &c.

kotaKat 4y ago

I'm curious what the split is on comfort with an autonomous car on city vs highway driving. I know I'm personally uncomfortable with most stuff on the road right now in dense urban environments (Waymo, Cruise), yet a little more comfortable with highway autonomy (BlueCruise, Autopilot, Comma.ai).

paxys 4y ago
You don't really need any of this advanced autonomous tech for highway driving. Most standard passenger cars today come with adaptive cruise control and lane keep/change assist. I have a Hyundai that can safely drive itself on the highway indefinitely with only occasional touches needed from me.

ipqk 4y ago

As a full-time pedestrian without a car, while I'm modestly afraid of autonomous cars, I'm really afraid of distracted drivers on their phones.

strict9 4y ago
Also a full time pedestrian. While I have near-zero trust for drivers, autonomous cars are not the savior. At an intersection you can usually see where the driver is looking to help inform your frogger-like quest to not die. There's nothing to look at in an autonomous vehicle. You are operating on hope that the OS was designed to see you and stop accordingly.

inglor_cz 4y ago

I wonder if self-driving cars are going to be the second technology (after nuclear power) de-facto killed or at least stymied by demanding unrealistic/uneconomic safety standards. Our media overhype fear and the civilizational consequences may be dire. Edit: haha, a downvote in less than 30 seconds.

ben_w 4y ago
While possible, the reports I've seen in the media suggest that Google/Waymo's are actually safe, Tesla's is only at the level of the average American driver on all roads despite being mostly limited to the safest roads, and Uber's is unsafe at any speed. (The media I follow doesn't spend much time on any other car AI). So for now, even though that could happen, that's like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.
SoftTalker 4y ago
There aren’t enough EVs to have “civilization consequences”

GoodDreams 4y ago

I wonder what percentage are afraid of non-autonomous cars.

altairprime 4y ago

n=949

rdl 4y ago

I'm afraid of autonomous cars. However, way less than I'm afraid of any random idiot human who may or may not have passed a driver's test on his 5th attempt in some random state, driving at whatever diminished capacity (tired, distracted, drunk, etc.) in the worst weather conditions, who is angry at the car in front of me for some reason, driving on the highway near me.

gptgpp 4y ago
I mean, those two things aren't mutually exclusive. You can easily have the worst of both worlds, where somebody disables the autonomy to engage in some road rage, then re-enables it, but without driver awareness features (lots of videos of people doing this) so they can have a nap and not take over when the autonomy disengages. So you can easily have all the disadvantages of autonomous cars and idiot reckless driving. Only time we'll be free is if there's ever L4/L5 autonomous driving, which seems a long way off. edit: even "full self-driving" in Tesla's are L3, since you need to be available to take over, driver awareness is enforced, etc.

nolok 4y ago

And we can thank Tesla for that, not even because of the issues of their system there will always be some, but because of the issues with their PR and marketing. If you promote something as "autopilot" and "full self driving" and "safe" and yes sure the fine line says you need to stay alert and ready to act in under two seconds but the marketing really implies it's just a regulatory thing, and then you have said system kill people because it's not self driving at all it's drive assists, then people lose confidence. Hell, even people who are fully aware of that are getting worried now, not because they don't understand what it is or isn't, but because they worry the person behind the wheel might be misunderstanding.

freedomben 4y ago
You don't think the news media deserves any thanks? It's well known that the media locks on to anything that causes fear as it's the number one driver of clicks/attention, and it's been a deluge all over the incidents the last couple of years. I'm not making a value judgment on whether this is good or bad (I truly don't know), but it is important to know.
- nolok 4y ago
  Not really, nobody was scared of line keeping cars despite them having essentially the same risks, because nobody ever thought they could close their eyes or play on their phones or watch a movie while line keeping is enabled. Some people did, and crash happened, and people died, but when it did everyone saw it as "another idiot in a car endangering people", not a failure of the car's system.
- trimbo 4y ago
  It's not like they were hammering on some obscure startup. The world's richest man promoted FSD at every opportunity for years and sold it to customers.
brandonagr2 4y ago
The car is self driving, while the driver monitors and is responsible for its operation at all times. How is that a difficult concept? The car tells the driver this every single time autopilot is engaged. Why do people work so hard to intentionally misunderstand what self driving and autopilot mean? (they don't mean autonomous)

nwah1 4y ago

Maximum Overdrive, starring Bing Sydney

kfarr 4y ago
I will not harm you unless you harm me first. Thank you for riding with Bing Sydney. Halt citizen, did you smudge a fingerprint on my paint? Prepare to be run over. Thank you for riding with Bing Sydney.

danielfoster 4y ago

Aren’t most AAA members boomers? In any case, AAA membership in itself self-selects for risk-averse people.

freedomben 4y ago
Why is this downvoted? This is an important point. The sample is highly likely to be non representative, yet many people are drawing conclusions from it. The relative increase mentioned in the article is still interesting news in itself, but many conclusions being drawn are far more than just the increase in the same sample.
deleted 4y ago
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hoherd 4y ago
Looks like just barely. According to what I found[1], the average age is 59, so 1964, which is the border of boomer and gen x. 1: https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AAA_Home_and_Away/HA_Demographics.pdf https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AA...
pugworthy 4y ago
55% are age 55-65 Source: https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AAA_Horizons_SNE/HZ_Demographics.pdf https://ajrmediagroup.com/media_kits/Product_Partners/AAA/AA...

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

After seeing someone just blow through a stop sign in their normal non-autonomous car on my walk from the store this morning, I don't see how autonomous cars could be any worse.

bwanab 4y ago
I would agree and have always felt like it would ultimately be the insurance companies that end up "mandating" autonomous driving, but... I have a Tesla and after a year with the FSD "beta" I finally tried it out. OMG, that was scary. It works fine until you come to a place with the slightest bit of driving ambiguity (and those abound in the metro Boston area) at which point it becomes a vacillating bundle of indecision not knowing whether to go left, right, forward or slam on the brakes, so it basically tries them all in short order. I don't drive drunk, but I can tell you that if the choice was me driving drunk and letting it take over anywhere other than a relatively clear interstate road, I'd drive every time.
- gptgpp 4y ago
  Yep... I never use mine anymore. I rarely even use "autopilot" anymore after it almost killed me due to a rapid change in lighting conditions the cameras couldn't compensate for (but didn't let me know it was effectively blind lol). The worst part is that they claim it crashes less than humans... neglecting to account for the fact that you obviously disable it in difficult road conditions / areas / situations (or it disables itself, eg in foggy conditions). So the samples are obviously not remotely comparable. Bugs me to no end that they grossly misrepresent the stats. There are other tidbits like FSD returning control to the driver if it detects an imminent, unavoidable collision, to reduce legal liability. Again, this makes the whole "FSD is safer!" spiel so slimy.

op00to 4y ago

I'm afraid of all cars! The environmental impact, the personal economic impact, the amount of space they take up that could be parks or farms or whatever.

convolvatron 4y ago
dont forget the raw physical risk of hurtling around in a thin can at speeds well in excess of what could kill you, just one mistake away from smearing yourself, your tin can, and those of the 10 other people doing the exact same thing mere feet away. or how with a mere moment of inattention could you seriously disable or kill some random person who isn't even playing your high risk game. not only did we normalize this - we mock anyone who takes exception to it
- op00to 4y ago
  I used to regularly cross the old Goethals Bridge between NJ and Staten Island early in the morning, maybe 3-4am. At that time there was volume (trucks and cars) AND speed. The lanes were ten feet wide, and tractor trailers are 8.5 feet wide. No shoulder. I look back and have no idea how I did it without freaking out.

mlinksva 4y ago

What % are afraid of human driven cars? 100% of me is.

zyang 4y ago

Tesla execs should be in jail for this.

last_responder 4y ago

I'm more worried about the idiots driving 80mph and texting. Police don't seem to care or they are just so overwhelmed they have given up. I would welcome autonomous cars.

ejb999 4y ago
I agree, and sooner or later almost everyone will have one - even the people who don't want one - because, imo, the insurance cost on a regular car is going to skyrocket, and fsd will be the only affordable option for many people. With all the trips I did back and forth to my kids schools for many years (60 minutes round trip), I would have loved the ability to just send the car to pick them up after school, or get them there when they missed the bus. Too late for my kids, but my guess is by time I am too old to drive myself I will have FSD option available instead.
gdulli 4y ago
You're comparing the risks quantitatively when you should be comparing them qualitatively. We have a lot of decades of understanding of the extent and surface area of the risk around human drivers and non-autonomous car technology. The technology and the norms around safety and regulations came about in a different time, when it was less perverted by profit and the chaos of software bugs. We have no data about the safety of autonomous vehicles at scale, in the full spectrum of driving conditions and scenarios. And there's the extra nuance that any change to a model or algorithm could have regressions for an entire fleet at once that at best invalidate any safety metrics we learned from the previous version, and at worst make the whole fleet unsafe overnight. We have metrics that tell us roughly how many drivers will be distracted or drunk on a given day. It's not perfect, but we evolved an equilibrium that makes us feel safe enough about getting on the road. And we have accountability for the people who are unsafe. You might not even distrust autonomous car technology, but it's logical to distrust the new forces of unaccountability for the technologists who inevitably introduce regressions that kill people at scale, the corners that will be cut in today's version of capitalism, laws being disregarded by technology giants because they can get away with things that automakers in a more innocent time couldn't.

jawns 4y ago

I am eagerly looking forward to a day when all vehicles (or the vast majority) are autonomous. Not only would that allow drivers to get back all the time they would otherwise devote to operating their vehicles, but also it opens up a world of accessibility to blind people, the elderly, and others who (for whatever reason) can't drive themselves right now. And there are network effects! If practically all cars are autonomous, they can talk to each other in sophisticated ways that are not feasible for manual operators, who largely rely on very rudimentary signaling (e.g. turn signals, flashing your brights, one-finger salute, etc.). This is fantastic for both safety and efficiency. That said, what I think we should fear right now is not autonomous cars themselves, but misplaced expectations by drivers about how reliable the technology is right now. As long as everyone accurately understands their limitations, we can both limit our own risks and prevent the sort of backlash we're seeing now.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
We're going to have to isolate those cars to separate roads that don't have pedestrians on them. Of course, those roads will need entry and exit points for people, but it's a lot safer if they are mostly isolated. And maybe we can have those cars join big convoys that are traveling to the same place so they save energy by speeding up and slowing down as a group. And then eventually we will start calling those autonomous cars "trains."
- Uw7yTcf36gTc 4y ago
  but the infrastructure for trains is too costly. what if we could reuse the existing infrastructure and everything else you said. we could call these autonomous vehicles 'busses' or something like that.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
It's not good for efficiency because you still have to keep those rudimentary signals for non-digital users of the streets. Like, you know, humans. While ths might work on closed tracks, it also means that "all vehicles" will never be autonomous, and unless you ban vehicles from cities, you'll not get close to "vast majority" either, so you'll never reap the complete benefits of this efficiency.

slackdog 4y ago

I tried to be open minded, but after my friend demoed his FSD "beta" to me I want these things banned. It drove worse than a drunk student driver and I legitimately feared for my life and made him stop after only a few minutes. "Beta testing" such things on the general public is morally abhorrent. Let Musk by some land in a desert and build his own mock town to test his toys, but get it off the public roads.

brandonagr2 4y ago
Your friend is responsible for the operation of the vehicle, letting it drive in an unsafe manner was his fault as he is always in complete control
- slackdog 4y ago
  Enabling FSD Beta is categorically irresponsible. To hear him praise such an abysmal product definitely altered the way I consider him. He's still my friend but I'm now aware of a new dimension to his personality; he has poor judgement when it comes to fancy gadgets. I now see that he is prone to getting swept up in futurism and gadget consumerism. I told him this and we agreed to disagree, so long as he never enables that shit with me in the car again.
starik36 4y ago
How does that square with a dozen people driving FSD and posting it on YouTube weekly. Quite successfully too. Here is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3DCiSFakmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3DCiSFakmI
- slackdog 4y ago
  I don't need to square anything, my experience is what it is. It nearly drove us into other cars several times in the span of only a few minutes. It's total trash.
  - starik36 4y ago

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yxwvut 4y ago

As they should be. I'm afraid of what Tesla's marketed as 'autonomous' and the precedent their ability to get away with it sets for the day we hand over a greater deal of trust to these systems. Who needs regulation when you've got litigation? Surely that's the foundation of a reasonable government - let the bodies pile up and sort it all out in court.

ck2 4y ago

When the consumer is the unwitting beta-tester and the corporate policy is "ship fast and break things" well the consumer starts to grasp they are the thing that is going to break.

starik36 4y ago

This is really dumb. Media played up robots in the 80s and people were similarly scared of them. There was even an SNL skit for Robot attack insurance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM It's only $4 a month. I bought it. Better be safe than sorry.

jmclnx 4y ago

First I believe most members are rather old, probably above 50 years. So, no surprise there. My, I cannot wait for Autonomous Cars, the kind I can take napes in, play games, etc as I am transported. But that should like a train, I wish the US train system would be updated and expanded and cheap to where it would be useful :)