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The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of t

The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.

iovrthoughtthis 2y ago
at least 10x better than a human
- becquerel 2y ago
  I believe Waymo has already beaten this metric.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Waymo is limited to cities that their engineers has to map and this map maintained. You cannot put a waymo in a new city before that. With Tesla, what you get is universal.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - RivieraKid 2y ago
      Waymo is robust to removing the map / lidars / radars / cameras or adding inaccuracies to any of these 4 inputs. (Not sure if this is true for the production system or the one they're still working on.)
    - dageshi 2y ago
      I think the Waymo approach is the one that will actually deliver some measure of self driving cars that people will be comfortable to use. It won't operate everywhere, but it will gradually expand to cover large areas and it will keep expanding till it's near ubiquitous. I'm dubious that the Tesla approach will actually ever work.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Waymo is safe where they've mapped and trained and tested, because they track when their test drivers have to take control. Tesla FSD is just everywhere, without any accountability or trained testing on all the roads people use them on. We have no idea how often Tesla FSD users have to take control from FSD due to a safety issue. Waymo is objectively safer, and their entire approach is objectively safer, and is actually measurable, whereas Tesla FSD's safety cannot actually be accurately measured.
triyambakam 2y ago
Hesitation around self-driving technology is not just about the raw accident rate, but the nature of the accidents. Self-driving failures often involve highly visible, preventable mistakes that seem avoidable by a human (e.g., failing to stop for an obvious obstacle). Humans find such incidents harder to tolerate because they can seem fundamentally different from human error.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Exactly -- it's not just the overall accident rate, but the rate per accident type. Imagine if self-driving is 10x safer on freeways, but on the other hand is 3x more likely to run over your dog in the driveway. Or it's 5x safer on city streets overall, but actually 2x worse in rain and ice. We're fundamentally wired for loss aversion. So I'd say it's less about what the total improvement rate is, and more about whether it has categorizable scenarios where it's still worse than a human.
becquerel 2y ago
My dream is of a future where humans are banned from driving without special licenses.
- gambiting 2y ago
  So.........like right now you mean? You need a special licence to drive on a public road right now.
  - seizethecheese 2y ago
    Geez, clearly they mean like a CDL
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    The problem is it’s obviously too easy to get one and keep one, based on some of the drivers I see on the road.
    - gambiting 2y ago
      That sounds like a legislative problem where you live, sure it can be fixed by overbearing technology but we already have all the tools we need to fix it, we are just choosing not to for some reason.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    No, you need an entirely common, unspecial license drive on a public road right now.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  And yet Tesla's FSD never passed a driving test.
  - grecy 2y ago
    And it can’t legally drive a vehicle
Arainach 2y ago
This is about lying to the public and stoking false expectations for years. If it's "fully self driving" Tesla should be liable for when its vehicles kill people. If it's not fully self driving and Tesla keeps using that name in all its marketing, regardless of any fine print, then Tesla should be liable for people acting as though their cars could FULLY self drive and be sued accordingly. You don't get to lie just because you're allegedly safer than a human.
- jeremyjh 2y ago
  I think this is the answer: the company takes on full liability. If a Tesla is Fully Self Driving then Tesla is driving it. The insurance market will ensure that dodgy software/hardware developers exit the industry.
  - blagie 2y ago
    This is very much what I would like to see. The price of insurance is baked into the price of a car. If the car is as safe as I am, I pay the same price in the end. If it's safer, I pay less. From my perspective: 1) I would *much* rather have Honda kill someone than myself. If I killed someone, the psychological impact on myself would be horrible. In the city I live in, I dread ageing; as my reflexes get slower, I'm more and more likely to kill someone. 2) As a pedestrian, most of the risk seems to come from outliers -- people who drive hyper-aggressively. Replacing all cars with a median driver would make me much safer (and traffic, much more predictable). If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance payouts, and vice-versa. The market works everything else out. But my stress levels go way down, whether in a car, on a bike, or on foot.
    - gambiting 2y ago
      >> I would much rather have Honda kill someone than myself. If I killed someone, the psychological impact on myself would be horrible. Except that we know that it doesn't work like that. Train drivers are ridden with extreme guilt every time "their" train runs over someone, even though they know that logically there was absolutely nothing they could have done to prevent it. Don't see why it would be any different here. >>If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance payouts, and vice-versa In what way? In the EU the minimum covered amount for any car insurance is 5 million euro, it has had no impact on the safety of cars. And of course the recent increase in payouts(due to the general increase in labour and parts cost) has led to a dramatic increase in insurance premiums which in turn has lead to a drastic increase in the number of people driving without insurance. So now that needs increased policing and enforcement, which we pay for through taxes. So no, market doesn't "work everything out".
gambiting 2y ago
>>. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? The answer is zero. An airplane autopilot has increased the overall safety of airplanes by several orders of magnitude compared to human pilots, but literally no errors in its operation are tolerated, whether they are deadly or not. The exact same standard has to apply to cars or any automated machine for that matter. If there is any issue discovered in any car with this tech then it should be disabled worldwide until the root cause is found and eliminated. >> It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role. I really don't like this argument, because we could already prevent literally all automotive deaths tomorrow through existing technology and legislation and yet we are choosing not to do this for economic and social reasons.
- esaym 2y ago
  You can't equate airplane safety with automotive safety. I worked at an aircraft repair facility doing government contracts for a number of years. In one instance, somebody lost the toilet paper holder for one of the aircraft. This holder was simply a piece of 10 gauge wire that was bent in a way to hold it and supported by wire clamps screwed to the wall. Making a new one was easy but since it was a new part going on the aircraft we had to send it to a lab to be certified to hold a roll of toilet paper to 9 g's. In case the airplane crashed you wouldn't want a roll of toilet paper flying around I guess. And that cost $1,200.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    No, I'm pretty sure I can in this regard - any automotive "autopilot" has to be held to the same standard. It's either zero accidents or nothing.
    - murderfs 2y ago
      This only works for aerospace because everything and everyone is held to that standard. It's stupid to hold automotive autopilots to the same standard as a plane's autopilot when a third of fatalities in cars are caused by the pilots being drunk.
croes 2y ago
> It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. Were the Teslas driving under all weather conditions at any location like humans do or is it just cherry picked from the easy travelling conditions?
jakelazaroff 2y ago
I think we should not be satisfied with merely “better than a human”. Flying is so safe precisely because we treat any casualty as unacceptable. We should aspire to make automobiles at least that safe.
- aantix 2y ago
  Before FSD is allowed on public roads? It’s a net positive, saving lives right now.
- cubefox 2y ago
  > I think we should not be satisfied with merely “better than a human”. The question is whether you want to outlaw automatic driving just because the system is, say, "only" 50% safer than us.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I don't think the question was what we should be satisfied with or what we should aspire to. I absolutely agree with you that we should strive to make autonomous driving as safe as airline travel. But the question was when should we allow autonomous driving on our public roads. And I think "when it's at least as safe as the median human driver" is a reasonable threshold. (The thing about Tesla FSD is that it -- unsupervised -- would probably fall super short of that metric. FSD needs to be supervised to be safer than the median human driver, assuming that's evn currently the case, and not every driver is going to be equally good at supervising it.)
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Aspire to, yes. But if we say "we're going to ban FSD until it's perfect, even though it already saves lives relative to the average human driver", you're making automobiles less safe.
akira2501 2y ago
> traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. It's completely acceptable. In fact the numbers are lower than they have been since we've started driving. > Accidents caused by human drivers Are there any other types of drivers? > are one of the largest causes of injury and death More than half the fatalities on the road are actually caused by the use of drugs and alcohol. The statistics are very clear on this. Impaired people cannot drive well. Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better. > technology that could save lives There is absolutely zero evidence this is true. Everyone is basing this off of a total misunderstanding of the source of fatalities and a willful misapprehension of the technology.
- blargey 2y ago
  > Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better. That raises the question - how many impaired driver-miles are being baked into the collision statistics for "median human" driver-miles? Shouldn't we demand non-impaired driving as the standard for automation, rather than "averaged with drunk / phone-fiddling /senile" driving? We don't give people N-mile allowances for drunk driving based on the size of the drunk driver population, after all.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Motorcycles account for a further 15% of all fatalities in a typical year. Weather is often a factor. Road design is sometimes a factor, remembering several rollover crashes that ended in a body of water and no one in the vehicle surviving. Likewise ejections during fatalities due to lack of seatbelt use is also noticeable. Once you dig into the data you see that almost every crash, at this point in history, is really a mini-story detailing the confluence of several factors that turned a basic accident into something fatal. Also, and I only saw this once, but if you literally have a heart attack behind the wheel, you are technically a roadway fatality. The driver was 99. He just died while sitting in slow moving traffic. Which brings me to my final point which is the rear seats in automobiles are less safe than the front seats. This is true for almost every vehicle on the road. You see _a lot_ of accidents where two 40 to 50 year old passengers are up front and two 70 to 80 year old passengers are in back. The ones up front survive. One or both passengers in the back typically die.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
Many people don't (and shouldn't) take the "half the casualty rate" at face value. My biggest concern is that Waymo and Tesla are juking the stats to make self-driving cars seem safer than they really are. I believe this is largely an unintentional consequence of bad actuary science coming from bad qualitative statistics; the worst kind of lying with numbers is lying to yourself. The biggest gap in these studies: I have yet to see a comparison with human drivers that filters out DUIs, reckless speeding, or mechanical failures. Without doing this it is simply not a fair comparison, because: 1) Self-driving cars won't end drunk driving unless it's made mandatory by outlawing manual driving or ignition is tied to a breathalyzer. Many people will continue to make the dumb decision to drive themselves home because they are drunk and driving is fun. This needs regulation, not technology. And DUIs need to be filtered from the crash statistics when comparing with Waymo. 2) A self-driving car which speeds and runs red lights might well be more dangerous than a similar human, but the data says nothing about this since Waymo is currently on their best behavior. Yet Tesla's own behavior and customers prove that there is demand for reckless self-driving cars, and manufacturers will meet the demand unless the law steps in. Imagine a Waymo competitor that promises Uber-level ETAs for people in a hurry. Technology could in theory solve this but in practice the market could make things worse for several decades until the next research breakthrough. Human accidents coming from distraction are a fair comparison to Waymo, but speeding or aggressiveness should be filtered out. The difficulty of doing so is one of the many reasons I am so skeptical of these stats. 3) Mechanical failures are a hornets' nest of ML edge cases that might work in the lab but fail miserably on the road. Currently it's not a big deal because the cars are shiny and new. Eventually we'll have self-driving clunkers owned by drivers who don't want to pay for the maintenance. And that's not even mentioning that Waymos are not self-driving, they rely on close remote oversight to guide AI through the many billions of common-sense problems that computets will not able to solve for at least the next decade, probably much longer. True self-driving cars will continue to make inexplicably stupid decisions: these machines are still much dumber than lizards. Stories like "the Tesla slammed into an overturned tractor trailer because the AI wasn't trained on overturned trucks" are a huge problem and society will not let Tesla try to launder it away with statistics. Self-driving cars might end up saving lives. But would they save more lives than adding mandatory breathalyzers and GPS-based speed limits? And if market competition overtakes business ethics, would they cost more lives than they save? The stats say very little about this.
smitty1110 2y ago
There’s two things going on here with there average person that you need to overcome: That when Tesla dodges responsibility all anyone sees is a liar, and that people amalgamate all the FSD crashes and treat the system like a dangerous local driver that nobody can get off the road. Tesla markets FSD like it’s a silver bullet, and the name is truly misleading. The fine print says you need attention and all that. But again, people read “Full Self Driving” and all the marketing copy and think the system is assuming responsibility for the outcomes. Then a crash happens, Tesla throws the driver under the bus, and everyone gets a bit more skeptical of the system. Plus, doing that to a person rubs people the wrong way, and is in some respects a barrier to sales. Which leads to the other point: People are tallying up all the accidents and treating the system like a person, and wondering why this dangerous driver is still on the road. Most accidents with dead pedestrian start with someone doing something stupid, which is when they assume all responsibility, legally speaking. Drunk, speeding, etc. Normal drivers in poor conditions slow down and drive carefully. People see this accident, and treat FSD like a serial drunk driver. It’s to the point that I know people that openly say they treat teslas on roads like they’re erratic drivers just for existing. Until Elon figures out how to fix his perception problem, the calls for investigations and to keep his robotaxis is off the road will only grow.
danans 2y ago
> The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's pretty simple: as good as it can be given available technologies and techniques, without sacrificing safety for cost or style. With AVs, function and safety should obviate concerns of style, cost, and marketing. If that doesn't work with your business model, well tough luck. Airplanes are far safer than cars yet we subject their manufacturers to rigorous standards, or seemingly did until recently, as the 737 max saga has revealed. Even still the rigor is very high compared to road vehicles. And AVs do have to be way better than people at driving because they are machines that have no sense of human judgement, though they operate in a human physical context. Machines run by corporations are less accountable than human drivers, not at the least because of the wealth and legal armies of those corporations who may have interests other than making the safest possible AV.
- mavhc 2y ago
  Surely the number of cars than can do it, and the price, also matters, unless you're going to ban private cars
  - danans 2y ago
    > Surely the number of cars than can do it, and the price, also matters, unless you're going to ban private cars Indeed, like this: the more cars sold that claim fully autonomous capability, and the more affordable they get, the higher the standards should be compared to their AV predecessors, even if they have long eclipsed human driver's safety record. If this is unpalatable, then let's assign 100% liability with steep monetary penalties to the AV manufacturer for any crash that happens under autonomous driving mode.
    - mavhc 2y ago
      And the same penalties for Human Driver Beta
Terr_ 2y ago
> It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. Even if we optimistically assume no "gotchas" in the statistics [0], distilling performance down to a casualty/injury/accident-rate can still be dangerously reductive, when the have a different distribution of failure-modes which do/don't mesh with our other systems and defenses. A quick thought experiment to prove the point: Imagine a system which compared to human drivers had only half the rate of accidents... But many of those are because it unpredictably decides to jump the sidewalk curb and kill a targeted pedestrian. The raw numbers are encouraging, but it represents a risk profile that clashes horribly with our other systems of road design, car design, and what incidents humans are expecting and capable of preventing or recovering-from. [0] Ex: Automation is only being used on certain subsets of all travel which are the "easier" miles or circumstances than the whole gamut a human would handle.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Re: gotchas: an even easier one is that the Tesla FSD statistics don't include when the car does something unsafe and the driver intervenes and takes control, averting a crash. How often does that happen? We have no idea. Tesla can certainly tell when a driver intervenes, but they can't count every occurrence as safety-related, because a driver might take control for all sorts of reasons. This is why we can make stronger statements about the safety of Waymo. Their software was only tested by people trained and paid to test it, who were also recording every time they had to intervene because of safety, even if there was no crash. That's a metric they could track and improve.
__loam 2y ago
The problem is that Tesla is way behind the industry standards here and it's misrepresenting how good their tech is.
alkonaut 2y ago
> How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Probably closer to the latter. The "skin in the game" (physically) argument makes me more willing to accept drunk drivers than greedy manufacturers when it comes to making mistakes or being negligent.
sebzim4500 2y ago
>It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. Are you sure? Right now FSD is active with no one actually knowing its casualty rate, and the for the most part the only people upset about it are terminally online people on twitter or luddites on HN.
moogly 2y ago
> Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death In some parts of the world. Perhaps some countries should look deeper into why and why self-driving cars might not be the No. 1 answer to reduce traffic accidents.
kelnos 2y ago
If Tesla's FSD was actually self-driving, maybe half the casualty rate of the median human driver would be fine. But it's not. It requires constant supervision, and drivers sometimes have to take control (without the system disengaging on its own) in order to correct it from doing something unsafe. If we had stats for what the casualty rate would be if every driver using it never took control back unless the car signaled it was going to disengage, I suspect that casualty rate would be much worse than the median human driver. But we don't have those stats, so we shouldn't trust it until we do. This is why Waymo is safe and tolerated and Tesla FSD is not. Waymo test drivers record every time they have to take over control of the car for safety reasons. That was a metric they had to track and improve, or it would have been impossible to offer people rides without someone in the driver's seat.
fma 2y ago
Flying is safer than driving but Boeing isn't getting a free pass on quality issues. Why would Tesla?
jillesvangurp 2y ago
The key here is insurers. Because they pick up the bill when things go wrong. As soon as self driving becomes clearly better than humans, they'll be insisting we stop risking their money by driving ourselves whenever that is feasible. And they'll do that with price incentives. They'll happily insure you if you want to drive yourself. But you'll pay a premium. And a discount if you are happy to let the car do the driving. Eventually, manual driving should come with a lot more scrutiny. Because once it becomes a choice rather than an economic necessity, other people on the road will want to be sure that you are not needlessly endangering them. So, stricter requirements for getting a drivers license with more training and fitness/health requirements. This too will be driven by insurers. They'll want to make sure you are fit to drive. And of course when manual driving people get into trouble, taking away their driving license is always a possibility. The main argument against doing that right now is that a lot of people depend economically on being able to drive. But if that argument goes away, there's no reason to not be a lot stricter for e.g. driving under influence, or routinely breaking laws for speeding and other traffic violations. Think higher fines and driving license suspensions.
mvdtnz 2y ago
How about fewer accidents per distance of equivalent driving?

iovrthoughtthis 2y ago

at least 10x better than a human

becquerel 2y ago
I believe Waymo has already beaten this metric.
- szundi 2y ago
  Waymo is limited to cities that their engineers has to map and this map maintained. You cannot put a waymo in a new city before that. With Tesla, what you get is universal.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - RivieraKid 2y ago
    Waymo is robust to removing the map / lidars / radars / cameras or adding inaccuracies to any of these 4 inputs. (Not sure if this is true for the production system or the one they're still working on.)
  - dageshi 2y ago
    I think the Waymo approach is the one that will actually deliver some measure of self driving cars that people will be comfortable to use. It won't operate everywhere, but it will gradually expand to cover large areas and it will keep expanding till it's near ubiquitous. I'm dubious that the Tesla approach will actually ever work.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Waymo is safe where they've mapped and trained and tested, because they track when their test drivers have to take control. Tesla FSD is just everywhere, without any accountability or trained testing on all the roads people use them on. We have no idea how often Tesla FSD users have to take control from FSD due to a safety issue. Waymo is objectively safer, and their entire approach is objectively safer, and is actually measurable, whereas Tesla FSD's safety cannot actually be accurately measured.

triyambakam 2y ago

Hesitation around self-driving technology is not just about the raw accident rate, but the nature of the accidents. Self-driving failures often involve highly visible, preventable mistakes that seem avoidable by a human (e.g., failing to stop for an obvious obstacle). Humans find such incidents harder to tolerate because they can seem fundamentally different from human error.

crazygringo 2y ago
Exactly -- it's not just the overall accident rate, but the rate per accident type. Imagine if self-driving is 10x safer on freeways, but on the other hand is 3x more likely to run over your dog in the driveway. Or it's 5x safer on city streets overall, but actually 2x worse in rain and ice. We're fundamentally wired for loss aversion. So I'd say it's less about what the total improvement rate is, and more about whether it has categorizable scenarios where it's still worse than a human.

becquerel 2y ago

My dream is of a future where humans are banned from driving without special licenses.

gambiting 2y ago
So.........like right now you mean? You need a special licence to drive on a public road right now.
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  Geez, clearly they mean like a CDL
- nkrisc 2y ago
  The problem is it’s obviously too easy to get one and keep one, based on some of the drivers I see on the road.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    That sounds like a legislative problem where you live, sure it can be fixed by overbearing technology but we already have all the tools we need to fix it, we are just choosing not to for some reason.
- kelnos 2y ago
  No, you need an entirely common, unspecial license drive on a public road right now.
FireBeyond 2y ago
And yet Tesla's FSD never passed a driving test.
- grecy 2y ago
  And it can’t legally drive a vehicle

Arainach 2y ago

This is about lying to the public and stoking false expectations for years. If it's "fully self driving" Tesla should be liable for when its vehicles kill people. If it's not fully self driving and Tesla keeps using that name in all its marketing, regardless of any fine print, then Tesla should be liable for people acting as though their cars could FULLY self drive and be sued accordingly. You don't get to lie just because you're allegedly safer than a human.

jeremyjh 2y ago
I think this is the answer: the company takes on full liability. If a Tesla is Fully Self Driving then Tesla is driving it. The insurance market will ensure that dodgy software/hardware developers exit the industry.
- blagie 2y ago
  This is very much what I would like to see. The price of insurance is baked into the price of a car. If the car is as safe as I am, I pay the same price in the end. If it's safer, I pay less. From my perspective: 1) I would *much* rather have Honda kill someone than myself. If I killed someone, the psychological impact on myself would be horrible. In the city I live in, I dread ageing; as my reflexes get slower, I'm more and more likely to kill someone. 2) As a pedestrian, most of the risk seems to come from outliers -- people who drive hyper-aggressively. Replacing all cars with a median driver would make me much safer (and traffic, much more predictable). If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance payouts, and vice-versa. The market works everything else out. But my stress levels go way down, whether in a car, on a bike, or on foot.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    >> I would much rather have Honda kill someone than myself. If I killed someone, the psychological impact on myself would be horrible. Except that we know that it doesn't work like that. Train drivers are ridden with extreme guilt every time "their" train runs over someone, even though they know that logically there was absolutely nothing they could have done to prevent it. Don't see why it would be any different here. >>If we want safer cars, we can simply raise insurance payouts, and vice-versa In what way? In the EU the minimum covered amount for any car insurance is 5 million euro, it has had no impact on the safety of cars. And of course the recent increase in payouts(due to the general increase in labour and parts cost) has led to a dramatic increase in insurance premiums which in turn has lead to a drastic increase in the number of people driving without insurance. So now that needs increased policing and enforcement, which we pay for through taxes. So no, market doesn't "work everything out".

gambiting 2y ago

>>. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? The answer is zero. An airplane autopilot has increased the overall safety of airplanes by several orders of magnitude compared to human pilots, but literally no errors in its operation are tolerated, whether they are deadly or not. The exact same standard has to apply to cars or any automated machine for that matter. If there is any issue discovered in any car with this tech then it should be disabled worldwide until the root cause is found and eliminated. >> It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role. I really don't like this argument, because we could already prevent literally all automotive deaths tomorrow through existing technology and legislation and yet we are choosing not to do this for economic and social reasons.

esaym 2y ago
You can't equate airplane safety with automotive safety. I worked at an aircraft repair facility doing government contracts for a number of years. In one instance, somebody lost the toilet paper holder for one of the aircraft. This holder was simply a piece of 10 gauge wire that was bent in a way to hold it and supported by wire clamps screwed to the wall. Making a new one was easy but since it was a new part going on the aircraft we had to send it to a lab to be certified to hold a roll of toilet paper to 9 g's. In case the airplane crashed you wouldn't want a roll of toilet paper flying around I guess. And that cost $1,200.
- gambiting 2y ago
  No, I'm pretty sure I can in this regard - any automotive "autopilot" has to be held to the same standard. It's either zero accidents or nothing.
  - murderfs 2y ago
    This only works for aerospace because everything and everyone is held to that standard. It's stupid to hold automotive autopilots to the same standard as a plane's autopilot when a third of fatalities in cars are caused by the pilots being drunk.

croes 2y ago

> It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. Were the Teslas driving under all weather conditions at any location like humans do or is it just cherry picked from the easy travelling conditions?

jakelazaroff 2y ago

I think we should not be satisfied with merely “better than a human”. Flying is so safe precisely because we treat any casualty as unacceptable. We should aspire to make automobiles at least that safe.

aantix 2y ago
Before FSD is allowed on public roads? It’s a net positive, saving lives right now.
cubefox 2y ago
> I think we should not be satisfied with merely “better than a human”. The question is whether you want to outlaw automatic driving just because the system is, say, "only" 50% safer than us.
kelnos 2y ago
I don't think the question was what we should be satisfied with or what we should aspire to. I absolutely agree with you that we should strive to make autonomous driving as safe as airline travel. But the question was when should we allow autonomous driving on our public roads. And I think "when it's at least as safe as the median human driver" is a reasonable threshold. (The thing about Tesla FSD is that it -- unsupervised -- would probably fall super short of that metric. FSD needs to be supervised to be safer than the median human driver, assuming that's evn currently the case, and not every driver is going to be equally good at supervising it.)
josephcsible 2y ago
Aspire to, yes. But if we say "we're going to ban FSD until it's perfect, even though it already saves lives relative to the average human driver", you're making automobiles less safe.

akira2501 2y ago

> traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. It's completely acceptable. In fact the numbers are lower than they have been since we've started driving. > Accidents caused by human drivers Are there any other types of drivers? > are one of the largest causes of injury and death More than half the fatalities on the road are actually caused by the use of drugs and alcohol. The statistics are very clear on this. Impaired people cannot drive well. Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better. > technology that could save lives There is absolutely zero evidence this is true. Everyone is basing this off of a total misunderstanding of the source of fatalities and a willful misapprehension of the technology.

blargey 2y ago
> Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better. That raises the question - how many impaired driver-miles are being baked into the collision statistics for "median human" driver-miles? Shouldn't we demand non-impaired driving as the standard for automation, rather than "averaged with drunk / phone-fiddling /senile" driving? We don't give people N-mile allowances for drunk driving based on the size of the drunk driver population, after all.
- akira2501 2y ago
  Motorcycles account for a further 15% of all fatalities in a typical year. Weather is often a factor. Road design is sometimes a factor, remembering several rollover crashes that ended in a body of water and no one in the vehicle surviving. Likewise ejections during fatalities due to lack of seatbelt use is also noticeable. Once you dig into the data you see that almost every crash, at this point in history, is really a mini-story detailing the confluence of several factors that turned a basic accident into something fatal. Also, and I only saw this once, but if you literally have a heart attack behind the wheel, you are technically a roadway fatality. The driver was 99. He just died while sitting in slow moving traffic. Which brings me to my final point which is the rear seats in automobiles are less safe than the front seats. This is true for almost every vehicle on the road. You see _a lot_ of accidents where two 40 to 50 year old passengers are up front and two 70 to 80 year old passengers are in back. The ones up front survive. One or both passengers in the back typically die.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

Many people don't (and shouldn't) take the "half the casualty rate" at face value. My biggest concern is that Waymo and Tesla are juking the stats to make self-driving cars seem safer than they really are. I believe this is largely an unintentional consequence of bad actuary science coming from bad qualitative statistics; the worst kind of lying with numbers is lying to yourself. The biggest gap in these studies: I have yet to see a comparison with human drivers that filters out DUIs, reckless speeding, or mechanical failures. Without doing this it is simply not a fair comparison, because: 1) Self-driving cars won't end drunk driving unless it's made mandatory by outlawing manual driving or ignition is tied to a breathalyzer. Many people will continue to make the dumb decision to drive themselves home because they are drunk and driving is fun. This needs regulation, not technology. And DUIs need to be filtered from the crash statistics when comparing with Waymo. 2) A self-driving car which speeds and runs red lights might well be more dangerous than a similar human, but the data says nothing about this since Waymo is currently on their best behavior. Yet Tesla's own behavior and customers prove that there is demand for reckless self-driving cars, and manufacturers will meet the demand unless the law steps in. Imagine a Waymo competitor that promises Uber-level ETAs for people in a hurry. Technology could in theory solve this but in practice the market could make things worse for several decades until the next research breakthrough. Human accidents coming from distraction are a fair comparison to Waymo, but speeding or aggressiveness should be filtered out. The difficulty of doing so is one of the many reasons I am so skeptical of these stats. 3) Mechanical failures are a hornets' nest of ML edge cases that might work in the lab but fail miserably on the road. Currently it's not a big deal because the cars are shiny and new. Eventually we'll have self-driving clunkers owned by drivers who don't want to pay for the maintenance. And that's not even mentioning that Waymos are not self-driving, they rely on close remote oversight to guide AI through the many billions of common-sense problems that computets will not able to solve for at least the next decade, probably much longer. True self-driving cars will continue to make inexplicably stupid decisions: these machines are still much dumber than lizards. Stories like "the Tesla slammed into an overturned tractor trailer because the AI wasn't trained on overturned trucks" are a huge problem and society will not let Tesla try to launder it away with statistics. Self-driving cars might end up saving lives. But would they save more lives than adding mandatory breathalyzers and GPS-based speed limits? And if market competition overtakes business ethics, would they cost more lives than they save? The stats say very little about this.

smitty1110 2y ago

There’s two things going on here with there average person that you need to overcome: That when Tesla dodges responsibility all anyone sees is a liar, and that people amalgamate all the FSD crashes and treat the system like a dangerous local driver that nobody can get off the road. Tesla markets FSD like it’s a silver bullet, and the name is truly misleading. The fine print says you need attention and all that. But again, people read “Full Self Driving” and all the marketing copy and think the system is assuming responsibility for the outcomes. Then a crash happens, Tesla throws the driver under the bus, and everyone gets a bit more skeptical of the system. Plus, doing that to a person rubs people the wrong way, and is in some respects a barrier to sales. Which leads to the other point: People are tallying up all the accidents and treating the system like a person, and wondering why this dangerous driver is still on the road. Most accidents with dead pedestrian start with someone doing something stupid, which is when they assume all responsibility, legally speaking. Drunk, speeding, etc. Normal drivers in poor conditions slow down and drive carefully. People see this accident, and treat FSD like a serial drunk driver. It’s to the point that I know people that openly say they treat teslas on roads like they’re erratic drivers just for existing. Until Elon figures out how to fix his perception problem, the calls for investigations and to keep his robotaxis is off the road will only grow.

danans 2y ago

> The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's pretty simple: as good as it can be given available technologies and techniques, without sacrificing safety for cost or style. With AVs, function and safety should obviate concerns of style, cost, and marketing. If that doesn't work with your business model, well tough luck. Airplanes are far safer than cars yet we subject their manufacturers to rigorous standards, or seemingly did until recently, as the 737 max saga has revealed. Even still the rigor is very high compared to road vehicles. And AVs do have to be way better than people at driving because they are machines that have no sense of human judgement, though they operate in a human physical context. Machines run by corporations are less accountable than human drivers, not at the least because of the wealth and legal armies of those corporations who may have interests other than making the safest possible AV.

mavhc 2y ago
Surely the number of cars than can do it, and the price, also matters, unless you're going to ban private cars
- danans 2y ago
  > Surely the number of cars than can do it, and the price, also matters, unless you're going to ban private cars Indeed, like this: the more cars sold that claim fully autonomous capability, and the more affordable they get, the higher the standards should be compared to their AV predecessors, even if they have long eclipsed human driver's safety record. If this is unpalatable, then let's assign 100% liability with steep monetary penalties to the AV manufacturer for any crash that happens under autonomous driving mode.
  - mavhc 2y ago
    And the same penalties for Human Driver Beta

Terr_ 2y ago

> It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. Even if we optimistically assume no "gotchas" in the statistics [0], distilling performance down to a casualty/injury/accident-rate can still be dangerously reductive, when the have a different distribution of failure-modes which do/don't mesh with our other systems and defenses. A quick thought experiment to prove the point: Imagine a system which compared to human drivers had only half the rate of accidents... But many of those are because it unpredictably decides to jump the sidewalk curb and kill a targeted pedestrian. The raw numbers are encouraging, but it represents a risk profile that clashes horribly with our other systems of road design, car design, and what incidents humans are expecting and capable of preventing or recovering-from. [0] Ex: Automation is only being used on certain subsets of all travel which are the "easier" miles or circumstances than the whole gamut a human would handle.

kelnos 2y ago
Re: gotchas: an even easier one is that the Tesla FSD statistics don't include when the car does something unsafe and the driver intervenes and takes control, averting a crash. How often does that happen? We have no idea. Tesla can certainly tell when a driver intervenes, but they can't count every occurrence as safety-related, because a driver might take control for all sorts of reasons. This is why we can make stronger statements about the safety of Waymo. Their software was only tested by people trained and paid to test it, who were also recording every time they had to intervene because of safety, even if there was no crash. That's a metric they could track and improve.

__loam 2y ago

The problem is that Tesla is way behind the industry standards here and it's misrepresenting how good their tech is.

alkonaut 2y ago

> How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Probably closer to the latter. The "skin in the game" (physically) argument makes me more willing to accept drunk drivers than greedy manufacturers when it comes to making mistakes or being negligent.

sebzim4500 2y ago

>It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. Are you sure? Right now FSD is active with no one actually knowing its casualty rate, and the for the most part the only people upset about it are terminally online people on twitter or luddites on HN.

moogly 2y ago

> Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death In some parts of the world. Perhaps some countries should look deeper into why and why self-driving cars might not be the No. 1 answer to reduce traffic accidents.

kelnos 2y ago

If Tesla's FSD was actually self-driving, maybe half the casualty rate of the median human driver would be fine. But it's not. It requires constant supervision, and drivers sometimes have to take control (without the system disengaging on its own) in order to correct it from doing something unsafe. If we had stats for what the casualty rate would be if every driver using it never took control back unless the car signaled it was going to disengage, I suspect that casualty rate would be much worse than the median human driver. But we don't have those stats, so we shouldn't trust it until we do. This is why Waymo is safe and tolerated and Tesla FSD is not. Waymo test drivers record every time they have to take over control of the car for safety reasons. That was a metric they had to track and improve, or it would have been impossible to offer people rides without someone in the driver's seat.

fma 2y ago

Flying is safer than driving but Boeing isn't getting a free pass on quality issues. Why would Tesla?

jillesvangurp 2y ago

The key here is insurers. Because they pick up the bill when things go wrong. As soon as self driving becomes clearly better than humans, they'll be insisting we stop risking their money by driving ourselves whenever that is feasible. And they'll do that with price incentives. They'll happily insure you if you want to drive yourself. But you'll pay a premium. And a discount if you are happy to let the car do the driving. Eventually, manual driving should come with a lot more scrutiny. Because once it becomes a choice rather than an economic necessity, other people on the road will want to be sure that you are not needlessly endangering them. So, stricter requirements for getting a drivers license with more training and fitness/health requirements. This too will be driven by insurers. They'll want to make sure you are fit to drive. And of course when manual driving people get into trouble, taking away their driving license is always a possibility. The main argument against doing that right now is that a lot of people depend economically on being able to drive. But if that argument goes away, there's no reason to not be a lot stricter for e.g. driving under influence, or routinely breaking laws for speeding and other traffic violations. Think higher fines and driving license suspensions.

mvdtnz 2y ago

How about fewer accidents per distance of equivalent driving?