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Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

• josefritzishere 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 1mo ago
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    • josefritzishere 1mo ago
      [dead]
• dlisboa 1mo ago
  ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers. Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.
  • jpcfl 1mo ago
    There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers: > Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1] I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles. 1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-of-technology-do-advanced-driver-assistance-and-semi-automated-vehicle-systems-lead-to-improper-driving-behavior/ https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...
    • notahacker 1mo ago
      I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.) If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
      • lazyasciiart 1mo ago
        Overtrust looks like people sleeping or not even bothering to stay in the front seats of the car. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patrol-searching-man-seen-riding-back-seat-tesla-n1266944 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patr...
        • notahacker 1mo ago
          Sure, but I'm failing to see how an autonomous driving system without a steering wheel or brake fitted is safer than one with a steering wheel and brake fitted but the human driver ignoring it and sitting in the back seat. The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.
          • madamelic 1mo ago
            You are correct but I think previous comment hung on specific word you used: "semi-autonomous". What that would mean is a system that still requires attention / supervision. What I believe you meant is an AV that still has human controls but is capable of unsupervised driving. If you aren't familiar with SAE AV levels, check them out. It is a common refrain that L3 AVs are a SUPER bad idea because they would be 99.9% perfect at driving but could still mess up so 'drivers' of them would become too trusting and minimally attentive which would cause accidents. The common thing is that L3 needs to be skipped entirely so a car should either be L2 and wouldn't be good enough to drive entirely on its own for long periods (lane assist, low speed traffic jam chauffeur, etc) or L4+ where the car can drive on its own but if conditions degrade where it can't continue it is capable of finding a safe spot to stop rather than aborting in the middle of driving suddenly. The controls vs no controls isn't really an argument. Like you said, it will basically be fine either way if the system is sufficiently advanced especially if autonomy can't be disengaged while moving.
  • redwall_hp 1mo ago
    Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction. The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
    • epgui 1mo ago
      Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
      • stephencanon 1mo ago
        I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
        • Terr_ 1mo ago
          Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely? I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
          • ozim 1mo ago
            Never hear of someone who was rear ended being liable. Guy behind should keep a distance that allows him reacting in time and he is responsible for keeping that distance. The same for skiing you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, one behind you is responsible for not crashing into you. In car you have rear mirrors but if you have something in front of you and breaking you are not going to look in the mirrors.
  • MostlyStable 1mo ago
    The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.
    • dylan604 1mo ago
      It doesn't help when manufacturers call their mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous systems Full Self Driving
      • throw1234567891 1mo ago
        A manufacturer.
  • AlotOfReading 1mo ago
    An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally. The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
  • hoss1474489 1mo ago
    I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip. Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off. The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9. I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only. It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.
• Junk_Collector 1mo ago
  It could, but maybe not if your motto is, "Move Fast and Break Things." Article is short on data instead referencing a bunch of aggregated IIHS studies.
  • bestouff 1mo ago
    "Move fast and break things" looks obviously bad for an autonomous vehicle ...
  • anon84873628 1mo ago
    Which autonomous vehicle company has that as their motto?
    • warkdarrior 1mo ago
      Stop asking relevant questions! I have a narrative to push and you are getting in the way.
  • computomatic 1mo ago
    Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
    • pbkompasz 1mo ago
      Didn't they just launch autonomous Ubers in London last week?
      • computomatic 1mo ago
        You can request a ride via Uber. They aren't building the tech. I find it a bit unclear who is operating the fleet (Uber or Wayve), but that seems irrelevant when the question is whether the vehicles' autonomous technology is safe.
  • arjie 1mo ago
• n0us 1mo ago
  Growing proof that PR for autonomous car companies has aligned on a strategy of painting you as a bad person if you want to drive your own car, and therefore you should pay them money to continue being a good person.
  • jjordan 1mo ago
    There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
    • matchbok3 1mo ago
      How selfish. Why should I, someone who wants a safer AV, subsidize those who are riskier drivers? Extremely selfish.
      • gottorf 1mo ago
        This happens in insurance all the time. Healthy people who eat right and exercise subsidize people with poor habits. It appears to some degree that we as a society do not want risk priced optimally to each individual.
        • linkregister 1mo ago
          It is understandable that you think this is the case as someone who is not above the age of 50. You will see that health and life insurance premiums rise precipitously once you reach certain milestones. Once you reach 90 years old, you will find that car insurance companies will discontinue your policy based on a single traffic ticket. We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.
      • uuddlrlrbaba 1mo ago
        Is this your first introduction to an insurance pool?
• dghlsakjg 1mo ago
  Is there a standard that these cars have to meet? Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
  • throwup238 1mo ago
    If it’s anything like my San Francisco DMV driving test, they did a loop around Fell and Oak St (both one way streets with no opposing traffic). I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.
  • margalabargala 1mo ago
    While I would like to see that just for the data, from a regulatory standpoint all we really need are the manufacturers being liable in a crash if their cars were driving. The insurance savings of their cars being safer will create the incentive they need.
  • iknowstuff 1mo ago
    Real world data results are so much more important than an obstacle course to overfit for.
  • AlotOfReading 1mo ago
    There's no legislated standard in the US, nor pre-sale verification that a vehicle has met most of the other automotive standards. That's just not how the US regulatory environment works. There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
    • Animats 1mo ago
      China is going for what's sometimes called "L3.5" - hands off wheel, eyes off road, driver may have to take over if alerted, but if the driver doesn't, the vehicle must safely stop and pull over if possible. The trouble with "driver assistance" systems is the handoff to the driver. That's not reliable. Results from the aviation community indicate that it takes about ten seconds after an autopilot disconnect before the pilot has stable control of the aircraft. "L3.5" accepts that. The < 2 second response required by some L2 systems does not.
• 32ahgf 1mo ago
  So can 100% public transport, non-autonomous. But there is less lobbying money for award winning journalists.
  • throw1234567891 1mo ago
    And trucking. But jobs.
  • Robotbeat 1mo ago
    That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.
    • devilsdata 1mo ago
      I can not imagine that the cost of busses can ever approach the cost of the equivalent amount of cars (for the same amount of passengers).
      • Robotbeat 1mo ago
        It is, at least in a place like LA. Fares are like less than 10% the actual total cost of an average bus ride. https://www.reddit.com/r/LAMetro/comments/1orftnt/should_you_compare_the_total_metro_expenses_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LAMetro/comments/1orftnt/should_you... Now if you’re ONLY serving high density and high passenger volume times, buses are incredible.
        • devilsdata 1mo ago
          Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be? I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars. The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses. So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.
• danieldevries 1mo ago
  Of course. This seems so obvious. More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue. No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system. Fyi. Long robotaxis.
  • ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
    But they still cannot drive cars. All this stuff can do is react very slowly, maybe, if it detects it, to a change in the environment. Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers. If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.
    • abeppu 1mo ago
      > Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers. You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details. Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.
    • madamelic 1mo ago
      FSD avoiding a deer at night at highway speeds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWAmZBEK2Wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWAmZBEK2Wk FSD driving in decently heavy rain (this is mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKePEavEhv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKePEavEhv Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this. I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened. An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
• raincole 1mo ago
  Isn't it... quite a well known thing?
  • derbOac 1mo ago
    The articles I've read on this have said it's murky because of obfuscation of reported data by self-driving companies. The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven." My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc. I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety? I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.
    • paulnpace 1mo ago
      They can also massage the numbers by only driving on the safest roads, then making a comparison based solely on miles driven. The comparisons I've seen are with the general population, not professional drivers. How might that comparison look, since this is a paid service?
• watwut 1mo ago
  I was reading about autonomous cars being better then people 6 years ago ... along with cries about the cars are treated unfairly.
• fierycatnet 1mo ago
  I have a feeling that once everything goes EV and autopilot, they will start phasing out regular cars or will make it more difficult to obtain the license.
  • paulnpace 1mo ago
    Also, the autonomous car companies will have their vehicles coordinating to make it difficult for humans to drive, such as holding a long convoy with close following distance in a single lane.
    • asdff 1mo ago
      At least I'd be able to cut them off with impunity and know they won't try and follow me for it
      • paulnpace 1mo ago
        Instead, they will record you, retain the recordings forever, and assign you a "score" to be applied once they have total dominance of the roadways.
    • gib444 1mo ago
      Definitely. They'll be like the obnoxious people on public transport who play music and videos out loud, people who don't give up seats to the elderly etc
    • jodrellblank 1mo ago
      The streets of the future are an unbroken conveyor belt of fast moving death machines; existing outside of a car or building will become illegal by lobbying "to keep people safe".
  • jillesvangurp 1mo ago
    This will be a gradual process. But probably getting a drivers license will become a lot less common for people over time. There won't be any need once cars drive themselves. Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers. This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer. As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.
• WalterBright 1mo ago
  I'll be sad when I'm forced to give up driving my old cars.
  • bryanlarsen 1mo ago
    You're old enough that isn't a worry for you. If your grandkids have cars as a hobby they might have to use a track rather than public roads.
  • arjie 1mo ago
    Even in the far future of AV highways, I expect that tracks will exist where you can drive your car for leisure.
  • asdff 1mo ago
    The loss of the joy and satisfaction of driving a proper drivers car with a firm feeling manual transmission will be hard to explain to future generations for sure. But the bigger fear is the loss of autonomy in movement that having everyone become beholden to a botnet for transportation will bring. "Drive me to the anti government protest. I want to make my voice heard." "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
• ks2048 1mo ago
  In the modern USA, "saving lives" is anti-correlated with policy, so let's see how this plays out.
• BoingBoomTschak 1mo ago
  The article sensibly asks if the (intentionally or not) cherry-picked stats about automated driving (fair weather only, limited to specific areas that aren't especially difficult) is valid then cites a study that really massages those stats in a dubious way (e.g. only counts as a crash if the airbag triggered, no mention of weather). Hmmm... Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?
• EarthBlues 1mo ago
  I wonder to what extent this effect comes from the fact that robotaxis don't get drunk. I seem to recall a paper showing that human crash frequencies surge up to 6x between midnight and 4am on weekends, despite that traffic accounting for only a miniscule percentage of vehicle miles traveled.
• dontsubmit 1mo ago
  [dead]
• SoftTalker 1mo ago
  Growing proof that driving attentively, sober, not playing with your phone, and not speeding saves lives. Actually, we've known that for a long time.
• alexpotato 1mo ago
  The most likely scenario at this point it: - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents - so either insurance will be cheaper for them - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up - even if only one happens, the relative cost of insurance will change in favor of autonomous - driving your own car becomes a kind of "prestige" thing where only really wealthy people do it (similar to owning your own plane etc)
  • ceejayoz 1mo ago
    > so either insurance will be cheaper for them lol
    • jdm2212 1mo ago
      Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.
      • alexpotato 1mo ago
        > Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. This is an excellent point.
      • Someone 1mo ago
        That already is happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car_liability: In 2015, Volvo issued a press release claiming that Volvo would accept full liability whenever its cars are in autonomous mode. […] Starting in September 2023 in the United States, Mercedes-Benz takes liability for the Level 3 Drive Pilot as long as the "user operates Drive Pilot as designed," but "the driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times when prompted to intervene by the vehicle."
        • ceejayoz 1mo ago
          > when prompted to intervene by the vehicle There'll be a decade of court cases over how fast this means. Mercedes will argue 10ms before the crash counts; ambulance chasers will claim it's five minutes.
• mostly_harmless 1mo ago
  Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas. (https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/yearly-snapshot https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...) The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad. Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
  • BugsJustFindMe 1mo ago
    > "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad." I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
    • Retric 1mo ago
      Good here is in reference to the average crash statistics. Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.
      • ryandrake 1mo ago
        I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.
• kevin_thibedeau 1mo ago
  Didn't save Elaine Herzberg.
• JoeAltmaier 1mo ago
  We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.
  • anon7725 1mo ago
    > The cars know where they are not if they're in a tunnel or a highrise canyon, or there is weather-related interference, or the maps have not been updated to reflect reality, or there is a detour for construction, etc.
  • Gigachad 1mo ago
    GPS not nearly that reliable. There's a reason drones are moving towards computer vision rather than purely relying on GPS. The physical signs won't glitch out and show 100m offset because a tall building was reflecting GPS signals. Maybe in a 100% automated system we would replace the icons with QR codes or something but physical markers will likely be here to stay.
    • JoeAltmaier 1mo ago
      Human-readable? Why? Just sprinkle RFID tags in the roadway, and drive it and register the tags and GPS/Inertial frame with a database and now you know where you are with machine-readable 'signs'.
• cbondurant 1mo ago
  I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great. I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.
  • ElijahLynn 1mo ago
    Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited. But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.
    • bakies 1mo ago
      I can walk a mile. Rarely have to in the city.
    • marssaxman 1mo ago
      Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
      • EA-3167 1mo ago
        Let me guess… you live somewhere warm and mostly dry? Probably on the younger side and don’t have any kids.
        • marssaxman 1mo ago
          Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it. I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
• jmward01 1mo ago
  It has been, from the start and even before FSD had any basis in reality and was just sci-fi stories, obvious that FSD would eventually get here. The only question has been when. We clearly aren't there yet but it is pretty obvious we aren't as far away as the naysayers make out. I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake. You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.
  • lelanthran 1mo ago
    Agreed. I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar). I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider. They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.
  • toasty228 1mo ago
    We've done(ish) the first 80%: long straight roads and grid cities in south USA getting 350 days of sun per year. The last 20% will be tough. There are 1.3b vehicules in the world, most of the aren't in the US, most places will need a complete infrastructure revamp before autonomous cars can even dream to drive there
  • Gigachad 1mo ago
• motoboi 1mo ago
  Autonomous vehicles don’t drink and drive. That alone will save millions worldwide yearly.
  • ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
    Most people don't drink and drive. It's really only in the US where people still seem to think it's acceptable to drive drunk.
    • motoboi 1mo ago
      2nd cause of deaths in cars in the world and in the US too. Top of the list is speeding.
• gwbas1c 1mo ago
  Looks like we're over the biggest engineering hurdles. I used to tell people we'd see self-driving cars take off in the 2030s, (with them generally starting to appear mid 2020s) and now this looks like the case.
• goda90 1mo ago
  A vision of a possible future where capitalism might go with the rise of self-driving cars: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0 https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0
• DNSDNSDNS 1mo ago
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• lbrito 1mo ago
  Considering two groups, FSD and non-FSD, what are the shares of full-sized SUVs in them? Pretty sure whatever the FSD vehicle you can think of, none is a full-sized SUVs, and those are the most lethal kind of vehicle.
• auntienomen 1mo ago
  It'd be really nice to have bolt-on after-market automation. I'm not sure if the car companies will want to accommodate this, but I'd really love to make my old Honda self-driving. I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.
  • WhompingWindows 1mo ago
    Probably won't happen for many years, they need quite a lot of power to use the current AV tech.
  • tharant 1mo ago
    OpenPilot and comma.ai are very close to a bolt-on after-market solution; not FSD 14 quality but you can get a lot of autonomy and intelligence with a $1000 Android device and thirty minutes for installation.
    • 1970-01-01 1mo ago
      It isn't truly stick-and-go, you need to have existing ADAS and other sensors already in the vehicle. As people are now holding onto cars for an average of 15+ years, the bolt-on kits are about 10 years ahead of the average driver's car.
    • asdff 1mo ago
      This requires a fully drive by wire car I would guess
• a3w 1mo ago
  Doesn't ``less cars, more X, where X is bikes and trains'' save more lives than autonomous cars? Also: We have 580k direct deaths a year due to a top pollutant society cross-funds for those who buy them? This is insane. After ten-thousand years, nearly six billion humans died in car-related accidents, i.e. one population of earth when I was young? How is a personal level risk of one in ten thousand each year acceptable? Ban at least human-driven cars, not (only) AI/AGSI! As for driving in full automation: seems impossible outside clear-weathered rectangular cities, for now. But perhaps that does not stay this way for years, and in some places, we can could either adopt this tech, pragmatically, or build liveable, walkable/bikable cities instead in the more long term.
  • hughes 1mo ago
    Who's saying they don't? One good thing doesn't negate another
    • Grombobulous 1mo ago
      Driver assistance and self-driving cars are probably one of the cheapest and low-effort band-aids to the infrastructure mistakes made in the US. They are, of course, not as good as more enlightened city planning, but they’d be an improvement to the status quo I expect, especially the way the quality has made some serious strides lately. I get a sense that traditional automakers are done chasing Tesla on the technology and that’s unfortunate. Those traditional automakers figured out that their buyers don’t care that much about it, and the ones that do care already left for Tesla. Plus, the self-driving that really works best relies heavily on serious AI technology.
• amelius 1mo ago
  Yeah but just one automatic update away from becoming a horror show.
• deleted 1mo ago
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• giantg2 1mo ago
  Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in. Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person. Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive. If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability. People will use it when they are drunk if it means not going to jail and it's readily available.
  • mbac32768 1mo ago
    These are great points. I would add that part of societal buy-in might involve driving the cost of hiring cars down by automating them, though I realize at the moment Waymo can charge a premium because people prefer to not have a human driver. Over the long term autocars should be cheaper than either Uber or owning a car yourself.
    • giantg2 1mo ago
      I was talking more about mandating or encouraging the tech in personal vehicles. I think there's plenty of buy-in for driverless taxis already. It's a perception thing - trust a stranger or trust an automated system. I think it's a much tougher sell to put it in person vehicles, especially due to cost.
  • 1970-01-01 1mo ago
    >you also have to have societal buy-in. Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.
• hereme888 1mo ago
  Tesla has tons of data to the same. Elon ftw.
• MelonArmiger 1mo ago
  It doesn't really matter whether autonomous cars crash less than human drivers. A computer can never be punished, so a computer must never be allowed to kill any humans.
  • strbean 1mo ago
    Suppose human drivers were killing 1 person every 100 miles driven, and software was killing 1 person every 10 billion miles driven. We should just accept that the human population will be decimated each day for accountability reasons?
  • willmarch 1mo ago
    How does punishing someone make crashes better? I would rather have fewer crashes because of a system that can't be punished than more crashes with punishment. Being able to punish someone doesn't change the fact that a crash happened and it doesn't change the fact that someone died. There is a difference between punishment and justice, there is rarely ever perfect justice in life. The best we can do is mitigate harms as much as possible, and it seems self-driving might be the best mitigation of traffic accidents compared to human drivers.
  • Svoka 1mo ago
    * 12 deaths per 100,000 per year, but 4 people go to jail for it * 2 deaths per 100,000 per year, but no one goes to jail Because apparently going to jail is important for some reason? Honestly, choosing jail is somewhat dystopian IMO
  • bretthoerner 1mo ago
    Where do you live that humans are punished for "accidents"? You can run someone over in America and it's basically an "oopsie, do better next time!"
  • abeppu 1mo ago
    I do think that currently we're at the stage where Waymo is trying to convince most of the world of the _quality_ of its offering, so for the moment, things are well aligned. But in 5 years if there are multiple self-driving offerings competing on things like price, door-to-door time, OPEX (e.g. does a camera-only system with no moving parts need less skilled maintenance?), then someone may try to be the cheap but good enough self-driving service that cuts corners -- and we should want some execs to actually go to prison rather than just some cost-of-doing-business fines.
• deleted 1mo ago
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• ErroneousBosh 1mo ago
  You have to remember that this is data from the US, where the road death rate is just about level with Somalia, something like 30% of road deaths involve drunk drivers, and something like 50% of fatalities overall are because the casualty wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Driver training is non-existent, vehicle safety inspections are frankly comical. I have been driven in a car by an American colleague, supposedly trained to a high standard (former public safety) and frankly I think you could train a pigeon to peck buttons to control the car better.
• black_13 1mo ago
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• erelong 1mo ago
  idk if this was even part of the conversation tbh The question was if they could remain secure Also I saw people suggest rc cars as an alternative to autonomous vehicles which... is another consideration entirely as well
• whatever1 1mo ago
  Taxis also save lives. The lives of those who drive drunk.
• dweinus 1mo ago
  Cool, now show the public transit safety numbers.
• Lammy 1mo ago
  The System loves leaning on the Cult of Safety to justify taking away people's autonomy and freedom of movement
• josh_p 1mo ago
  Yeah, so would investment in reliable, nice public transportation. I know it doesn’t solve the last-mile-problem. Either way, fewer drivers means fewer deaths.
• deleted 1mo ago
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• Vaslo 1mo ago
  I feel like we never get real data on autonomous cars as we never do with data centers. It’s hard to tell if bad stories are anecdotal or rooted in truth. I hear the vast majority of accidents would be things that no human could avoid either - but then I’d also be anecdotal.
• usernametaken29 1mo ago
  Honestly, mount a front and back dash camera, and allow people to submit tickets for speeding and tailgating themselves. I’m not kidding excessive speed and not keeping a safe distance equates for some 50% of all deadly traffic incidents. It’s because a small and vocal minority drives like absolute fucking assholes and they will rally lawmakers not to introduce speed limits and to loosen grip on enforcement. The ADAC (German motor association) is a perfect example. When they announced after decades that they support a 130km max speed limit members jumped by the doves. The only vastly meaningful improvement I can see in FSD is faster reaction times when it comes to assholes. Coincidentally those are the people who insist on driving petrol and will never upgrade to FSD because they like to drive like assholes. IMHO it’s time for strict enforcement. Let’s ban them from the road finally. Set fines in percent from income. Allow self reporting via dash cams. Add stricter penalties for recurring offences, if you’re caught speeding 5 times in 2 days your licence is suspended. That’ll have a much bigger impact than FSD. Maybe we can rally our representatives making them all giddy with all the extra cash they can earn from these offenders?
  • lokar 1mo ago
    A hope (fantasy?) I have is that fleet robo taxis will (as part of regulations) get standardized “black box” recorders that can be admitted as evidence. Both for incidents, but also general traffic enforcement.
• fenwick67 1mo ago
  IMO the benchmark to pass will be to show it has better safety than the average sober, non-speeding, non-phone-using, seatbelt-wearing driver. IDK how that could even feasibly be shown but that's when people will actually start going all-in on it. Otherwise I will simply meet those criteria myself for free.
  • stouset 1mo ago
    Bordering on zero human drivers fit that profile. The competition to AVs isn’t a mythical race of flawless humans. It’s the drunk, speeding, distracted idiots who currently operate motor vehicles (e.g., us).
• deleted 1mo ago
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• foxtrot8672 1mo ago
  obviously true, and it has a lot of other benefits, such as being able to take a nap while driving.
• BatchJob 1mo ago
  The lack of transparency and misinformation coming from the industry players and the NHTSA cast serious doubts on any "science" around autonomous car safety being possible. If it was really known the full extent of the cover up it would probably be termed a conspiracy between the autonomous car companies, the state DMVs and the federal authorities. It will take many years and many more unnecessary deaths before we know the truth. THEN give me science based on real and complete data.
  • khazhoux 1mo ago
    Having worked in more than one of the big AV players, I can tell you that your fears of cover-ups or conspiracies with the government, is completely wrong. It'd be interesting if you have to first-hand experience otherwise, though...?
• nxmsmom 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• jeffbee 1mo ago
  I love this conversation as the death spasm of driver culture. On the one hand, a lot of hard data. On the other hand, myths.
  • threethirtytwo 1mo ago
    Ai is slaughtering the identities of everyone around it. Years of skills, dedication and experience rendered useless by a genuinely superior AI. So what do people do? They have to deny it. They have to make up stories, they have to lie to themselves. Normally HN is all about being data driven and logical. But you can see here that with AI this isn’t the case. When your identity is about to be eviscerated all logic goes out the window. I deal with it by having no identity. I never placed pride in anything.
    • jeffbee 1mo ago
      Good take.
      • AlexeyBelov 1mo ago
        > I never placed pride in anything. Really?
• mchusma 1mo ago
  It is correct to compare to average drivers because that is ultimately what they are going to replace. AVs are coming for the whole market, and if they are significantly safer than the average driver the average driver shouldn’t drive. I intend to stop driving when possible.
• rotringlvr 1mo ago
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• iambateman 1mo ago
  From a policy standpoint…I wonder about creating a rule that anyone who got a DUI could get an amended license where they could legally operate only autonomous vehicles. First DUI is a permanent AV-only license. Since 7 million people have DUI’s, that one policy change would completely reshape the industry.
  • Gigachad 1mo ago
    Why would you need a license to sit in an autonomous vehicle?
  • miki_tyler 1mo ago
    You don’t need a license for that.
• YeGoblynQueenne 1mo ago
  >> In March, Waymo’s independent study showed 92 percent fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes, a 13-fold reduction versus human drivers in comparable city environments. I can't progress beyond this point in the article. How is Waymo's study "independent"? I don't understand.
  • hiddencost 1mo ago
    The study was done by one of the most respected and independent groups out there (insurance companies have a very high incentive to know what's real here). Waymo provided the data and probably helped pay for it.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 1mo ago
      Thanks. Well, that doesn't sound independent at all.
• consumer451 1mo ago
  This article is malarkey. Title includes "autonomous cars" - url includes "self-driving" - I smell what you are selling. Meanwhile, the article never gives a share, but as far as I can tell, nearly all the lives are saved by basic ADAS: auto-braking, which is really cool and should be the focus. If you want to click-bait, fine, but then at least tell the truth after the user clicks.
• ericmay 1mo ago
  The safest car is the one that is parked. I’m not anti-car but in terms of safety we should focus more on getting people using bus/rail/bike/walk especially for daily needs. It’s more cost effective too. Autonomous cars are cool and will be great for reducing crashes, but it’s an additive solution, not a subtractive one.
  • pbkompasz 1mo ago
    Yes, instead of fixing the problem let's go back 100 years and start walking everywhere. It's easy for someone that works for home or an in office, but most people truly rely on their cars, otherwise they would lose hours everyday...
    • vkazanov 1mo ago
      Public transit is not "100 years back". London, uk is not exactly backwards looking in that sense, and the vast majority of people use trains/metto to go to work. I walk 10k steps a day on a normal day, only drive when necessary to go out of my normal routes. This has an added benefit of keeping me, an aging programmer, in shape (as well as other relevant activities). Nothing dramatic about it at all.
    • asdff 1mo ago
      It is healthy to walk. You should be walking probably an hour a day at least if we are being honest. You are made to hunt and forage all day, not sit down. Use it or lose it.
    • krembanan 1mo ago
      Most people in societies built car-first/only (USA) truly rely on their cars. The situation is not the same in big parts of Europe and Asia. We can go 100 years forward and fund public infrastructure which is better for the environment, more safe and gives a much higher socio-economic value (except for the highway lobby).
    • ericmay 1mo ago
      > but most people truly rely on their cars, otherwise they would lose hours everyday... They lose hours, lives, and a boatload of money every day in the current state. Removing the reliance on cars will improve those things.
• wolfcola 1mo ago
  what about when an autonomous car kills someone, and the car company remotely deletes important onboard logs to avoid culpability?
  • dzhiurgis 1mo ago
    What about whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
• Rover222 1mo ago
  This is real and good news. Autonomous driving systems have gotten very good and safe (well, Waymo and Tesla FSD). Taking vehicle out of the hands of humans WILL save hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. Yet most comments here want to complain that we should be building public transit instead. Glass is always half full on this topic for some reason.
• Tinned_Tuna 1mo ago
  One thing I'd like to see modeled is how many excess deaths they cause in, for example, London. Driving in London is already very safe because the street design prevents people going very fast. American roads are, by comparison, unsafe. That probably means AVs in those countries had a lot of low-hanging fruit, so they could have a significant impact by staying within the speed limit, for example. Without such low hanging fruit, will there be so much benefit in London? London has excellent and very safe public transit, far safer than even professional drivers. If AVs are cheap and convenient enough to pull people off transit, that might expose enough people to higher risk that makes them overall kill more people than if they'd stayed on the tube. Likewise, more driving (even EVs) generates more asphalt and brake pad dust, which cause respiratory illnesses. If they cause a drop in transit ridership compared to no AVs, how does that affect the excess deaths in the city? My gut says that, in London and other cities with safer streets, they're going to have more difficulty getting such headline-grabbing numbers. Combine that with the potential to take people off safe transit and put them on the road and the balance might slightly tip against them.
• bluecalm 1mo ago
  People kill and hurt others in cars for many reasons but the main ones are: -being dangerous on purpose (speeding, ignoring signs, tailgating etc.) -being inattentive (phones, screens in general, being tired, being sleepy) -road raging in many forms As evidenced by comments in this thread and elsewhere people also have terrible judgement about reality on the roads - blaming cyclists, justifying speeding etc. Self-driving cars remove all those from the equation. It would be shocking if they didn't save lives. We put too high a bar on them. It's a life saving tech and we should put them on the road yesterday and go from there.
• My_Name 1mo ago
  I have said for a while now that self driving cars do not need to be perfect. They will have accidents, of a different type than humans have, and sometimes they will be ones that most humans would avoid. What they do need to be is better than humans overall, and then it would make sense for them to be allowed onto the road. When they get far safer than humans, phasing out of human driving will make sense. They reached that point a while ago, now we just need legislation and public opinion to catch up.
  • LtWorf 1mo ago
    They reached that point on very very limited scenario and conditions.
  • oersted 1mo ago
    Yes but in practice the pushback is more about the shift on who is held responsible and who has the control to prevent a crash. People understandably prefer to keep control of their own safety, even if on average they are worse at it. Because individuals that do care about safety can actually do many things to lower the risks well below the statistics, and likely remain much better than self-driving. There’s also the question of responsibility and liability. In society we have such pressures so that there’s an incentive to continually reduce risks. It is dangerous to shift the responsibility to fast-growth tech companies that will care much less about individual accidents than the drivers involved, and are more capable of absorbing liability without substantive remediation. Safety is outsourced in many contexts (aviation, police, military…), but it has to be substantially better than what the individual can achieve on their own. For instance, due to the expertise required, or because you can achieve more through coordinated collective action. And there has to be very high trust in the companies involved, the regulatory systems around them, and the technologies employed.
    • My_Name 1mo ago
      I completely agree. I feel a lot of pushback is likely to be coming from insurance companies who very much like being able to hike up your premium because they have decided that you as a person are a bad risk. When the entity that had the accident is some software and sensors made by a company, they can't do that. I disagree that the safety concerns have to be on an individual basis, no other driving regulation works on that basis. They are based on the statistical likelihood of an overall reduction in damages or risk. You as an individual might be safe driving 10-20mph over the limit, but the limit is there to cover a variety of road conditions and road users. The self driving system just has to fulfil those criteria, being that overall having it is safer for the average road user than not. It, also, is not the fast-growth tech companies that decide that.
• dataking 1mo ago
  Was surprised that article mentions Waymo, Rivian, Zoox, but not Tesla.
  • perilunar 1mo ago
    How can you write an article on autonomous cars and not mention Tesla? Clearly in bad faith.
• krautburglar 1mo ago
  Epstein class pays a "journalist" to lie, so that one day, you will have no choice but to purchase their drivable iphones.
• worldsavior 1mo ago
  Can someone remind me why we need autonomous cars? What's wrong with paying someone to drive? Autonomous cars is an inefficient solution anyway, I don't see how it benefits the rider.
  • IshKebab 1mo ago
    Yeah sure! In theory they should be cheaper one day because you don't need to pay someone to drive. This means you can use them in situations where for cost reasons you would have driven yourself - e.g. for long journeys, in the countryside, for commuting etc. Getting people out of their own cars and into autonomous cars is better for several reasons: 1. We need to own fewer cars collectively, which is better for the environment. 2. Don't need to waste a ton of space on car parks. 3. It's safer (at least for Waymo). Not just for occupants but also for pedestrians and cyclists. Having a cheap option for last mile travel also makes trains more attractive. All of this of course rests on them actually ending up cheap, which hasn't been the case so far but we'll see.
    • solatic 1mo ago
      They won't be cheap until there's competition to drive down the price, which will otherwise be as high as possible to justify the initial investments. It's only a matter of time, but likely on the scale of decades. But I wanted to add on the future benefits front - as more vehicles on the road become autonomous, they could communicate with each other and reduce the buffer distances between them, allowing for faster travel and improved saturation while still being safe.
    • worldsavior 1mo ago
      It won't be cheaper. 1. If auto cars will be cheap, every one will use them, and none will use public transportation. 2. Oh yeah, we would just waste space outside the city. 3. Right now it's not safer. It will probably drive at the speed of 25% less than the limit, sure than it might be safer.
      • IshKebab 1mo ago
• pbkompasz 1mo ago
  Hopefully the people that find autonomous cars great are the bad drivers of today. They will transition into that and leave the better drivers of today to drive in peace.
• superkuh 1mo ago
  Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives in cherry picked temperate and clear environments that don't get things like snow. The article mentions this point and acknowledges it is a serious problem and then just leaves it at that as if it doesn't completely demolish the entire argument they're making. They don't try to refute it or anything. >How Does Limited Fair-Weather Data Compare to Traditional Crash Statistics? >A key question is whether Waymo’s robotaxis, currently limited to fair-weather operation in a handful of cities in the U.S., are directly comparable to humans driving a wider variety of roads in much more variable conditions. That's literally all they say about the subject before moving on to talking about incomplete sampling of true crash rates.
• cloudie78 1mo ago
  I’ll risk sounding crass to state the quiet part out loud: Majority of car accidents outside of the occasional genuine freak accident are self-inflicted. Call it FAFO or Darwinism, whichever you prefer. I’m saying that having done that myself once in the early days of holding a drivers licence and feeling heroic with my speed and a corner. I was lucky to walk away with minor bruises, mostly to my ego. And wallet. That day I learned how a car behaves when it loses traction. 15 years later accident free, minus one person bumping the rear left side because they’d thought it would be a good idea to cross over into my lane over a solid line. Having watched how autonomous driving is “developing” over the same span of time - I’m not convinced, the last decade was spent more on “trust me bro” targeting lawmakers than genuinely trying to have a breakthrough in the technology and we’ve hit a wall (no pun intended). The correct answer to this problem is better driver education, and a higher bar for entry. Lest we let the idiots take over and we as a society accept a lower standard.
  • asdff 1mo ago
    People run the stop sign all the time by my house. The highway sounds like a fast n furious movie every night. There's no education shortcoming. They know what they are doing. They know how to go the speed limit and stop for a sign for the DMV test. They know when no one is looking and they can get away with dangerous bullshit. Certain drivers just need their privileges revoked, cars crushed, and some nights spent in jail if we are being honest.
• artoghrul 1mo ago
  Calling something that kills people but just does it less as "saving lives" is batshit crazy. Looks like people in the US got so brainwashed by the toxic car culture that not killing feels the same as saving lives. It's like calling it a saving when my girlfriend decides NOT to buy something. This whole article is a joke, right? Right???
• deleted 1mo ago
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• deleted 1mo ago
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• LaGrange 1mo ago
  You know what actually saves lives? Fewer cars.
• dainank 1mo ago
  I would imagine that world running on fully autonomous cars would certainly be less error-prone than a world running on human-driven cars where each human has different intelligence, reflexes, emotions, moods e.t.c. A purely algorithmic system of autonomous cars is certainly safer, just needs to be fully adopted. The only drawback I suppose is the fear of these systems being hacked, something that is not so easy with biological humans.
• lucaprata 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• lionkor 1mo ago
  Slightly besides the point, but I love seeing people in massive modern SUVs, clearly completely overwhelmed by them, barely able to tell where it starts and ends, probably distracted by the screen. Its especially funny in parking here lots in Europe, where they barely fit. If you drive such an SUV, I have a suggestion: Let the computer do the parking, you can't park and you can't drive well either. Just let the clanker figure it out, it'll save everyone time.
• Simon_O_Rourke 1mo ago
  Of course they do, an 8 bit PC rigged up to an old Nintendo Duck Hunt sensor would drive more safely than some of the morons in my neighborhood. I've ceased to be annoyed at them, and instead just shrug at the idiocy.
• alescalaios 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• ahaferburg 1mo ago
  Saving lives is not the priority. Transportation efficiency is not the priority. Follow the money, and you'll find out the priorities.
• trizoza 1mo ago
  Please, when can I return my driving license and we'll all go all-in on self-driving cars only?
• m0llusk 1mo ago
  Life saving is a good metric. So also are incidents of blocking traffic or interfering with responders. Navigation is only one aspect of driving which is a social act and requires both sophisticated understanding of context and communication. Looks like progress is impressive but there is still a lot of work to do.
• ericyd 1mo ago
  > Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes. That potentially skews safety numbers in favor of human drivers. I am not understanding the phrasing of this section. If humans under-report crashes, and autonomous vehicles accurately report crashes, then that would mean the rates are more favorable towards autonomous vehicles rather than humans, right?
  • cbruns 1mo ago
    Your interpretation is correct and not at odds with their phrasing. They mean that reported safety numbers for humans are skewed towards appearing more safe than they actually are.
    • ericyd 1mo ago
      I see it now, thank you
• Lifetrajectory 1mo ago
  Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes: That is an important point.
• Lifetrajectory 1mo ago
  Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes: that is an imprtant point.
• Lifetrajectory 1mo ago
  In Germany Waymo will only be allowed to use self-driving cars starting in fall 2026
• tonymet 1mo ago
  Violations and collisions are not uniformly distributed. A minority of drivers cause the preponderance of collisions. Eventually these misunderstood stats will lead to everyone having their driving privileges revoked, when in reality, only the worst drivers should be banned. And in many cases, stellar drivers will be at greater risk of harm by being forced to ride in an automated car.
• demo4567 1mo ago
  PHASING OUT HUMAN DRIVING IS ADDING A MIDDLE MAN TO GO FROM POINT A TO POINT B AND HAVING TO PAY THEM AND BE TRACKED ALL THE TIME. HOW IS ANYONE OKAY WITH THIS?
  • alephnerd 1mo ago
    CAPS LOCK DOES NOTHING TO HELP YOUR ARGUMENT. IT IS THE FORUM EQUIVALENT OF YELLING
    • NoGravitas 1mo ago
      I AM YELLING, CARL!
    • demo4567 1mo ago
      I know, it doesn't. It feels helpless sometimes. It is either a super moderated forum where people willingly ignoring reality it seems.
  • tra3 1mo ago
    Like taking a train or a plane or a bus? Like having to purchase a vehicle? Like having phone companies know which cell tower you're connected to? It's a valid point you're making, but we can legislate against the abuse you're implying. We've got privacy laws for a reason.
• maerF0x0 1mo ago
  My hypothesis of why autocars will make life so much better than we're imagining, which I think a lot of negative/hater folks miss includes: (All of this is very USA centric because that's my context) - Very old people who lose their license will get mobility back, as will blind or otherwise unlicenseable people - Autocars can break phantom traffic jams - They should massively reduce DUIs - They will serve as a form of competition to airlines (and is approx as eco friendly with 2 occupants), especially for drives < 12hours. You can sleep or work while it drives. Probably also to long distance passenger trains, except when they're very fast like the 300km/hr one I took in Spain. - Autocar can be a sort of public transit in that you will not need to own it, and it can serve many people per day. It's not likely to be mass transit though, afaik - Autocar can make your commute be work time - Autocar could make money while you dont use it, this is a form of "public" transportation that doesn't require massive public investment/loans. It will help decrease the net TCO of a car. - Autocar can go home or serve others instead of needing parking garages in cities - If it's safe to be in an autocar, very small cars can make sense again. It can help break the arms race of mass that has gone on in the USA. You dont need a big SUV to be safe from a bad driver if most cars are autocars and your autocar can dodge the bad manual drivers - Autocar will drive fuel efficiently saving something like 20-25% of gas the vehicle would have used with an impatient human trying to save 1 minute on a 15 minute drive. Many many more, but I hope this inspires some.
  • stkdump 1mo ago
    Arguments I heard that make no sense to me: - Autonomous cars will improve traffic because stopped cars can start going at the same time at an intersection -> Then you have no safety distance. And while theoretical improved reaction times mean you might need a bit less distance, the quadratic term comes from the needed breaking deceleration, not the reaction time. - Autonomous cars will reduce congestion: they can't if they are supposed to drive around empty either to park somewhere else or to get to the next person to transport. On the contrary, they will increase congestion. Note also that I don't buy the "work" inside "very small cars". It's not just that having to drive prevents you from working. Also the overall comfort while traveling isn't good enough outside of trains or planes for anything but some tiny amount of work. I am on board with the benefits for old, disabled, tired and drunk people though. Also, I do accept that they will prevent a lot of accidents and deaths.
• sporkland 1mo ago
  If you've ever ridden a bike next to an autonomous car on its worse day and most meatbag drivers on their best day you'd know it's not just life saving... the amount of near misses, stress and asshole moves drops precipitously as well, at least once per trip from my experience, but usually more.