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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source for that claim? I might have fallen victim to Google's PR here, but I was under the impression that they are reliable already - at least in controlled conditions (low speed, good weather, well mapped area).

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Depends on the threshold for reliability. As of the end of 2015 in the 1.3 million miles Google cars had driven on public roads in California, human drivers had been required to prevent 13 incidents where Google assessed a collision would have happened without human intervention, a further 56 where the driver intervened for safety reasons and 272 times due to more minor sensor issues (using quite conservative thresholds)

That might not be bad for new technology and was showing trend improvement, but it doesn't compare favourably with accident rates for human drivers

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

But once they have accident rates that compare favorably with accident rates for human drivers, they'll have a saleable product. Self-driving cars don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than people.

To be allowed on regular public roads without humans behind the wheel in most jurisdictions, they're going to have to be better than people in virtually all conceivable circumstances rather than just on average. (This isn't even necessarily a bias in favour of the status quo or irrational fear of machines though those exist too; the analogy would be a person with unusually quick reaction times who drives 100k miles every year without incident still being liable to lose their licence if they're proven to have a bug in their system that makes them occasionally inclined to drive under the influence or faster than speed limits...)

And, as a practical matter, not to fail in ways that average people (aka the voters) won't see as crazy and incompetent--even if the occasional tired or under the influence human driver might have done something equally bad.

Also, let's say the accident rate was slightly better than that of an average human's.

Among people, there are some good drivers and some poor drivers. The average driving ability --- including fast reflexes for dealing with accident situations, for example --- is somewhere in between.

Is it fair to possibly force self driving cars on the good drivers?

(they probably shouldn't jump on the self-driving car bandwagon early anyway, but just a thought.)

Force? I said they had a salable product. Even if every car sold today was self-driving, the average car on the road is eleven years old. It's going to be awhile before anyone is forced into anything. At least in the US.

People (especially males I've noticed) seem to equate good driving with great reflexes.

I have pretty good reflexes, but that doesn't make me a good driver.

I equate good driving with common sense, not speeding over the limit or taking unnecessary risks, not tail gating people, and in general not being a tool.

I.e. when you're driving a 2-tonne metal tank going at 80 km/h, good == safe.

In this sense, autonomous cars have already far surpassed us.

I apologize if I made it seem like I meant great reflexes meant good driving. Instead, I included it because great reflexes might help people get out of accident situations (say, like properly pulling the handbrake when the car starts spinning out of control, or turning away from a deer in the right direction last second, etc.)

Again though, I was discussing the situation in which cars were only slightly above average, meaning there were likely situations where some people would do better than it and might be putting themselves in more risk going into a self-driving car.

(if your point was more to make sure people don't take the wrong message away from my post, sorry for this response then!)

This assumes self driving without human intervention. If your in the car you can keep an eye out for danger and still be far more relaxed. Open road on a sunny day, no cars, sit and chill. Creeping along at 5mph in a traffic jam, relax it's all good. Driving in a more complex situation ok, manual time.

People suck at paying attention to boring situations. So, the easiest part of the trip is likely the best thing to automate.

Remember, the actual accident rate is very low. Further cars and humans are likely to make different mistakes so if you supervise and the car does sub second reactions and 24/7 360 degree vision the combined rate is likely to be great.

You likely under estimate the number of accidents a human has in that time frame it ~108 years worth of driving. 1 accident per 8 years is hardly terrible. Further there rate of problems has likely been dropping so the most recent 120,000 miles are the most important.

What is in your opinion the acceptable number of traffic death through self-driving cars?

In addition, impaired drivers causing accidents will pay a fine or go to jail. Who takes the responsibility of impaired sensors in self-driving vehicles?

You don't need a source for common sense. It will take years for self driving cars to become reliable. There are many adverse conditions the car will need to be able to deal with in the real world. Weather and all other chaotic systems are not to be dismissed casually if we want self driving cars to become a reality in our lifetime. Just because something will take a long time to reliably engineer doesn't mean it's not a worthy problem to solve.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "reliable". If you mean it won't crash more than a human, then we can pretty much do that under certain conditions. If you mean it will accept a trip 24/7 no matter the weather or road, it will take a while.

Do you have a source for this? Everything I can find is not apples-to-apples - they compare the reliability of a self-driving car under extremely careful and limited conditions, specifically by people who are developing, testing or evaluating the car... To the reliability of cars driving in snow, rain, glare, and operated by people with limited cognitive abilities and reflexes.

I don't think that's a fair comparison at all.

No, I was just going by what ma2rten said. But I think it is a fair comparison in the context of "show we allow this?". People drive in the rain at night without anyone considering banning it, so if we can make good-weather autonomous cars safer than that then it's good enough to start.

Well, given the current safety level of new cars, which is coming down towards 1 fatality per one billion miles driven, and a fleet of 100 000 vehicles driving autonomously for 10 000 miles per year, you need to collect data for five to ten years just to show that your autonomous cars are safer than regular cars.

Tesla, with the current AutoPilot, will have to collect data for closer to 20 years in order to have good enough statistics to claim AutoPilot is safer. (Since AutoPilot only works in some situations, they wont get 10 000 miles per year.)

If they're only reliable in controlled conditions, they're not reliable. The really hard problems that would impact the feasibility of self-driving cars (as the popular imagination sees them) arise in unanticipated situations.

After all the work that was done with the DARPA Grand Challenge(s) in the past decade, it would be an embarrassment to Google if they couldn't get the cars to work in controlled conditions, rather than it being a staggering achievement in getting them to where things are at now.

I really want self-driving cars to happen, but I see the biggest impediment to that vision of the future being the general public's level of optimism and credulity WRT this stuff, to say nothing of the tech community's optimism and credulity. It's a domain that is a nearly infinite bucket of incredibly hard problems, problems that may ultimately prove insoluble as currently specified. If everything goes well, then maybe in 20 or 50 years a lot of transportation will take place in self-driving cars which operate with sets of known constraints in environments that are (to some degree) controlled.

If everything doesn't go well, then people will keep talking about how self-driving cars are inevitable, and how in a just a few years they're going to pick you up at your house and drive you to work using the exact same roads set up the exact same way as roads are now, doing the exact same commute that they might've been doing when driving themselves. This credulity will push the money and the technology forward, until too many disappointing setbacks occur, and then all the money dries up and nobody's talking about self-driving cars anymore.

If you tell somebody that something is inevitable and almost here and it's just a matter of throwing enough resources at it, it's much easier to get people to give you money to do those things, but as soon as anything happens that doesn't fit that script, they will assume you've been lying to them all along (or just aren't credible), and the R&D money goes away. Whereas if expectations are set appropriately, it's harder to get that money, but as long as there are achievable, realistic goals and people aren't basically pitching magic, then the funding is more likely to stick around during the rough patches.

Let's assume that we have all the algorithms discovered, the prototype works excellently. For example, all the problems with snow and weather have been solved, as well as the logistical problem of making an extremely accurate 3D map of the world. Google has their prototype working everywhere: it's ready to be implemented as production quality (it has to be better than Android).

Writing high quality, reliable code (for example, in airplane control software), including testing etc, tends to take 5-8 years. So from a project management perspective, that's the reasonable estimate.

Why would anyone believe a company's claims? I'm not trying to be a jerk, but why would we trust a source who has a vested interest in misleading us?

Maybe phrased less combatively: Do you have a source that's not Google (or a Google-slanted PR piece) that has hard data about what's possible today and what will be possible soon?

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