Regardless of what you, I or others in 'our' sphere might think, there's a lot of traction in playing the conservative card when it comes to cars hurtling down roads.
As someone in a big city who drives a bit, cycles a bit and walks a lot, I can't help but feel we're still a long way off high autonomy in cars outwith constrained environments.
What history told us is that people's lives really isn't a concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
Slowing down the deployment of self driving cars is likely to cost far more lives than it saves. The difference is we don't create national news for the several people that will be killed today on America's highways.
https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/02/09/a-v-safety-2018-upd...
But who cares about data, if it is all about AI singularity religion?
Still if you want a real comparison my parked cars have been hit 5 times, most of which does not show up on accident data, because I only reported one of those the rest caused minor damage. Similarly I know of multiple cases of people driving off the road and not reporting anything because they did not cause significant damage. I even know of several cases of road accidents not being reported due to minor damage.
PS: Tesla's self driving cars get a lot of flack for not being ready but they have dramatically lower accident rates than non self driving Tesla's.
So, your argument falls flat.
Some people may take that view, but I don't. It's not great, but good enough for deployment and easily qualifies as autopilot.
Really, aircraft is autopilot not designed to be used without pilots. Yet, it's still good enough to both be used significantly more than 50% of the time on commercial flights and increase overall safety. So even a highway only car autopilots that's plenty to be useful. Now, if you mean it's not designed to be level 4 automation then sure, it's got a steering wheel unlike several buses in production.
I'm interested in seeing the stats for this if you have them, because I've previously looked and been unable to find anything to back this up.
To be properly comparable, we'd need to be comparing human drivers in the same situations in which people use autopilot - i.e. less challenging situations like highway driving.
This article covers some of the problems with Musks pronouncements on this matter: https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2016/1014/How-saf...
Here's a better study from the NHTSA that measures the safety impact of Tesla's autopilot features. They found that Tesla vehicle crash rates dropped by almost 40 percent for cars equipped with autopilot: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF
And BTW, I'm not saying I'm measuring what is available on the market. I simply point out, that there is no evidence yet that _fully_ autonomous vehicles had exceeded human safety level by any stretch of imagination.
Now, driving a semi may be more dangerous than a car, but it's hard to argue it's vastly more dangerous. Further, people are not uniformly good drivers, a self driving car is vastly better than someone that so drunk they have trouble standing.
However US is not the only country, they have easily passed the accident rate in Brazil.
Current autonomous cars still have a backup driver. So what we are measuring here is a compound safety level of autonomous tech + attentive, professional, sober human. The real data of interest is the safety level of autonomous vehicle alone. We don't have that data. We can proxy it, by looking at the numbers of disengagements and their severity, and that data currently does not look particularly good. But nonetheless it is just proxy data. Once a larger scale tests without backup drivers are concluded, we will get a better picture. Until then, I advise to withhold from any statements such as "autonomous vehicles are much safer than humans", because they are simply not supported by any data.
As for you final statement, I bet there are many undeveloped countries or particular cities with huge number of deaths per mile. But exceeding their death rate on US roads is not anything to be celebrated.
While it took the company 18 months to reach one million, then 14 to reach two, then 8 months to reach three and finally six months to reach the four million mile marker.
Call it 4.7 to 4.9 million miles today.
Uber went from 1 to 2 million miles in 100 days and where over 2 million in December. So they are likely around 2.5 million today unless they slowed down significantly.
However, their are actually a surprisingly large number of self driving car initiatives world wide. Though apparently EasyMile which sells slow level 4 automation busses to 20 countries is only at ~100,000 miles which surprised me. Sill there are several competitors in that space.
Every day that goes by without a shift to autonomous driving, we lose 70 or so people in the US alone. Why this isn't being treated as a Manhattan- or Apollo-scale project, I don't understand.
A conservative approach is not what's called for here. We can afford to break a few eggs on the way. Sounds heartless... but sorry, that's what the math says.
But they also all add cost to new vehicles, and the average age of vehicles on the road reflects that. It's been climbing, looks like 11.5 years now.[0]
Looks like there's about 260M cars in the US, and on average only ~18M new ones sold each year[1]. Let's go conservative, and say we just need to replace 200M cars with current-or-near-future tech ones to save 30K lives a year. Let's say a 30K car has the level of tech we want. 200M * 30K = 6 trillion.
But car crashes are like 2% or fewer[2] of all deaths in the US. So that's a massive cost that might be much better spent elsewhere. It's not that we can't make cars safer - we can already do that! - it's that there are some much more appealing ways to spend the money if approaching it from a non-commercial perspective.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-average-c...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
I expect that if every car in the US were replaced with a new one with most of the available modern safety features, you'd reduce the current fatality rate by a very significant percentage.
One of my vehicles is quite old. But I'm not going to replace it just to get new safety features.