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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Does it currently really reduce fatalities if you control for car cost, age group and area driven? I‘m unconvinced of the current statistics.

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Biggest factor to control for is drunk driving, which is ~30% of all deaths IIRC.

Good point. I wonder whether the ratio of drunks behind autopilot wheels is different than average. Could be lower (because richer) or higher (because richer).

There could easily be more than just a wealth differential, e.g. people who are more are of their emissions impact might also be be more aware of intoxication impact.

I'm any case, "statistically more safe" is a weak argument, e.g. we would be terrified of boarding a plane if they were merely statistically more safe than driving (by a small margin).

>e.g. we would be terrified of boarding a plane if they were merely statistically more safe than driving

Don't know why you're treating that as a hypothetical. Many people are terrified of flying and it is safer than driving.

What that commenter is getting at is that the term "statistically more safe" is meaningless because it can be such a wide net of meaning, e.g. a very small margin (1%) or a large margin (50%).

It's 28% in 2016 according to NHTSA [0], 10,497 deaths.

Certainly auto-pilot is worth it if the driver is drunk. I wish that all cars were fitted with alcohol measuring devices so that the cars won't start if you're over the limit.

Drink driving is still a massive problem in Belgium where I live. Although you get severely fined (thousands of euros) it's up to a judge to decide if you should have your licence taken away [1]. Typically you have to sit by the side of the road for a few hours then you're allowed to continue. In the UK it is a minimum 1 year ban.

[0]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving

[1]: http://archive.etsc.eu/documents/C.pdf

Currently it is probably worse than the average driver. But here is a trolley problem for you. What is the ratio of people killed who volunteer to test out an auto-drive to the number of lives saved by that early testing? 1:1, 1:10, 1:100, 1:1000, 1:1,000,000? A million people die in vehicle wrecks each year.

Those are clearly not the only two options. Waymo appears to be far and away the leader in this space, and they've killed zero people.

Yea, most self driving miles are simulated, not done in meat space.

5 million are in meat space, too few to derive anything about safety since on average a fatal crash happens every 100Mmiles

Can't find how many of these miles were driven on roads with a posted limit above 35mph

The problem is that it's not just the drivers who are the volunteers getting killed. When you kill pedestrians as Uber did, they did not volunteer to be killed to test your software.

Yes automation is good, but Tesla is being needlessly reckless. They can easily be much more strict with the settings for auto-pilot but they're not.

If you are talking about the world a large part of that million are killed on the roads where no self-driving car would be able to drive anyway. Also "normal" drivers do not usually get killed in crashes—unless it involves reckless driving. So probably self-driving is safer than drunk driving, reckless driving or driving on the roads with the extremely poor infrastructure, but compared to responsible driving? Also, why is this so black-and white? The safest current option is technology assisted driving, but no much talk about it.

I'm just throwing something at the wall here: Just start with a purely assistive package like most big manufacturers have. Let buyers opt-in to a test program (giving them, say, a 3% reduction on the list price), where all their inputs and outputs are recorded and sent to the manufacturer. Manufacturer can now assimilate that data into a model of car and road and test their fully autonomous software on that model and search for situations where the software gave much different input compared to the human driver. Check these situations in an automated way and/or manually to see whether it's a software error or improvement. IMO this approach would have had a high chance to find the bugs that caused the two recent fatalities, as I'm convinced that most human drivers would have done better there.

After years of doing this (which seems to be close to what Waymo is doing if I understand correctly), the autonmous software should be way better than what is being pushed out now by Tesla and Uber (and probably a bunch of others).

Sort of assuming Tesla is doing this already.

If they do I'm surprised of the latest accident tbh.

I think you could have just stopped that sentence after does it currently really reduce fatalities?.

why? got better data than me? please share.

Considering that tesla w/ autopilot enabled is less safe than tesla w/ autopilot disabled, I'm going to go with "no, if you control for those factors it doesn't reduce fatalities".

and how did you reach that conclusion?

Oh is that the case? How long is this known? In that case I find it should be taken off the market by the government.

Source?

Anyone driving with it for an hour will probably encounter a situation they have to take over. Seems pretty obvious. It's a cool tech demo with bugs that can kill you.

That proves that a Tesla is dangerous if you enable the autopilot and then take a nap. It doesn't demonstrate that it's more dangerous if used as intended.

I haven't ever seen it save anyone, only introduce more problems for the inattentive driver.

I'm not reading a position in what you've said, but there is an observation here to draw out for the crowd. It doesn't matter all that much if after controlling for those variables it is relatively less safe; in absolute terms it just needs to be as safe as the worst human drivers.

That is, we have an accepted safety standard - by definition, the worst human driver with a license. If a Tesla is safer than that, the rest is theoretically preferences and economics.

I'm not saying that the regulators or consumers will accept that logic - if airlines are any example to go buy, they'll take the opportunity to push standards higher - but I think the point is interesting and important. It is easy to smother progress if we don't acknowledge that the world is a dangerous place and everything has elements of risk.

I don't agree with this position. Autopilot is a new thing that governments need to decide whether it's allowed or not (since it is operating dangerous equipment, so the state has an interest in doing the right thing). If improved safety is not a demonstrably valid argument for allowing it, it IMO doesn't pass the bar for what should be allowed. At that point it's purely a money-grabber from corporations that want the cookie (first to market with fully autonomous vehicles) without paying for it (heavy investment in testing).

What about if it could pass a driving test?

Since it would be one software being used many times over, I'd be fine if it could pass a large number of driving test with very low failure rate, considering driving tests are quite random in how they are applied. The question is however which driving test. My experience in Switzerland was that the practical driving test was quite hard to pass, I had to train a lot to satisfy them completely and they route you for one hour quite randomly around a European medieval town and its outskirts, i.e. a place that's quite hard to navigate correctly as it's not built for cars.

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