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Comment by ashelmire | Hacker News Reader

>Yes, these vehicles will eventually save lives once their error rate drops below that of a human driver.

Aren't self driving error rates already below human drivers? The fatality rate is extremely skewed by one incident in which the system detected an obstacle but wasn't allowed to stop the car because it was disabled (so... not a failure of the self driving aspect of that system) and another in which a partial self driving system warned a driver repeatedly to take the wheel, but they did not.

In both instances the problem was a failure to force action by the human drivers (or failed reliance on them). In the former case, the system would have braked, in the second, the system should brake instead of asking for help from the driver.

Meanwhile the overall crash rate for self-driving cars is lower, correct?

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> Meanwhile the overall crash rate for self-driving cars is lower, correct?

I don't think that's correct in general, and especially not so if you compare the conditions that each are driven under. Said a bit differently, the human error rate is in all conditions (rain / snow / nighttime / unmarked roads / gravel) where most self-driving miles are on well-marked city and highway roads in near ideal conditions.

The Uber system would not have braked (and didn't) the system that would have braked was the Volvo system built into the car which Uber purposefully shut off. If Uber cant drive on a clear dry night without killing people they shouldn't be allowed on public roads endagering people who didn't sign up to be around these cars.

I'd be interested to see your stats comparing the two crash rates. Note that you have to compare equal conditions; most self-driving tests are done in unrealistically good ones. (Which is fine for pilot programs, but makes the stats hard to compare.)

But you're already no-true-scotsmanning your way to giving the self-driving cars unrealistically good scores. Yes, a cause behind the Uber crash is indeed Uber disabling a safety system they thought unnecessary. But we have no reason to believe some other companies aren't also either turning off or just never adding safety systems.

On the other hand, if we're worried about the performance of these systems, shouldn't we be testing them in ideal conditions before submitting them to suboptimal conditions?

Yes, which is why I explicitly said it was fine for pilot programs.

My objection is not to better testing. It's to bad comparisons. Including, as here, with somebody handwaving at data that, at best, couldn't answer the question.

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