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Comment by s_y_n_t_a_x | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving is the future. Mankind will one day realize 1.25 million deaths a year from crashes is unacceptable. Tesla is on the forefront of that, it would be dumb not to be sinking money into it. If they don't now, they'll lose their lead, lose marketshare, and lose their training data.

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You do realize that everybody still drives knowing the risk? The driving force behind self-driving cars is convenience, it will never be safety -- especially when the fist $x decades of mass-adopted self-driving cars will be more dangerous than human drivers. If safety was that important and the political capital existed to actually change things then we could make a huge dent with just the things we know right now.

Current self-driving cars are already orders of magnitude safer than human drivers. I agree convenience is likely the largest driving factor but safety is definitely emphasized.

I think we should all be able to agree that there are no commercially-available "current self-driving cars" - there are cars with ADAS, but they are far from self-driving. And if you tried to let your "self-driving car" actually drive itself on the typical routes that a person takes through the course of a month (not on a closed course), you would never arrive, either because you died in a crash or because the car gave up.

(NB: I own a Tesla Model 3 and have the various "self driving" options.)

Per what data? Human-driven cars cause 1.25 deaths per 100 million VMT in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... Even Waymo is nowhere near 100M miles driven: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsilver/2018/07/26/waymo-ha...

There's not nearly enough data to make a claim like that.

Self-driving is a safety feature. It's a really advanced form of driver assistance, which is a safety feature. ABS, Forward Collision, Lane Assist, Blind Spot detection, these are all safety features. Self-driving is a combination of all of those with extra radars and cameras and AI.

Safety features can also be considered a convenience, but that doesn't mean they aren't safety features.

Humans zone out, they get tired, they have slow reaction times, they only have 2 eyes, they get complacent. Computers do not.

Self driving is way safer where are you getting the fact that a human reaction are faster than a computer

Where are you getting that all of these accidents could have been prevented with faster reaction times?

I mean if you're right and reaction times are all that matter then we don't actually need self-driving cards for the safety benefits, just somewhat improved emergency collision avoidance/braking systems. Much easier problem to solve.

Putting unproven self-driving software into public use won't lead to a reduction in deaths. If Tesla were serious about preventing traffic deaths rather than pushing whizbang tech out before it's ready, it could push a software update that makes it impossible for its cars to speed on surface streets tomorrow.

tesla wants to stay in business as a company, that would kill them, as it would any company. you might not be aware that on non-freeway roads, tesla won't let you 'auto-drive' more than 10 miles over the speedlimit. you can just 'drive' any speed you want, but you can't engage autopilot more than 10 over on side streets.

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