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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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