W.r.t."self driving winter", I think Waymo are aiming to protecting themselves from that situation by developing close relationships with regulators, highlighting the "we're not them"-part and sticking to their safety-first approach.
Again, the measuring stick is real drivers. And real drivers are really bad at this stuff too.
For the comparison to hold you need to do the following:
- discount all the hours when humans are in adverse conditions and autopilot is not normally engaged
- remove motorcycles and other vehicles from the pool
After you do that Tesla is still much less safe than your average driver. Their whole spiel of taking the easy 80% in miles of driving and claiming victory has been debunked so often now it is getting boring. It's the remaining 20% where the fatalities are and which - coincidentally - are the hard bits.
The only story I see is politics and complexity, as opposed to moral clarity.
People (and the media) are going to focus on the accidents that would not have happened if self driving did not exist.
I agree with this but I think it implies that people also will not accept safe self-driving cars that take forever to get anywhere in traffic. Especially since a decline in average traffic throughput makes things worse for everyone in a car, self-driving or not.
I think this makes the problem much harder, since a lot of people do demonstrably take risks in their driving now, in the interest of saving time (even knowing intellectually that lives are on the line).
If you assume people drive 10K per year at an average speed of 33 mph, you’re driving ~300 hours per year. Slow that by 25% and it’s an extra 100 hours per year. If you assume 7.5 hours of sleep, you’d spend an extra 1.6% of your waking life in a car because of the slowdown. That’s killing a lot of time, even if not directly killing people.
But machines make different mistakes, mistakes that humans would never do, and that's psychologically not acceptable to most people. All the actual accidents will be "freak" accidents that a human could never cause, and that scares people a lot more than "human" accidents like a drunk driver running someone over at a pedestrian crossing.
It psychologically like being a passenger in a car with a good driver who has a history of epileptic seizures.
If I get killed by a drunk driver, my wife will at least have someone to rage at.
If I get killed because my car randomly decides to drive itself into a high up truck and I basically died because of stupid technology. I would hope that it doesn't end up killing my wife too out of rage that she's going up against a major corporation now.
That's kind of maddening.
I think what would be accepted is if the self-driving car would have capabilities that surpass the best human driver (as opposed to the "average" driver). But we're a long way from that.
frankly I don't think any of the teams who have demos are as close as they hint they are. there are just so many exceptions that it becomes maddening.
look, people road rage over the driving habits of others and the computer while it won't road rage has to react to those who infuriate others with their driving either because its reckless or just bad driving
some of my favorite conditions....
people stopping to let you out, how does the car know? people going out of order at an intersection?
* I do not let it drive where I think the situations are complex and obviously it does not have the ability to respond to traffic signals or make turns at intersections.