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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

I think it is great that they are starting to think about this, but I find the approach profoundly disappointing. While it is a bit silly in form at the moment, this test is starting in a much more useful direction, IMO:

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39688/drivers-new-to-automated...

We all know that there are car accidents every year, and it is no secret that driver inattention is the root cause for a very large percentage of them.

But what can be done about them? The NTSB is focusing almost exclusively on driver monitoring while the driver assistance is turned on.

But what about when its turned off? And more generally, how do these systems compare against driving without such systems at all? Its clear that the current state is far from perfect, but an overly heavy focus only on failure cases will lead to misleading conclusions.

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When a driver fails they are culpable, when an auto pilot fails who is culpable, who loses a license and potentially faces criminal charges?

Auto pilot vs human drivers is not apples to apples because of the culpability question imo.

This is easily solvable. Manufacturers will take out umbrella liability policies to immunize them from lawsuits relating to self-driving failures. In order to price these policies, insurers will perform their own due diligence of the self-driving packages. The armies of lawyers employed by the auto makers will develop a boilerplate legal defense that will make massive lawsuits impractical, and most victims will settle out of court.

Alternately, your own auto liability insurance will include coverage for your car’s automaton, and again it will be priced based on risk. For most people, the premium will be lower than if they drive themselves, as the risk will be lower.

Won't work most places except for the US. Contracts are almost always different for the EEA since you can't legally sign away your rights here.

Want to start a class action lawsuit? Go for it. The company might say you've waived that right, but any such clause is null and void.

Nowhere do I mention anyone signing away their liability. This doesn’t require any kind of click-through license or arbitration clause. The manufacturers will be fully open to being sued, they’ll just have an insurance policy that pays out if they lose.

If autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers, then ultimately they are going to be safer to ensure.

VW is setup to do just that with their goliath bank: https://www.vwfs.pl/ - I would imagine this is where the larger brands may come into their own with larger legislation and legality issues. VW provides a whole range of financial offerings.

The day is rapidly approaching where we'll have to choose between the desire to blame and the desire to save lives.

Fairly soon autopilot will be safer than new drivers and the elderly who are aging out of the ability to drive safely. I hope we have the political will to potentially save my parents' and child's life by allowing them to have an AI driver even if it's not 100% safe.

I’ve been reading “fairly soon” for so many years now. People laughed on HN when you said we wouldn’t have it by 2020. I hope technologists are willing to do the hard work to make sure it actually is safer before making assertions that it is based on shoddy as-honest-as-an-advertisement statistics.

My parents will be alive for probably another 20 years. That's the kind of time horizons I'm looking at things, not the current marketing speak. If we get there within a decade, that will seem very quick to me and I'll be very happy with our progress.

And I make the prediction that Tesla's "Autopilot" in its current form of camera-only navigation will not be able to be safer than new drivers and the elderly (below 80) within the next 20 years, maybe ever.

To be it must navigate any situation without any driver intervention:

- parking in tight spaces

- follow the assigned turn lanes in an intersection

- follow the local laws on turn on red

- navigating streets that are less than a meter wider than the vehicle and have vehicles parked alternating between right and left but are still both ways (very common in Europe)

- nighttime driving in heavier rain

- following diversions that are not published, badly signposted, and were set up quickly by the city due to sudden a hole or similar in the street

- follow streets without any or even wrong markings on them

Most importantly it must not drive people into dividers, well-lit emergency equipment, and/or crossing trailers.

The fun thing about this is: we both won't ever be able to prove our theories right because neither enough elderly nor enough new drivers will own a Tesla with "Autopilot". They are just too expensive.

I don’t see anything in this comment thread that was specifically referring to Tesla self driving cars. I think the sentiment is for self-driving cars in general, achieved however.

A decade is a long time, long enough for the entire tech stack of every self driving platform to change completely.

> Fairly soon autopilot will be safer than new drivers and the elderly

This assumes that our hill climbing hasn't hit the top of the hill in this area. I submit that there's almost no evidence of recent continuous growth in this technology.

I’m glad you have a magical belief without meaningful facts produced with meaningful oversight. Tesla’s representations are essentially “hold my beer while we provide not full self driving”.

In a plane when an auto pilot fails the pilot is still culpable.

Stop the comparison to planes just because it's named autopilot in both cases.

There are always 2 highly trained professionals in a cockpit and both are familiar with emergency situations because they regularly train for it. They are in constant contact with ATC that keeps other planes far away from them. In case of a crash or even a deviation there are entire agencies all over it with sometimes international investigators present. All communication is recorded.

A driver is not only alone, they can have very poor skills in general which were last tested 40 years ago. They are on the road with dozens of vehicles around them, tightly packed and often separated by less than a vehicle width between them. If a crash occured there may be a few police officers present that pick up the pieces and fill out forms to satisfy the insurance.

Commerical flying should not be equated to amateur driving. Amatuer flying does not require a second person or many other safety requirements. Commerical driving does have higher standards on number of hours , certifications etc

Lack of adequate recurring certifications or poor standards does not absolve the driver of his responsibily towards himself and more importantly to others on and near the road, same as the pilot , inadequate oversight is not an excuse.

driving a 2+ton vehicle that at the typical speeds can be fatal or cause major injury you are responsible period. Same for any other equipment or a pet

Once you get to L3 self-driving, you delegate full responsibility to the car, even if only under limited circumstances. Many L4 cars will not even have steering wheels or pedals, and won’t have a pilot’s seat. A lot of prototypes turn the front seats around to face the back row.

Do you still believe that the driver is responsible under those circumstances?

Anything L2 or under is a “driver assistance system”, and the driver maintains control and responsibility at all times. All of the systems in recreational or commercial aircraft today (autopilot, auto-land) are L2 or less.

This is why it’s very critical that automakers not blur the lines to drivers. We are approaching an inflection point as to who is responsible behind the wheel, the car or the AI.

> There are always 2 highly trained professionals in a cockpit...

Nup. Sometimes it's just one barely trained amateur.

And those are still far more regulated than drivers, and they would be regulated even stricter would they routinely kill others without being harmed themselves. Meanwhile, cars are advertised by how well they protect the driver in events that likely involve killing others.

That's silly. There's a huge difference between the 'barely trained amateur' and the average person in coach. Who drives a car.

The last time a plane's flight system screwed up big time, the manufacturer was found to be at fault, all models of that plane were grounded, and it was a massive public scandal.

That’s mechanical / system failure, like Toyota’s “sudden acceleration” problem years ago. The question is about wrong decisions made by self driving, where there is no clear failure mode.

That's not generally true. It would generally be the manufacturer if the autopilot failed (as opposed to disengaging).

Well, humans tend to only face criminal charges if the problem was willful (which may include willful DWI).

The closest direct equivalent with driverless is that the vehicle may lose its right to operate until the problem has been corrected. I'd actually expect this to happen somewhat frequently in the early days.

And this is what killed earlier attempts at self driving cars... liability (and merging problems but those were fixable)

Granted in the late 90s the self driving technology was mostly focused on closed roads and using modified systems (eg magnetic pins in the road) to help cars self locate

But it came down to: if there’s an accident who’s responsible? The driver? The car manufacturer? The road designer? The road builder? The government?

For this to all work, companies have to take responsibility (not legal, but much more ethical than Tesla has shown) for their technology and you probably need a government system like the vaccine adverse event reporting system with associated payouts.

Even back with those self driving buses, things were on the side of extreme caution.

I remember the big problem with them were stray soda cans triggering stop.

I don't see how current technological advances can any improve the local environment awareness of the car until the actual cognition element is there.

I think there is still a question of who's responsible. If I have an accident in my non-automated Honda Accord, who's responsible? It could be the car manufacturer, if the front wheel falls off because of a manufacturing defect. Or it could be the government because of unmaintained safety features. Does that equation change if the car is "full self driving"?

I am not a lawyer...

My snarky answer says “who wrote and who is interpreting the licensing agreement”

Their comment was specifically about when the autopilot is off, so it is apples to apples because bot situation can be treated equally - a person driving a car fully manually.

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