Here's a video of Waymo car in Phoenix. Around min. 17 it gets confused by a cone and stops in the middle of two lane road, hugging both lanes.
Then google sends support but just when they arrive, the car drives away from them.
They were lucky it didn't lead to an accident and as long as they keep the fleet to 600 cars then yeah, the accident rate will be much lower than Tesla's AutoPilot, shipped in more than a million cars.
My point is not to rag on Waymo just to inject some reality.
We don't have a choice between "safe and unsafe" way of developing self-driving software.
We have a choice between "test software we know can't handle all situation on real roads and make it better based on that testing" or "we'll never have self-driving software".
Except the other option will rather be: "U.S. doesn't allow testing of self-driving software on real roads and a Chinese company will develop it and will capture a trillion-dollar market in U.S."
This is like saying that we'll never have a cure for cancer if we can't experiment on the public without their consent.
The bar for medication, at least, is proving safety first before testing on large amounts of people and allowing the public to buy it.
Except for vaccines, apparently...
It's also entirely possible Waymo hasn't achieved peak perfection in its software development practices despite doing better than Tesla, and that another entity could do it more safely.
The reason is widely known. Phantom braking is caused by rogue radar reflections that confuse the car into thinking there’s an obstruction in its path, activating the AEB automatic braking.
The real question is, why does it happen more often with Teslas than with other cars equipped with radar AEB? Maybe Tesla’s is just more sensitive.
And this part from the previous poster strikes me as a big problem: "They were lucky it didn't lead to an accident and as long as they keep the fleet to 600 cars then yeah, the accident rate will be much lower than Tesla's AutoPilot, shipped in more than a million cars."
That seems like an excellent reason to keep the number of active cars very, very small. Rather than, as stated, an excuse for shrugging at a death rate at least 1667 times higher.
But “move fast and kill people” is ludicrous and it’s exactly what Tesla is doing.
I bet you that'd reduce traffic fatalities dramatically too.
How far do you want to go to 'save lives'.
I guarantee you with 100% certainty I can design a society that will 'save lives' at every turn for every single activity, and I can guarantee you with 100% certainty you wouldn't want to live in it.
https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
fortunately our regulators don't take a one size fits all approach for how new technologies can be developed
Even if we trust them on that stat, which I certainly don't, that still doesn't mean they aren't killing people unnecessarily.
Plenty of businesses are able to build very effective safety mechanisms for motor vehicles without subjecting the general public to Beta software. To me this is a case where the ends do not justify the means.
What if we made driving tests far more difficult (otherwise, you can drive a 50(?)CC moped that tops out at 35mph)? What if we had government subsidize rides home after going out drinking? There are a lot of solutions that don't involve "let companies test 5000lbs autonomous vehicles on public roads." Heck, those companies have enough money let them buy a city and test it on the now private streets.
> Tesla and Waymo seem to be making progress. I don't expect them to be perfect but in the long run this will save lives.
Let's assume for a second your unstated assumptions I was alluding to above are correct. This is the only way to make a better system and that system has to be tested on public roads. Why do we allow two private companies to reap the inevitable huge monetary rewards when we all pay for that system with a higher increased risk of dying in the meantime?
Now, if you drive one of these "FDS" cars and it ends up in an accident where people die, who is responsible? Are you responsible? Is the car manufacturer responsible? Do we just write it off as a freak accident with 1 in a million chance of happening again?