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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

"Excessive speed" and "alcohol intoxication" -- two common causes of human driver failure.

Other causes of human driver failure include driving while tired or exhausted, falling asleep at the wheel, driving while angry or upset, getting bored while driving, using the car's infotainment system while driving, using a mobile phone while driving, getting distracted by passengers, smoking pot while driving, being a recklessly immature teenager (or a grown-up idiot), lacking the bare minimum of driving skills that every driver on the road is supposed to have, and so on. The list of causes of human driver failure is long. There are a lot of horrifically dangerous human drivers -- look around you next time you're on the road.

Notably, machines are immune to all these human failure modes.

I'm looking forward to the day in which cars drive themselves well enough to rid the roads of so much dangerous human driving.

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Roadways have failure modes of their own, pavement fails. Vehicles have parts that fail. Pedestrians are 1/6 of all motor vehicle fatalities. Dangerous weather happens at least once a year in most of the country. People are allowed to and still enjoy riding motorcycles.

Meanwhile, excessive speed and intoxication account for more than 50% of all fatalities. You can solve this problem without having to wait for an AI car, it's probably morally justified to do even if you think those AI cars will arrive "any minute now."

Finally.. I am not looking forward to the day when a parent puts their kids in an AI car and does not accompany them to their destination. People will invent new failure modes for you.

> “Excessive speed" and "alcohol intoxication" -- two common causes of human driver failure.

Amazingly it’s worse than that. He was also on pills that would react with the alcohol to make things worse.

I’ll say I’m very surprised by the areal photo in the report. I was under the impression the driver (man or machine) had gone a real distance at speed before the accident. Which did lead some credence in my mind a driver assist system had been helping it along if the driver was slow to react/inattentive.

He could have pulled out of that driveway, hit the gas, and it happened. The trip had barely begun. You could do this crash easy in a 1960s sedan, no ADAS needed.

However they are proving very bad at making complex decisions, especially ones that involve people and nature.

A lot of our driving in unusual conditions require our experience and reasoning about the world.

We already have self driving that works and it's called a train. Instead of dumping money into self driving we should improve infrastructure and motivate more people to take trains.

Door-to-door transport is here to stay, despite any idealised vision of everyone moving to a train schedule.

> and motivate more people to take trains.

If you build a train that does what I need without requiring copious amounts of my spare time, I might take it. If you don't then your only "motivation" boils down to "reducing options until the train is all that is left."

People need infrastructure that meets their demands. If it works, they'll be plenty motivated.

This. My new office (a 25 minute drive off peak) is unusual in having a train station nearby, but to get there I need to take a bus to a different train in the wrong direction, in all a 90 minute ordeal (worse off peak).

Trains somehow manage to be more expensive than cars, even in countries that subsidise them, despite having massively more throughput. Until that problem is solved I don't see people choosing them over cars.

Me too, but that's not this day. I hope it comes soon, but I think it's important that car companies promise and deliver in a rock solid fashion like Mercedes is doing instead of grandiose near future predictions that everyone knows won't be met. Not commenting on this incident in particular, just the general landscape of self driving.

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