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Comment by KenSF | Hacker News Reader

My neighborhood is shown in this video multiple times. Number of times I have seen an AV act dangerously? Zero. Number of times an SUV has hit me while I was legally in a crosswalk lifting me off my feet and throwing me through the air? more than zero. Number of times I have seen an AV parked in the box on a red light? Zero. Number of times I have seen a human parked in the box on a red light? All the time, every frackin day.

Are AVs perfect? Nope but they might already be safer drivers than the median driver in SF. There have been 310 pedestrian deaths in SF over the past 10 years. Number of deaths the NHTSA has attributed to full self driving vehicles? Zero.

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Given there's over a million registered vehicles in SF, and only ~300 fully autonomous vehicles in SF, if there's only 310 pedestrian deaths over the past 10 years, with all else being equal, you'd definitely expect the vast majority of those deaths to be from normal vehicles, given that there's you know, over a million of them, and only ~300 AVs.

As AVs are .0299% of the vehicles on the road, all else being equal, they'd account for .00929 deaths per year. You can't really point at the lack of deaths at this point as proof of anything.

According to the DMV of CA in 2023 there were 453,180 including motorcycles and trailers. Most vehicles are used very little or not at all where as autonomous vehicles are used most of the time. Also, the NHTSA numbers are for all AVs everywhere in the US so your astonishingly numbers precise are way off.

Still, as a pedestrian, I am pretty happy the AVs are not parking in the crosswalks all the time.

You need to look at per mile driven rather than just number of vehicles because the AVs are much higher utilization. The states confirm that per mile driven, AVs are much safer.

Also anyone that has walked near one can easily tell. The AVs actually yield to pedestrians, especially if you step near the crosswalk unlike many SF drivers.

I doubt everything is equal. AVs are likely driving many more miles on the road each day than the majority of other vehicles.

Not to discredit your numbers, but the video mentions deaths and injuries in the US attributed to self-driving - it's a real thing. Do companies have a long way to go before these things are ready for the streets? Absolutely.

Just don't export that kind of road behaviour to other countries, please.

That's another important point he makes: these self-driving cars will probably not be retrained for every single country, so you risk exporting the dangerous behaviour of American drivers to other countries.

A better solution is less cars, more other modes of transportation.

And the other side of the coin is if you are a driver who isn’t a brainless idiot, who hasn’t ever been in an accident, self driving cars are worse than your average performance even if they are better than the median american idiot.

And yet imagine the world without the oversized crap... I mean SUVs... or 95% of cars altogether...

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