| If autonomous cars can lead to a significant reduction in road fatalities, then we aren't we in the right direction ? I was hoping that the discussion here would consider the outcome of autonomous vs non-autonomous cars in totality instead of having an emotionally charged outburst against a big corporation. Yes, maybe this is not the right time for Tesla to go all defensive but that's expected & that's how almost any company would respond. Why waste all the energy discussing that only. Yes, people will get careless with autonomous cars, but don't they do it with regular cars too ? Cellphone, coffee, makeup, etc. So I disagree that autonomous cars have to be perfect. An automobile is like a weapon in the driver's hand. If they aren't careful, they can hurt someone including themselves. Autonomous systems are there to help reduce the chances of mundane accidents due to the driver being distracted or less than capable. They are not their to replace a human yet. My point of view is that if a human can't avoid a collision, don't expect the autonomous system to fill the gap. It's their to catch "some" of the errors that a human might make, it's not a foolproof safety net. |
My personal thinking is that if these imperfect autonomous systems can create a net reduction in road injuries and fatalities they are worth consideration. However, I would also want to take into consideration any incidents where an autonomous system protected the safety of its own occupants, yet caused injury to those in other vehicles.
The type of analysis necessary for this would be complex as it would be dependent upon wider scale deployment of these vehicles and large amounts of unbiased data (which is rarely available in most traditional road incidents). I would imagine that currently only manufacturers of these vehicles have access to the majority of the necessary data and it seems unlikely they would release it for third parties to evaluate.