[Isamu]

If nothing else, this article provided a link to the California vehicle code that covers autonomous vehicles. That is an interesting read.

Back to the article, they point out impatient overrides by the test driver are apparently not being counted as disengagements and do not appear on the reports to the DMV. The author tries to make this into a safety concern, but it just isn't. Maybe it is against the intent of the code as written, but maybe not, since it seems to be concerned with true safety violations.

The code: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/d48f347b-8815-458e...

[ars]

> impatient overrides

It's not impatient. It's the car having no idea what to do next, so it just sits there waiting for something to happen.

I count that as a failure in the path to autonomous driving. Remember: Those 1% scenarios are the hardest part, yet they are critical. You can't just say "99%" it's good - after all humans drive perfectly 99.999% of the time (measured by time on the road vs assuming 5 minutes per accident - which is probably high, since the error leading to the accident probably took less time than that), yet that's not good enough.

[taneq]

We need to distinguish between the two.

For any kind of self-driving vehicle, making a silly mistake and needing a human to override it to prevent a collision is not OK at any significant frequency. I'd guess the maximum acceptable rate would be no more than one collision in multiple years of driving.

For a self-driving private vehicle with manual controls, pulling over and saying "help me, human!" once every few months is perfectly acceptable. For a standalone self-driving taxi with no manual controls, it's not. For a self-driving fleet taxi with a remote operator able to take over and help it when it gets stuck, it may be.

[akira2501]

> We need to distinguish between the two.

More than that, you need to distinguish between accidents and fatalities and then you need to put them both against the number of miles driven. In the US we're currently at about 36,000 fatalities per year with about 3 trillion miles driven.

> I'd guess the maximum acceptable rate would be no more than one collision in multiple years of driving.

Again.. terrible metric. The rate versus the number of miles driven _while in autonomous mode_ is what you really want to consider; and anything worse than the current numbers is absolutely unacceptable.

> For a self-driving fleet taxi with a remote operator able to take over and help it when it gets stuck, it may be.

I'm not sure that's better, or an acceptable solution. Remotely controlled, how? Do we put limits on that system? Are limits always a good idea given the context it's expected to be used in? How long between alert and remote control? What's the expected latency of drive controls, given that light actually moves pretty slow relative to the planet's size? Then, how do we secure any of that?

Either the system works better than humans, or it shouldn't be deployed. Limited trials, a good grip on the numbers and a strong regulator are what's needed.

[ars]

> no more than one collision in multiple years of driving

That's really high, that's worse than what people do (on average a person will probably have an accident every 18 years, none fatal).

And that's with a person watching? That's really bad.

> once every few months is perfectly acceptable

Not really. The people inside it will have no practice (or even ability) at driving. Such a car is not really useful, you'll just make things more dangerous, not less.

The bar for self driving cars is so incredibly high, I doubt you'll see them on regular (non-instrumented, restricted) city streets until we have true AI.

Most likely there will be train-like intercity roads, dedicated (and instrumented) for self driving cars and trucks.

But unrestricted city driving? Very unlikely to ever happen.

Despite how high the accident rate is, people are actually really really good at driving. And computers are really really bad at being reliable.

When you can have a complex computer program that simply manages to have 99.9999% uptime, then we can start to talk about self driving cars. We don't even have that, self driving cars are an impossible dream.

And that 99.9999% number is not just random, it's how good you have to be to beat a human at driving.

[kurthr]

Hmmm... I think I read the same insurance statistic and the number was 17.9 years, which is close enough. The concerning bit was that the number came from insurance claims not accidents, which might be under-reported, because nobody wants their insurance to go up! As a result many parking bumper dings, minor side swipes of other cars, bicycles, and pedestrians probably aren't reported.

Otherwise, judging from the bumpers of most cars in NY/SF... I would guess that each person had filed hundreds of claims.

[Judgmentality]

What about self-driving trucks on highways?

[carlmr]

>Despite how high the accident rate is, people are actually really really good at driving. And computers are really really bad at being reliable.

Human swarm behavior is terrible (that's your rush hour traffic for you). And computers are very very reliable. The only question is whether they can be programmed in a way to handle enough edge cases to be feasible.

I'm with you in thinking that for the next 20 years we'll see a lot of automation on high ways but not in cities. On the highways there's very much less variability, and less erratic human driving. For me that's already 99% of what I would buy a self driving car for. I'm happy driving short trips through the city. I hate driving home for 2-3h and not being able to do anything else.

[sgillen]

I agree with the idea that an overide because the car has been stopped for too long is less dangerous than a more active sort of overide. But I think it still is a safety issue.

I’m mostly thinking of when we take the human out of the equation completely, if the car is stopped indefinitely that is going to cause all sorts of problems. If it’s blocking a city street you’re creating traffic as well as potentially slowing down first responders. Being stopped on a highway is very much a safety hazard.

Even with a human driver to take control there are places where coming to a stop would be a very bad thing (an on or off ramp for example).

[asynchronous13]

> if the car is stopped indefinitely that is going to cause all sorts of problems.

Your comment is true, but consider the context. There was a vehicle already blocking the lane that caused the autonomous car to stop. The autonomous car did not block an unobstructed lane, the lane was already blocked.

[khc]

I've seen Cruise's cars braking for no reason, including once at the intersection (there's nothing in front of the car)

I couldn't tell if it figured out it's safe to proceed on its own or if someone took over. It's also possible that the human drivers were doing the braking but if that's the case they clearly need better safety drivers

[BRAlNlAC]

i watched a Cruise driver sit through multiple opportunities to make a left against traffic, until the light turned red and the traffic clear out complentely, basically wasting the green light. It was rather infuriating to watch, i joked to my girlfriend who also watched that we are all screwed if the Valley cant get its act together to hire really top notch drivers to train driverless cars. We dont need the roads full driverless cars who dont know there own power.

[xbmcuser]

The main thrust of the article is that the disengagement numbers are not a good judge of which ai is better. As the companies have to much leeway to fudge the numbers as they are self reported.