[sokoloff]

This will have you unexpectedly slowing for road signs, guardrails, and other stationary objects on the side of the road when they are on the inside of a curve (as they will have apparent motion towards your lane)

Set "too tightly", it will also have you slowing for every car approaching a stop sign from a side street.

Cars that randomly slow out of an excess of caution are also a hazard to other road users. Don't believe that? Go drive for a month and set a series of alarms on your phone every 5-10 minutes. Everytime the phone goes off, abruptly slow to half of your prior speed. Do you think you'd make 1,000 miles without causing a road hazard or collision?

[davidgould]

I'm not sure what side you are on here, are you saying that the autonomous cars cannot be careful as the technology to do so is not good enough? or are you saying that they should not be required to be careful?

[sokoloff]

I'm saying that a rules based system with "slow down arbitrarily whenever the hell you want" is unlikely to meld well with existing traffic and is likely to cause as well as avoid unsafe situations.

I believe that might mean that autonomous vehicles are not yet ready for road testing if that is commonly required by the current state of the art. (I last worked on autonomous vehicles in 1991; ours was entirely rules-based and we tested on public roads in addition to private tracks. Ours was bad enough that the human driver hovered over the red E-shut button and was always paying attention. It was harder work than just driving the damn thing yourself, but we had to test in order to make progress. I'm sure loads has improved since then.)

I also don't think that zero fatalities is a realistic goal nor is it the standard that should unduly inhibit progress. People have been dying in transit on foot, on horseback, on bikes, and in cars. This is a version of the trolley problem. I don't mind and in fact actively prefer a system improvement that allows 100 deaths while saving 500, even if the 100 is entirely disjoint from the counter factual 500.

In this specific case, I believe the autonomous car allowed 1 death that would have also been allowed by a human driver in the same circumstances, so it's a push.