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by wooter 2945 days ago
The NHTSA found a 40% crash rate reduction from Tesla's autopilot. So how about you tell all the people who lives have been saved that you wish they hadn't been because you're an emotional reactionary
1 comments

I believe many people have found issues with the data used and how they were prevented. Also it's worth comparing the common case of accidents - bumper to bumper, etc on a freeway which I'd except all self driving systems to instantly reduce the rate of just by increasing the distance to the next car - to the number of serious crashes - e.g. driving into parked vehicles, concrete pillars - those have entirely different failure modes.

That said, the reality is that the types of self driving systems currently deployed - Tesla or whomever - are all fundamentally flawed because they do two things:

* Require attention from the human driver at all times * Cause driver inattention

The first is fairly clear, literally every one of these products is prefaced with "the driver is still in control of the vehicle and must remain attentive", and the latter is clearly demonstrated because of all of the different mechanisms that the manufacturers are deploying to try and deal with the fact that if you tell a human to pay attention to a specific task, but they aren't doing that specific task, they will not pay attention. Every system tried just increases the time required for a human driver to adapt to unconsciously managing the various "pay attention" alarms.

The solution is fully self driving cars. We don't have that yet. I fully expect them to be safer once we get there.

I don't disagree that levels 2/3 are a danger zone in self-driving technology, but I feel the need to point out that there are plenty of people who are disabled or suffer chronic injuries resulting from being rear-ended. Stop and go traffic can be plenty dangerous as well.