[bmcusick]

There's more to safety statistics than just the mortality rate. We should be able to look at frequency and severity of non-fatal accidents too. Those happen a lot more often.

For example, accidents that occur at 35 MPH or less are much less likely to result in a fatality or major injury, due to the amount of kinetic energy that a human body can safely dissipate. So if Google cars have even slightly better braking or speed control, you're going to see an improvement. Looking at the average speed at which accidents occur would be useful information.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> There's more to safety statistics than just the mortality rate. We should be able to look at frequency and severity of non-fatal accidents too. Those happen a lot more often.

When the industry or the press discuss the safety of self-driving cars, they almost always do it in terms of fatality rates. Not general accident rates.

[Animats]

"they almost always do it in terms of fatality rates"

That's an element of right-wing policy created to fight safety regulation. The position is that since the severity of non-fatal workplace injuries is hard to measure, only fatal accidents should be recorded.[1][2] Then there's too little data to make policy.

[1] https://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/testimony_michae... [2] https://www.oshalawblog.com/2017/04/articles/its-official-os...

[dmoy]

Huh I thought there was that huge fixation on just "disengagements" or whatever a year back.

[gpm]

"Disengagements" are a measure of how close we are to a self driving car. I.e. one that doesn't need a human sitting in the drivers seat to handle these disengagements, not a measure of safety.

[Animats]

Right. Only Waymo has disengagement numbers that are even vaguely decent.

The CA DMV data has enough info that you can distinguish between "driver had to take over to avoid crash" vs. "vehicle was unable to proceed due to problem ahead and needed help". The first number needs to get very low before self-driving can work. The second, Waymo proposes to handle by having a very limited remote control capability, so remote support can get a vehicle past a strange problem.

[agumonkey]

I wonder if there will be a psychological factor too. If SDV really manage to get better, during the transition, will the remaining human drivers improve to avoid feeling beaten by a machine ?

[mayniac]

I personally think, during a transition to an SDV majority, human drivers will get worse.

Mainly because good driving is often synonymous with defensive driving. And you don't need to drive defensively if there's a large number of cars on the road which won't unexpectedly change lanes, turn right from the left lane or wildly change speed for no reason. If anything, human drivers might start doing unsafe maneuvers more as they see SDVs around them react quicker and safer to their bad driving. Why bother getting in the correct lane when you can pick the less congested one and rely on SDVs to move out of your way when you barge past?

There's also the issue of people switching from SDV to manually operated vehicles. What if someone uses an autonomous car for commuting on weekdays and gets used to the car acting for them, then uses a normal car on the weekends? They might expect the car to emergency brake for them when a pedestrian steps out into the road, and in the split second it takes them to realise the car will not do that for them they've already traveled too far to stop in time.