[njarboe]

Would an auto-car that crashed at a rate 1/10th of humans be a successful "full autonomous" vehicle? You could save 30000 lives a year in the US by deploying such vehicles and probably more due to knock-on effects. But that would be about 10 auto-car deaths/per day. No way that works with the current media.

Unfortunately, it seems many people are not going to accept auto-cars with less than airplane like safety levels. Of course that will never happen. So yes, "full autonomous" vehicles are a long way off (probably forever), unless someone (Waymo?, Tesla?) can show they are much safer and some kind of national or state level laws are passed to restrict the legal liability of the makers and owners of such vechiles. Sort of like how ski resorts would not exist without special laws restricting liablity.

[fucking_tragedy]

> an auto-car that crashed at a rate 1/10th of humans

This is incredibly generous assumption, especially given the fact that cars with advertised Autopilot features, like Tesla's offerings, actually make accidents more likely[1][2]. Compared to the driver fatality rate in other luxury vehicles, Tesla's offerings nearly triple driver fatality[3].

This is like theorizing about a car that survives 99.9% of all impacts at any speed. It doesn't exist, nor is there any indication that it will exist, and it doesn't serve a purpose other than to prop up a contrived argument.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/in-2017-the-feds-said-t...

[2] https://driving.ca/tesla/model-s/auto-news/news/iihs-study-s...

[3] https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...

[njarboe]

No assumption, just a serious question. I agree no one is near that good yet. But it was a question that people should be thinking about. How good will be good enough to let the auto-vehicles operate on the roads?

[trickstra]

> This is like theorizing about a car that survives 99.9% of all impacts at any speed. It doesn't exist, nor is there any indication that it will exist

now THIS is a strawman

[trickstra]

quoting from your [1]

> So does that mean that Autosteer actually makes crashes 59 percent more likely? Probably not.

[hnhg]

This is a strawman. We're talking about replicating all of the abilities of a driver in all of the conditions they're supposed to operate in with approximately the same kind of performance. When we get to that point, then we can consider your question.

[Quick edit: a good question here though is what kind of drivers test is sufficient for us to even begin considering autonomous vehicles? Is that even answered?]

[trickstra]

why would that be a strawman? And why would we be talking about replicating the abilities of human driver? The ultimate point is to have safer transport, not copying a human driver with all of their quirks and flaws. Autonomous driving might look very different from human driving and still be safer. The way human drivers drive today is not necessarily optimal.

We don't want approximately the same kind of performance, we want much better performance, so it essentially must be different from the human driver

[Someone]

Level 5 isn’t only about safety, but also about universality.

At level 5, one expects a self-driving car to ride gravel roads, park in highly temporary parking spots, spot police officers and follow their orders, drive short distances on non-roads (e.g. to drive around a car pile-up), etc.

A car that recognizes those cases, stops, and tells it’s passenger “please help me out for a few meters” would be a fantastic accomplishment and very, very successful, but wouldn’t qualify as level 5 autonomous.