[semi-extrinsic]

The facts around current car safety is that it's already really quite good. In modern cars and "autopilot-feasible conditions" you are talking well below 1 fatality per billion vehicle miles travelled with regular human drivers.

This means that if a model has sold 1 million cars they each need to drive 100 000 miles with autopilot enabled before the insurance company has enough statistics to say "this is safer than a human".

[keanzu]

They might be able to extrapolate from non fatal accidents because they care more about damage which costs money to repair than fatalities. But I take your point - a lot of miles need to be traveled before you'd want to build it into your actuarial models.

[mtgx]

No, the "facts" you keep reading about (from the same companies trying to sell you on the technology) are extremely misleading.

Tesla for instance does that statistic against "average driving" but the "Average driving" happens in cities. And most Teslas enable Autopilot on highways, where Tesla recommends enabling it, too.

Accidents happen much less on highways, so of course this "statistic" looks better. Put Autopiloted Teslas in the cities and then see how that statistic fares. My guess is it will become much, much worse.

The more real statistic is that even Waymo, which is about an order of magnitude better than anything else on the market, has an "incident" where a human driver would need to intervene every 5000 miles. For everyone else, a human driver would need to intervene every few hundred miles.

That's far from the "self-driving" technology we were promised.

Two relevant posts from someone that used to lead the Waymo project, before it was named Waymo:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/06/10/gmcrui...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/04/18/are-ro...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/04/uber-goog...

[sillysaurusx]

It pains me to see you banned. You've been with HN a long time.

I compared your recent comments to 6 months ago. They seem a bit better now.

Why not just email and apologize? We all have bad days. Why let a string of bad days tank your 8-year history?

Regardless of what you decide, I wanted to leave an encouraging comment. At least one person is thinking of you and cheering you on. Good luck.

[dang]

If you go back to stirring up drama on HN with offtopic meta comments, we will ban you again, much sooner than the years-long, hundreds-of-emails, dozen-accounts process it involved last time. That was more agony than any other user has single-handedly managed to cause on this site, and we won't go through it again. No more of this please—nothing of the kind—nada—period.