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by bdamm 2314 days ago
The "collision imminent" scenario would occur whether or not the car is in self-driving. If the car manages to avoid a collision that is the amazing part to me. And there's plenty of evidence that the Teslas do, in fact, avoid quite a lot of collisions. It would be foolish, however, to drive like it's going to resolve all your collisions for you.

I view these as assistance to driving. It's a comfort that the steering and brakes are not overridable. And honestly, if the system messes up so badly as to go flying into a barrier, well, that's not so different from a tire popping, another car careening across into yours, or other catastrophic and unlikely events that do happen. We have seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, pre-tensioners, cargo hold-downs, and emergency services to help us survive what even 40 years ago would be unsurvivable accidents.

1 comments

If the car avoids 99% of crashes, but crashes happen 1% of the time, and it causes crashes 1% of the time, then it's making you less safe.

Those are just arbitrary numbers and a simplistic framework, but the point is, you can have a huge increase in safety by the numbers, and a very small increase in problems due to the safety system that cancel it out, because the prior underlying rate of crashes was pretty small.

I think this is an abstract pattern that comes up in other contexts and it doesn't seem to be intuitive.

True, the implementation quality does matter.