That’s an interesting take. So you think we shouldn’t have regulations on this new unproven technology where the government poured billions upon billions to help develop. And that’s fine. Just don’t take gov’t money then.
Not that there shouldn't be any regulations, but that the direction regulations are going in are pretty heavy-handed when you consider how accepting as a society we are to have thousands of car accidents every single day, and thousands of car-related deaths every year (in the USA at least). Self-driving cars are already much safer than human-driven cars.
“Self-driving cars are already much safer than human-driven cars.”
Citation sorely needed. The few self driving cars currently on the road either require active human supervision or only operate in the absolute best circumstances so can’t be compared to human drivers who operate in all conditions and all types of vehicles.
No they’re not safer than human-driven cars. Not enough data to claim that. And how can you even collect that data when we don’t even have fully automated cars in the wild?
There is a massive stats issue in this. It’s not that there isn’t enough data. Is that there isn’t the right kind of data. Properly controlled apples to apples data is what we need, not just a gazillion miles.
You might not like the data, but it exists. Tesla cars are 2x more likely to get into an accident when not in Autopilot mode.
Tesla cars in Autopilot mode are roughly 8x less likely to get into an accident compared with the average number of reported accidents in the US.
Note: There is a bias about when Autopilot is enabled (i.e. on highways). There is a bias in the type of person that can buy a Tesla car.
That said: Tesla is legally obligated to report all Autopilot accidents. Most accidents are not reported, only the major accidents are reported. So it’s likely that Tesla car’s accident rate are even better than the data suggests.
> There is a bias about when Autopilot is enabled (i.e. on highways). There is a bias in the type of person that can buy a Tesla car.
Yes. This makes any extrapolation to the population as a whole impossible without a lot of assumptions. In particular, things like this are meaningless because of sampling bias:
> Tesla cars in Autopilot mode are roughly 8x less likely to get into an accident compared with the average number of reported accidents in the US.
Society does not accept any level of car accidents. That’s why there are safety regulations, that’s why there are safety investigators, that’s why there is a ton of safety-related R&D and testing, heck that’s why there are stoplights and traffic laws and rules about using your mobile phone.
Individually, no one ever wants to get into a car accident. Collectively, the desired number of accidents each year is zero. We’re not there yet because it’s hard to do, not because of acceptance.
So any new mechanism for accidents is going to come in for very heavy scrutiny. And by mechanism I don’t mean solely technology, but also human factors, which are huge issues when it comes to the current state of “self driving” cars.
If it's proven that a system performs significantly worse than a human then regulate it further.