[prophesi]

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.

[camjohnson26]

“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.

[hahahahe]

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?

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

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.

[prophesi]

There's plenty of data on it. Safety is _the_ number one thing people are paying attention to in self-driving cars.

[kergonath]

It certainly is the number one fantasy some people have about autonomous cars. As the parent said, there is just no data to support either position.

[yazaddaruvala]

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.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

[kergonath]

> 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.

[prophesi]

It's almost as if we need a society that doesn't revolve around owning high speed vehicles. But we've missed that boat, so automation is our next goal to drastically reduce the thousands of yearly deaths.

I don't understand how this is a controversial opinion. The moment self-driving cars is mentioned, safety is the first thing that comes to mind. As a parent comment stated, Tesla is legally obligated to report every accident. And if a huge accident occurs, it will be in the news. Meanwhile it takes a 100 car pileup for any other vehicular accident to make it into a tiny sliver of the news cycle.

I don't own a Tesla or any of their stock, but the crux of the argument is that companies developing driving automation are already heavily regulated and will be put to the fire if mishaps do occur. We desperately need this automation if we do claim to not accept thousands of vehicle-related fatalities per year in our society, since better machine vision is always possible while better human judgement and reaction times are not.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> 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.

This is such an enormous bias, it invalidates the rest of the comment.

[snowwrestler]

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.

[matz1]

Society does accept some level of car accident otherwise there would be no car on the road at all.

Safety regulations is good but too much safety regulation is bad.

As individual I accept some level risk, I accept that there is some level of risk that I will be in accident, the trade off of 0 risk are too much.