[AlotOfReading]

I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities.

But I've also sat in those city council meetings and seen the inane opposition people have to any sort of positive reform in that direction. Self driving vehicles have the potential to actually improve road safety because local governments won't be involved.

[Gordonjcp]

> I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities.

Two questions, then. Firstly, do you think that self-driving vehicles will ever get even close to human standards of driving? And second, what do you see as the big challenges to getting them to be acceptably safe?

[AlotOfReading]

I obviously can't talk specific numbers, but there are reasonable arguments to be made that in certain limited scenarios, we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics. Turning that into "unequivocally safer than humans all the time, everywhere" is still an open problem.

As for safety, that's both a big topic and a "I have explicitly told not talk about this in public by legal" topic. The teams and organizations I've worked for take it very seriously, but things can always be improved. Phil Koopman puts out some excellent information about where we are currently and where industry could broadly improve.

[Gordonjcp]

> we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics.

Okay, bearing in mind your second paragraph, what are the conditions under which they're safer? I've been in a few self-driving cars and I'd struggle to see how they would ever get to an acceptable standard - like, pass UK driving test kind of standard.