[kypro]

> For the self-driving car, it shouldn't know cultural norms and be "more careful" sometimes. It should always know how much it sees and what stoping distance it can get with max breaking and its reaction time and adjust accordingly.

I used to live next to two schools. In the morning before school the pavement and road outside my house was always full of school kids on bikes. During this time I'd drive with the assumption that at any moment a bike could drive out in front of my car because those kids were nuts and often did.

But to assume this generally just to be safe would be extremely inconvenient. In reality if I see a group of bikers wearing lycra I will assume their competent bikers. While I'll still drive carefully, I won't assume they're about to pull out in front of my car.

If self driving cars operate with the assumption that every pedestrian is drunk and every bike on the road is a 12 year school boy then no one will use them. Do self driving cars try to this currently? If I jaywalked in front of a Tesla is it designed to always be able to stop in time?

[marcosdumay]

I'd expect self driving cars to have much better sensors and reaction times than we do, and as a consequence not needing to choose between those risks and actually carrying people from one point to another.

But they will probably be way slower than people on streets that are just at the side of sidewalks and full of pedestrians.

[Gordonjcp]

> I'd expect self driving cars to have much better sensors and reaction times than we do

That is never going to happen.

[psd1]

Words like "good", "better" and "should" always carry freight that's often worth unpacking. Here, "better" really needs a definition.

A CCD is better than human eyes inasmuch as it captures a field rather than a narrow focus, with fuzzy periphery, that must be pointed at an object to resolve it.

I'm sure we could find metrics where a 360-degree lidar is better than human eyes.

It's disingenuous to pretend that sensor quality is the whole story, of course.

Human drivers have notoriously variable reflexes. I once rear-ended someone because I was inattentive. I assert that the current gen has better reflexes than some percentile of real-world meat-drivers, and I suspect that the percentile is higher than 90. Human reflexes simply aren't that quick without significant priming.