[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.