Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.
The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven).
Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.
This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.
And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.
Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.
Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.
Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet.
I'm fine with it notifying the driver it thinks you might be speeding, but I don't like the idea of actually limiting the speed of the car. I've used several cars which had a lot of cases where it didn't track the speed right. Driving near but not in a construction zone. Driving in an express lane which has a faster posted speed than the main highway. School zones. I've seen cars routinely get these things wrong. A few months ago I was on an 85 MPH highway and Google Maps suddenly thought I was on the 45 MPH feeder. Add 20%, that's 54 MPH max speed. So what, my car would have quickly enforced the 30 MPH drop and slam on the brakes to get it into compliance?
I'd greatly prefer just automatic enforcement of speeding laws rather than doing things to try and prevent people from speeding.
Honestly I would think something like transponders on every freeway would work better than GPS. Regardless, I think everyone in the thread could think of 10 technological ways of making this work. I think the biggest barriers are political, not logistical, and definitely not engineering.
So we spend a ton of money putting in transponders and readers in cars which still have various failure modes, or we just put cameras on the highways and intersections and say "car with tag 123123 went from gate 1 to gate 2 in x minutes, those are y miles apart, average speed had to be > speed limit, issue ticket to 123123".
The toll roads could trivially automatically enforce speed limits. They already precisely know when each car goes through each gantry, they know the distance between each gantry, so they know everyone's average speed.
Yeah, because need to be able to use your vehicle to escape pursuers and also as a ramming weapon. I assume police would get an exception from this rule, but they don't actually have more of a legal right to use their vehicle as a weapon than anyone else, they are just less likely to be questioned on their judgement of the situation as an emergency by the DA. Probably also a second amendment violation, but the Supreme Court might be too originalist (and not textualist enough) to buy that argument, as cars did not exist in the decades surrounding the founding.
I sustained traumatic injuries a few months ago when a driver on a suspended learner's permit hit me. The lazy cop issued no tickets for the multiple traffic violations. He couldn't be bothered to show up for the trial and the lazy prosecutor who only notified me of the trial three days in advance went with a bare minimum wrist slap for the suspension. It's as if it officially never happened.
That's awful. The amount of egregious vehicular violence the US has tolerated is disgusting. Waymo seems like the best bet to making experiences like yours a thing of the past.
Odometers are pretty well regulated and insurance companies will often have a good record of the readings over long periods. I'm not sure how the org doing the data collection does it precisely, but pretty accurate data is out there.
Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.
This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.
And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.
Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.
Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.
Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.