[stouset]

Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types.

Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way.

It’s not really a fair comparison.

[l33t7332273]

> most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding

What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.

[stouset]

I’m lumping things like Tesla FSD.

But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.

[Zanni]

Human drivers "disengage" also, though we don't think of it that way. I have aging friends who refuse to drive at night. I'll stay home in bad weather. When I was younger, I'd sometimes ask a passenger to back out of tricky parking space for me.

[stouset]

Yes, but we’re still comparing a highly selected set of AV miles vs the massive variety of human-driven miles.

[xnx]

It's not too useful to lump Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo together here. Tesla is years behind Cruise and cruise is years behind Waymo in terms of driving capability. Waymo doesn't even drive on highways, so we don't know how safe it would be (probably very safe).

[serf]

>Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding

the bigger problem here is that the machine may not realize it isn't fully understanding the situation; I think that's the more common situation : a computer situational model doesn't match reality, but the machine has the confidence in perception to proceed, producing dangerous effects.