[kevinchen]

I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable.

That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...

(Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study. Just want to point out it’s not the argument being presented.)

[ivalm]

But issue is that human safety is kind of long tailed. Eg more than a third of all fatal crashes are DUI. I’m guessing if you take out high risk behaviours then the rate will be an order of magnitude lower. What we care about is not being better then an average driver (which basically is bad due to high risk individuals), but better than median driver.

[8note]

I dunno. If you got all the duo drivers to automatically kick in self driving, then a ton of the most dangerous drivers would be much less dangerous

[ivalm]

I think better automated collision avoidance as well as automated “you’re driving erratic take a rest in a safe location, we can help get you there” are clear wins. But forced autopilot is definitely not there yet and would require a lot of improvement over average driver (because I don’t want to increase my personal risk in order to decrease risk of high risk individual).

[Spivak]

Yes but this misses it, autopilot being better than a drunk driver but worse than the median driver isn't enough unless they only use it when they were going to drive drunk which is kinda a political nonstarter. Otherwise the overwhelmingly sober usage of the feature makes it a net loss in driver quality weighted by miles driven.

[jacquesm]

The problem is that it is better than average human performance but it needs to be better than specific human performance for any human to be incentivized to switch.

For now what you could do is to demand that anybody that has a DUI or other such item on their record to mandatory only be allowed to be in vehicles that have self driving if the manufacturer is willing to assume liability. And if that doesn't happen then they might as well take a regular cab.

[Edman274]

Yeah, I should clarify that my response is in anticipation of the comment sections I often see on hackernews about self driving cars, rather than arguments from the self driving car companies themselves. Waymo won't say "we're slightly better than people, let us on your roadways" but I feel like every time I see something about self driving on Hackernews there's a handful of commenters taking the hyper-utilitarian viewpoint of "they're better than people, we all need to let the robots do driving for us" which will never convince anyone outside these comment sections.

[tempest_]

Also isnt waymo only operating in Pheonix and California where the weather is always nice?

What happens when it snows ?

[NullHypothesist]

They don't operate in snow now, but everybody was like "This is great, but it doesn't work in the rain!" this time last year. I've now taken many flawless rides in outright downpours in SF. It might take a year or two, but I have no doubt snow will be something that is a non-issue in the near future.

[tomrod]

Sensing tech has to improve to get through the noise. As far as I'm aware, you can't see a yellow line or white line on a highway if it's covered in dirty snow.

We could also rework our roadways to include better sensing design and tech (passive or active!), but we are a ways out still from willingness to pay for that.

[seanmcdirmid]

Do what humans do and drive without lines while trying to stay to one side of the road. This doesn’t seem like a major problem to self driving snow cars. More like, how do you deal with other drivers who are RWD with summer tires and are fish tailing all over the place.

[sojournerc]

If the sensors are up for it... Mountain roads covered in snow pack are a white blur, especially in certain light. Best bets for actually knowing where the road is might be previous tracks. I've dipped a wheel in a ditch more than once, not from carelessness, but snow drift obscuring the road... A road that I drive 500 times a year

[tomrod]

To clarify, I'm not saying it's impossible to have a functional vehicle in dangerous conditions, simply that it's an area loaded with edge cases.

[seanmcdirmid]

I don’t drive at all when it snows as a human. Our whole city basically shuts down then, and we are pretty far north as far as cities go.

Even in places that expect snow, cars are moving much more slowly and cautiously than normal. It almost seems like self driving cars would do much better in those situations given the speeds and caution involved.

[jacquesm]

> I don’t drive at all when it snows as a human.

That's the smart move. I've been quite astounded at family members without a driving license pushing family members with driving licenses to drive when they thought it wasn't safe. If it snows and it isn't 911 level urgent then simply stay put.

[eklitzke]

What is the point you're trying to make? Waymo isn't making claims about their driving performance in snow. And they're not comparing their performance to using a basket of human performance in all weather conditions, if you read the linked blog post they're specifically comparing to human driving performance in the regions in California and Arizona they're testing in.

[ToucanLoucan]

Honestly, I never want a self-driving vehicle of any sort. I like driving, and if my going on about 8 years since even a speeding ticket is anything to go by, I'm pretty good at it. Driving is genuinely a leisure activity for me (only complicated by other, shit drivers) both in the usual way, and in the track-day way. So you could say I'm a car guy for sure.

I am all for autonomous vehicles for other people. And you can call that elitist and I frankly couldn't even argue with you, but god damn, so many people have utterly no business being in control of a car. I travel quite a bit both for work and leisure, almost always by motorway, and some of the shit I see is just mind-bending. So much inattentive driving, so much pointless risk-taking, as they say it's time for Wisconsin's favorite game: Why's that car being driven badly? Old, stupid, drunk, or all three?

And like, there's not really an answer for a lot of this. As much as I love them, cars suck on a society scale. They're basically a poor tax as even the most low-income people in my neck of the woods must have them to get around, there's a bus network but it's shit and it has very low ridership, and that's all my city has apart from taxis. And, old people use them for the same reason, even if they're damn well aware that they shouldn't really be driving anymore, if they don't have someone to get their groceries n such, what are they supposed to do?

So yeah, self-driving cars are awesome. In theory. But then I see video of someone using the lane-guidance on a Tesla where the car just sees... who knows, something, and suddenly jerks to the right, right at pedestrians. Or we get the stories of autonomous cars just shutting down and refusing to move, even for emergency vehicles. Still others, they end up parked on someone's legs, and the stupid support system can't allow a remote operator to move the vehicle off said leg.

At this point, as much as I hope we get it, I also kind of recognize that truly autonomous cars simply might not be viable yet. I think a much better idea is to just de-carify our societies. I don't want them gone entirely, but people need more options than JUST buying or leasing these enormous, polluting, dangerous machines that they do not want to learn to operate well. And like, I don't even judge people for that necessarily? I love them, to be clear, but that's something that's true for me and not necessarily everyone else, and if you don't care about something, you're not going to put your best effort into it. It becomes a chore. A necessary step to doing what you actually want to do, and as a result, people don't try and they just suck at it.

Edit: I'd much prefer and think it's more practical to create cities where cars are an option, not a requirement. If you WANT one, you're welcome to have one. And maybe it drives itself, or maybe you drive it. With those options being on the table, we can then raise the bar for driving tests which we badly need to do, there needs to be a higher skill floor for driving and more stringent requirements, especially as people age. Maybe once you get to a certain point in your life, as most of us probably will, you just can't have a manual car anymore. Then you can buy one that drives itself, or just join people on a robust public transit system.

This doesn't need to be hard, but it's made hard because tons of entities involved have a financial stake in keeping us dependent on cars. I think that's why self-driving cars are getting so much traction and funding, because then they get to sell you a new, more expensive car, instead of actually solving the problems of mass transit. And that just sucks.