[thot_experiment]

I gotta say, I was driven on residential streets/stroads from home to restaurant by a Tesla 3 (using vision alone I think? it was fairly recent) in absolutely POURING rain and I was blown away by how good it was. I think it's hard to get a handle on how good this stuff is because it's such a politically charged field now but I have a hard time believing the folks that say it's never gonna happen, or at least not soon, because of technical reasons.

Don't get me wrong, I'm on team ban cars and replace every stroad with a light rail corridor and bike paths, but I think self driving cars will be fine in some number of years once the haters calm down. Hard for me to believe we can't achieve better than the average shitty driver level of safety.

[thumbsup-_-]

It works most of the time but the issue is that "most of the time" is not good enough for these systems. Even if the failure rate is <1% that may end up being lots of accidents and deaths at scale.

People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems. Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar, and it's better if that accountability and expectation is held from the beginning.

[andrewmutz]

> Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar

Why? Won't this lead to a lot of needless deaths at the hands of human drivers while we wait for driverless cars to improve? Why not roll them out once they are safer than human drivers?

[zug_zug]

Well think about it this way:

I'm a driver, but I'm a safer than average driver. So why would I want a system that's better than "average" where average includes drunk people, speeders, new/bad drivers, driving in ice, etc.

I don't think it should be illegal to use a system that's actually better than average (which is 1 accident every 18 years), but many drivers might not want to.

Also when some company's financial success hinges on them reporting their safety being above a certain accident threshhold, I think any statistics provided by that company on safety should be doubted unless an indepedent third party can verify them.

[maximus-decimus]

Because they don't make laws just for you, they make laws for everybody including the drunk 16 inexperience texters and the new parents who survive on 3 hours of sleeps.

And those people drive on the same roads as you, so you're still affected. Don't you want other drivers on the road to be less likely to t-bone you because they ran a red light?

[nixgeek]

I’ve experienced both learning to drive in the United Kingdom, and later, in the United States (you have to test again if you immigrate). In summarizing both experiences I’m trying hard to avoid being too biased.

In the UK, almost everyone learned (and learns) using a manual/stick shift vehicle, and if you learn and test in an automatic gearbox, your license is limited and you legally can’t drive manual. Hill starts and clutch control can be much fun! Lessons and the test involved difficult city situations ranging from extremely narrow streets, through 7-lane roundabouts, country roads both single-track and unrestricted (so 60mph speed limit, but not necessarily safe to drive that quickly - good judgement is required). You must pass a theory and hazard perception exercise, and the testing is government-administered.

In the US it seems almost everyone learns in an automatic vehicle, your license then lets you drive stick with no restriction. At least near cities, the roads you learn and test on are seemingly not 2” wider than your vehicle (measured at the mirrors), the situations are comparatively simple as well. There’s no hazard perception test. In my state, the test is administered by the instructor and not an impartial/neutral party.

I haven’t gone looking for large datasets to support this but it feels like the “I just passed my test” driver competence is going to be different.

I would be extremely happy to buy and trust a system like Ultra Cruise if it could navigate UK roads and city situations autonomously with less accidents/incidents than drivers at the 75th percentile in those environment, meaning with widespread adoption the system would raise the bar, and improve median safety properties of being a driver/participant on the roads. However, I would guess had they not cancelled it, being acceptably good for US driving conditions / better than the average US driver really just means you’ve built a system which can work in the US but absolutely won’t work in London, Paris, Berlin or anywhere else?

[danhor]

People are less fine with risk if it's less controllable by themselves. Every mode of transport where people don't directly control their fate is held to a much higher safety standard (and partially as a result) much safer. Aviation, Trains, Busses, ... .

[lorstic]

Because society can't handle that.

And I think that's a fine reason. Even if you don't think it's a fine reason, it's not going to change.

[dgfitz]

> People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems.

Never let a good solution get in the way of a good problem.

“But this medicine, while it can cure cancer, has a 1% chance of death!” “Ah shit good point, fuck it then. As long as we can still get pissy with that musk fellow.”

[brucethemoose2]

The thing about machine learning is that it can fail very suddenly, in a very unhuman way.

So even if self driving works most of the time, it takes a lot of work to address weird edge cases even the most inebriated human would not mess up, that other drivers/pedestrians would not anticipate.

[joshe]

Nah, it's failure mode is to slow down and pull over. It would be amazing if drunk humans did the same.

[erictd]

Or randomly and suddenly change lanes or brake, or both, and you’d better be ready for that every second of your drive.

[D13Fd]

Or, you know, happily run you right into a tractor trailor or highway divider.

[gamblor956]

And I was in a Tesla 3 in sunny weather about 2 months ago, and it nearly crashed into a tow truck and a cyclist that it didn't see. It's embarrassingly bad at handling basic use cases and it pretty much the poster boy for why vision alone won't work for actual self-driving.

[adrr]

Tesla vision gets confused by shadows when it is sunny. Its the new phantom braking when using the Tesla vision stack on freeways. Before it was low hanging freeway signs that the radar picked up.

Also it can't figure out lanes at all and is always trying to change lanes into the wrong lane. The navigate on Autopilot stack seemed better than the current FSD stack.

[chris-orgmenta]

I am on the side of cars (long term), even though I hate cars, the inefficiency, the space issues, the anti-pedestrian externalities, etc.

Ultimately, to design a transport system that benefits all of society, it needs to go from point A to point B. Light rail / public transport will always need a +somethingelse, in order to do that. Or we end up expanding the rail infra so much that we have just reinvented roads, but a little more constrained. Or we end up with car shares. Either way is fine.

I just don't see how to cater for lots of different disabilities and needs without 'cars' being a (maybe small) part of it. Regardless of what path we take, I just see the evolution converging back on a car-like vehicle for a substantial portion of the freight/transport industry (albeit 'trains' of them, but not physically connected), even if it's mostly final mile. But people and things don't want to hop between transport modes. They want to step outside their door into a vehicle, then out again at the destination.

Anyway... Self driving vehicles could be worse than some drivers currently, but it sure is better than SOME drivers I have seen. For an industry that has only had 15yrs direct investment, it's already better than bad drivers from my view - So it's almost time to start making driving licenses slightly harder to get and keep, IMO (it's so easy to get a license. It's hard to take them away, unless it's after an incident. There are so many very unsafe drivers).

That's a long way of saying that I concur with your comment.

[joshe]

I'll second that for Waymo.

Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.

I've taken 5 trips so far, and all have been great and better than the average uber driver.

I've had 3 sketchy Uber rides out of about 10 total in the last 3 months. One older woman was was peering over her steering wheel commenting that she really can't see that well at night, she'd kinda guess and head over to next lane, and had to abort once when she almost merged into another car. One plunged across 3 lanes of traffic without signaling while looking at the phone in her hand, twice! Another did a no look left turn while looking at the map and almost hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk. I said "stop!" and he did and looked up shocked. Slow enough that it would have only been a broken leg, but still...

[hedgehog]

One angle is to look at when we expect there to be data showing a new autopilot vehicle is at least equivalently safe to a new non-autopilot vehicle with modern ADAS. I don't think the performance is there yet, hard to tell when it will be.

[bigtex]

Did the windshield wipers actually work?