[xfs]

All the effort is spent for safety. But is it worth it? The fully autonomous approach may never make Google's self-driving car economically viable to reach the same level of human driving safety. Note that humans are actually decent drivers. WHO reports 7.6 road fatalities per billion vehicle km in the US. Now Google's self-driving car has reached 1 million km, and that's under ideal conditions and human monitoring. If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it requires at least several billion miles of driving, which would cost much much more than a lot of low hanging fruits of improvement at driving safety (autobraking, obstacle radar, auto lane keeping etc).

Now that you can see a slow version of self-driving car already out there with 25 mph top speed and impossible to cause serious injury in the first place. This might be the future of self-driving cars, to provide accessibility and enable those who can't drive.

[aylons]

> If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it requires at least several billion miles of driving

No, it doesn't, the same way we don't need decades of testing to build an edifice or centuries of flying to test an airplane. Actually, as every human driver is literally a different person, by your logic we would need driving tests enduring several billion miles.

We can make tests using the worst situations, corner cases and even simulated accidents to see how the driving AI reacts. The problem is hard, but engineering is a finer art than what you imply.

[xfs]

Note that I was comparing with Google's methods of testing self-driving cars: idle roads, good weather, precision maps, human monitoring, no accidents. If Google's miles of safe driving mean anything, if means it has 99% more miles left before a level of validation. If you look at it for the effective miles where actual accident recovery happens, it will be much much shorter.

And yes, UMich/Ford's self-driving car project is making a testing field specifically designed for increased hazardous environment. But that environment is always artificial, and the hard part is to catch the last 1% situations, or the last 0.000001% in order to reach a level of billion miles safe record, because you don't even know what those are.

Autonomous navigation is fancy on all side (Yes I do this research), but all field experts know any security audit can probably reveal a bunch of failure modes because nobody has really worked on making it robust again adversaries.

[icoder]

Road fatalities are probably also that way because of the cars themselves (crash-tested and with airbags and all), emergency infrastructure (ambulances and medical care) and the relatively high number of 'easy' kilometers (highways). The European average is 13.

But shouldn't we also look at injuries, both physically and mentally, and perhaps even material damage? That probably gives a much higher resolution to compare those 1M km's from Google with.

[xfs]

Injuries per billion miles are often unreported, thus it is not a reliable statistic to talk about and compare with.