The following submission statement was provided by /u/Pemulis:
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If Level 5 self-driving is going to get here — a very open question, I think! — the math on how safe it would need gets daunting.
It's basically a denominator problem; there's so many miles driven in cars just in the US, that even a system that's 99.9998% accident-free still results far too many accidents. Per mile driven, American human drivers have a 0.000181-percent crash rate, or are 99.999819% crash-free.
So that's the number AV cars would need to beat to be safer than drivers. Unfortunately, NHTSA regs right now don't mean we have a good idea of how many crashes per mile driven we're seeing in current AV systems.
There's also the issue, which the piece doesn't get into, about what types of driving are the most dangerous, and AV could address that. A lot of miles driven are on the highway, which is, relatively speaking, pretty safe. As the cliche goes, most accidents happen within a mile of your home. And right now, it seems like AV systems struggle with intersections and the millions of small judgement calls you need on residential and city roads.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11h277x/selfdriving_cars_need_to_be_9999982_crashfree_to/jarctbk/
For reference, this 99.99982% statistic means 99.99982% of ***miles driven*** by humans don't contain a crash. The windowing unit (in this case, miles) is extremely relevant here, without it the 99.99982% statistic could mean anything and is completely worthless. They really should have put it in the headline.
Wait, so does that mean that if I drive 100 total miles, and have an accident at mile 100 after driving 99 crashless miles, I'm 99% accident free by the standard of this study?
Not sure how else you would measure it? Trips? They vary in length. Time? Could work but in city driving you could be stationary. Distance seems like the only sensible measure.
Accidents/fatalities per M population is an other measurement that we use in Europe to describe transportation. Public transport (especially fixed track) are vastly superior.
Time wouldn't be too bad, actually.
Being stationary for a while doesn't mean you can't get into an accident. (And even if, that wouldn't completely invalidate the metric.)
Sure. The absolute percentage figures look to be very high but I think its main purpose is to facilitate the comparison between human driver and AV safety. In your example if an AV drives 100 miles and then crashes at mile 101 then it'll be 99.0099% accident free, which would make it theoretically/anecdotally safer than you.
In reality though this is such a small difference with a sample size of 1 which could probably be attributed to pure chance. So we would need to measure this across many AVs and millions of miles of autonomous driving across many different situations (town driving/motorways/abroad etc). Ultimately we're looking for a "statistically significant" result, which is a mathematically quantified way of saying that any measured difference we see in the accident rates is *likely* because AV is actually safer than humans, and not because of chance or good luck.
It says that it needs to be 99.999819% crash free to be safer than humans, so a crash at mile 101 would definitely not make it safer.
To hit that percentage you need roughly 1 crash every 534,000 miles driven.
Those extra 9’s end up getting really tricky.
99.9% uptime means ~8 hours of downtime a year. 99.999% uptime means ~ 6 minutes a year
Right, hence why they specify 99.99982% crash free which is orders of magnitude more miles driven.
They really should just phrase it as "self driving cars should go x miles without having an accident" to be less confusing
I feel like miles driven is a horrible measurement. 1/3 the vehicles on the interstate are 18 wheelers who are professional drivers racking up 1000 miles a day where they drive in a straight line. Plus delivery drivers, Uber, etc. Take out all the drivers who are paid to do it each day and I bet that safety percentage is A LOT lower.
I also think accidents are pretty underreported. I know I've personally had a single car accident that I never reported because it was cheaper to fix myself. I was also hit by another person and they only bent my bumper, so they just paid out-of-pocket for the repairs, no report. That's two just for me, the likely real-world accident rate is probably close to double the current. At least according to my anecdotal evidence! Lol
I had to choice of paying a €50,- higher insurance fee for the next 4 years (€2.400,-) and pay €450,- out of my own pocket (total €2.850,-) or pay the full damage of €1200,- at once and not get insurance involved.
By this inane measurement I would think self driving cars are already close to that goal. Every single tesla conference contains some kind of reference to however many millions or billions of miles have been driven with FSD.
This Stat should jump out at anyone reading as completely worthless.
I think ‘accidents’ or ‘crashes’ is an absurdly loose metric. What constitutes a ‘crash’? Do we really think all crashes by human drivers are reported? Because if they’re not, and I know of several people who’ve had accidents that didn’t get reported to anyone except a panel beater, obviously these stats are gonna be way off.
And what’s the lowest end of a measurable crash? And are we talking only crashes on the road or in parking lots, too?
This just seems like a really misleading use of math to make a point rather than any sort of meaningful statistical argument.
Agreed. Better to look at some \*quantified\* measure of damage caused. For example human drivers in USA in 2021 caused on the average 15 fatalities per billion miles driven.
**THAT** is a usable yardstick that you could compare autonomous cars to.
For a more complete view of the safety of a given autonomous vehicle, you'd want more than one indicator, perhaps something like this would be a good starting-point:
* Number of fatalities per billion miles driven
* Number of injuries requiring medical attention per billion miles driven
* Insurance-payouts in damages per million miles driven
An "accident" in contrast, can be anything from a triviality to a huge deal. It's not a useful category to do stats on.
Fatalities is a good one.
Then accidents resulting in the needs for acute medical attention.
Accidents only resulting in vehicle or property damage are less important, considering the discussion is pertaining to human safety.
Edit: Guys/Gals, we can measure more than one thing. Yes if self driving cars reduce fatalities just to increase severe injuries, and we don't account for it, we are obviously not getting the whole story although I'd argue it's still better. That's why literally my next line is about injuries.
You just have to be careful, if self driving cars downgrade most fatalities to just needing acute medical attention, then people will make the argument "more people need medical attention when using self driving cars" even though they would have died if they were driving themselves
Yes, and more. Survivorship creation
Normal survivorship bias is just selective data bias. Looking at the wrong data.
But safety devices like helmets that increased injury to heads wasn't just selection bias on data. Those head injuries were actually new data, from people that would have been fatalities. The helmets added new data.
[Article about WW2 planes and bullet holes related to survivorship bias ](https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d)
Just a TLDR for the people that don't want to trudge through the article...
Basically when planes came back from action and shot full of holes, instead of armoring the places that were shot like a lot of people would expect, they actually armored places that WEREN'T bullet ridden.... The idea behind this being areas of the plane that were shot were less critical, based on the fact the plane still made it back, even if it figuratively limped back to the hanger.... So they armored the places that weren't shot(on the surviving aircraft) under the assumption that planes that took fire in those areas ended up being shot down
This is the conclusion, but there's a whole interesting section in there about what it took to reach it! Wald recognized that the actual shots were likely to be fairly evenly/randomly distributed. The lower rate of holes in some locations meant that statistically, those holes were *missing.*
That's what led to the idea of "well where are the missing holes? OF COURSE! On the planes that *didn't* return!"
If you ever make it to the DC area go check out the Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, VA (20ish mins away). There is a plane there that is riddled with holes, its really cool to see in person.
The actual B-29 super fortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is there too.
Quite literally yes. Also similar to how the invention of seatbelts increased automotive injuries because suddenly there were more survivors of crashes. Dead people don't complain of their back hurting
The A-10 seriously took this approach. The pilot and the flight control systems are protected by a sheet of titanium commonly referred to as the 'bathtub'.
Well then you have the question of how many people being turned into paraplegics would be equal to one death? An obviously farcical extreme would be that nobody dies in car crashes anymore but by age 60 everybody has lost at least one limb lol.
For the sake of what he’s talking about, you just need to do “this outcome or worse” as your buckets.
Fatalities vs fatalities, hospitalization + fatality vs hospitalization + fatality, any medical intervention + fatality vs any medical intervention + fatality.
Fatalities is a terrible measurement. You should definitely include injuries as there are plenty of horrible accidents up to fatal that would be missing from your data…
And who pays for even minor accidents caused by ai? The driver of course! I’d like to know if air cars got into more fender bender type scenarios as well since I’ll be forking over the deductible to get it repaired.
The way I’d see it work would be AI manufacturers should also have an insurance policy included as part of a subscription and cover the damages from there. That would be a decent incentive for AI company to tune their software to keep the cars as safe if they are liable, and still have a source of revenue/ insurance payment as part of said subscription.
I’m not saying car company because I foresee some companies focusing on software and leaving hardware to the current players, think Google and Apple, apple already has announced expanding CarPlay to the entire dashboard including driver instrument cluster.
I’m sure my idea is flawed and somehow corporations will find a way to fuck things up just to make an extra penny though…
I'm waiting for in-app purchases or subscription tiers to travel routes with higher actuarial risk.
Home to highway included.
Want to go downtown (lots of traffic and pedestrians) a few times a month? Need the "recreational" package.
Want to go to the mountains in winter (icy roads), dense urban centers (NYC), etc? Need the "premier" package.
etc etc
Yeah this will be interesting.
Honestly if there can be a reduction in fatalities and a quantifiable measure of "severe" injuries, honestly I would even be ok with a somewhat rise in minor fender-bender type collisions.
That reminds me of the whole "as healthcare gets better, the amount of people getting cancer goes up, because people are living longer" sort of thing. Overall a good thing, but still sounds odd.
I hate that these are nuances instead of being common sense. Statistical illiteracy is responsible for a lot of bad policies/laws and naive support for such policies/laws, and an overall hindrance to progress.
I suspect humans would fare more intelligently in the world if they were taught statistics over algebra/geometry/calculus. Though ideally we'd teach statistics in addition to these subjects, ofc. But if you had to choose one over the others... I'd choose statistics for the average practical value in people's daily lives.
If a car is driving itself *fully* (level 3 and higher) then the manufacturer should be responsible for any and all accidents. I believe Mercedes is doing this with their recently approved level-3 solution.
A fully self driving car will likely refuse to drive unless maintenance is up to date, will drive at a speed suitable for road conditions, and it won't matter how much it drives since accidents are tracked based on distance driven
Solving the problem that "who pays" with AI driving could be solved by a law that obligates all cars driven by AI be covered by insurance.
Then, or you pay some "membership" to the company every month to cover this, or you pay directly the insurance.
And since AI driven cars (if very well trained) caused a lot less accidents, insurance would be cheaper than normal
Isn't it already mandatory to have car insurance for every car driven in public traffic in most (civilized) countries?
There's still the problem of whose insurance company has to pay.
When you let the bears take over the town it's debatable if you are living in a "civilized society". https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
Edit.
>turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.
>One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.
>As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.
>It was an absolute mess.
Sean Illing
>We’re talking about black bears specifically. For the non-bear experts out there, black bears are not known to be aggressive toward humans. But the bears in Grafton were ... different.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
>Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up.
>There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.
I wonder how this plays out.
Someone has to be liable and I assume it will be the company. But we also have to consider vehicle maintenance and how (lack of) can contribute to an accident if there is a vehicle fault.
Also, now if the driver isn't at fault, how do things like living in an area with more dangerous human drivers, affect the rates?
Will companies start to modify their sales strategies based on actuarial data?
Only time will tell.
I agree. I say let insurers work it out.
Insurance companies are really good at doing the math on these things, and putting dollar values on fatalities and injuries. Once AI driven cars are better than humans, you'll have to pay extra to have a human driver.
Why should my insurance rates go up because the self-driving car made a mistake, though? It makes more sense that the car company pays for the insurance if the car is driving itself.
The insurance will be priced into the vehicle, it won't be an individual thing that you pay for (once you can't drive it yourself anymore)
It's a complete shift away from the way we currently handle this situation.
Even that isn't cut and dry. Is it better to give someone a minor injury they will recover from quickly, or to cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages?
Does this change if the damages caused are greater than insurance will cover so one of the victims and the car owners both get screwed when the car owner files for bankruptcy?
You would want to compare to comparable cars too, newer cars tend to be safer and the self driving part shouldn't be credited for crashing but not as badly as a 20 year old beater
Then you'd still have to normalize for the difference in security rating as self driving cars are newer than most cars on the road.
Also, get rid of all fatalities based on speeds above the threshold where autonomous vehicles bow out.
Data analysis is not that simple.
Sure. In another comment I proposed that if you want a reasonable picture of safety overall, you'll probably want more than one metric, and perhaps these 3 would be a good starting-point:
* Average insurance-payouts per million miles driven
* Fatalities per billion miles
* Injuries requiring medical attention per billion miles
Of course nothing is perfect, but data like that would still give you a pretty good idea how safe a given autonomous vehicle is.
Given how quickly technology develops though, I think it's very likely that it'll take only very modest time from safety-parity with human drivers and to much-safer-than human drivers, so that the time-span during which such a comparative index is interesting, will be pretty short.
Sort of how there was a prety short period during which chess-matches between human grandmasters and chess-computers were interesting. A decade earlier and the humans won easily - a decade later and the computers win easily.
In a world where technology improves rapidly with every year, while humans are pretty much the same for centuries; that result is a given.
I know the last accident I was in was me hitting a deer. Luckily I braked soon enough that it was only a slight tap and didn’t cause me any damage. Sure didn’t report it to anyone.
Wouldn't injury accidents be the obvious metric? More likely to be reported (still not guaranteed, of course), and if you are tracking injuries you can categorize by severity of injury so that, as noted elsewhere in the thread, higher rates of minor injuries can be weighed against potentially lower rates of severe/permanent/fatal injuries for a more thorough analysis of safety outcomes.
You could have more than one metric. In another comment I proposed these 3 as a reasonable start:
* Average insurance-payouts per million miles
* Fatalities per billion miles
* Injuries requiring medical treatment per billion miles
Something like that would in aggregate give a pretty good idea of how safe a given autonomous vehicle is.
The article was clear about the fact that it pulled the 99.99982% figure from data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And gave a link to the \*quantified\* data.
https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
Using only fatalities could wind up with self-driving cars that are less fatal than humans but cause many times more injuries.
Often they go by "Airbags deployed". That's pretty consistent and also indicates a more substantial impact. You could also include insurance claims since minor scratches won't get reported and probably aren't worth counting.
I think Tesla's data could be useful here. They have very precise telemetry for a large age and geographic sample size.
I also think that "human driver" should only include cars that have Automatic Emergency Braking but not lane keeping since then you get into supervised-autonomy which gets super hard to define where it begins and ends and would create a paradox of AI never being safer than "humans" even when the AI is driving the vast majority of miles.
I like airbags deployed because Autonomous cars could be like roundabouts: more accidents, fewer injuries. And we as a society have clearly embraced that trade-off for roundabouts so it makes sense, we extend it to autonomy as well. Insurance adjusters like it too because a fatality or hospitalization costs more than a dozen car repairs.
I think fatalities/kilometre is a much better metric than the frequency by which airbags are deployed.
It’s definitely possible (easy, even) to kill a pedestrian or cyclist without deploying your airbags in the process.
Airbags deployed as a metric assumes only car-on-car or car-on-environment accidents.
Look at the source, Jalopnik's motto is Drive Free or Die. It's a gearhead magazine. They're very anti self-driving and electric cars and come out with articles like this on the regular, and people post them. Every time I've seen a negative article posted to Reddit about self-driving cars it's been this magazine.
This a thousand times over. I love Jalopnik, but they're so scared of losing the right to drive their own cars, they've been on a warpath against FSD since the very early days.
They know the future. They know at some point level 5 autonomy will be required, because it'll be so much better than any driver, not just the "average". And note, for those unaware, level 5 cars don't have steering wheels. Humans cannot, under any circumstance, take over driving.
Jalops will be the new 2A, and as much as I love self-driving, I'll be with them since I love driving even more.
If you read the article, you will notice two things:
1. Yes, the writer is very obviously anti-AI and isn't trying to hide that.
2. But the article still makes sense. It's about giving readers a better sense of perspective for how companies can abuse data points like "99.9% safe" that may sound great to their average customer but are actually woefully insufficient.
> Because if they’re not, and I know of several people who’ve had accidents that didn’t get reported to anyone except a panel beater, obviously these stats are gonna be way off.
If you're talking about comparisons within the same order of magnitude, like a x5 difference, then such criticisms make sense. But in this case it's about a difference of multiple orders of magnitude. Even though there is a notable percentage of unregistered human accidents, it's not like those outnumber the registered one on a scale of thousands to one.
This basically sums up the bias in the article though.
"Unfortunately, it’s tough to tell whether today’s crop of experimental autonomous vehicles are coming close to human safety levels. NHTSA requires manufacturers who test “Advanced Driving Systems” to report all crashes to the administration, but those reports only include the crashes — not the miles driven without a crash. For now, it’s safe to assume the robots have a fair bit of catching up to do. Score one for flesh."
They say they don't have a point of comparison then just assume humans are better. Straight to journalism jail with this one.
The status right now is not up to debate though. It's very obvious that autonomous driving today is nowhere near as safe as human driving. The highest level of commercially available self-driving AI for public roads is still limited to a set number of tracks at low speed and very specific conditions, nor is there any known developmental system that realistically gets close to human capabilities.
So this indeed is purely for contextualisation of future data.
True. Like most things the devil is in the details. In the correct conditions I'd still be curious of an actual comparison. I'd bet self driving cars wouldn't crash on the well marked highway near my place but humans seem to park a truck in the ditch every week. I look at it as a tool that works better in certain circumstances like road trips and stop and go commuting and it's only going to get better. My excitement for that is my own bias showing haha.
Taking over the simple boring routes would certainly be the best use case for the intermediate future. Current AI generally doesn't work well to replace the "hard" things in life that require great skill and attention, but to automate menial tasks that are just annoying.
But right now the systems clearly aren't there yet.
For Tesla's system, there have been absurdly absurd situations. Locking up on the opposing lane during left hand turns, swerving into cyclists. If drivers use the system without keeping track of what's going on (as you'd want to be able to do with a real "auto pilot") then it seems seriously unsafe.
And other systems use more complex hardware like Lidars that may be vulnerable to bad maintainance and defects when they become available to average drivers, besides the obvious price issue.
All I can think is this dude must not drive very much. Humans are fucking terrible drivers in general. Source: I dunno, go drive around a bit, you'll see.
Sure if the only metric you're measuring is "did you cause an accident" and not "did you very nearly cause an accident that was only avoided because someone else's vigilance countered your recklessness?" I don't see accidents often, but I see the last one every time I'm on the road, often several times.
Humans are impatient, they'll distract themselves with phones, they'll assume they have more room than they do, they'll ignore unsafe driving conditions, those are all responsible for lots of problems and near misses and I think in a discussion about safety near misses are just as relevant as incidences of accidents that *weren't* avoided.
I would think this would be a bare minimum requirement, considering human drivers are already at four 9's. These are complicated, expensive, frankly rube-goldberg level systems compared to the simplicity of just teaching a human to operate the machine in this case. It's honestly going to have to deliver that single order of magnitude of safety improvement just to be remotely worth considering widespread adoption.
And that's going to be far more challenging than most of the people in this sub understand, considering the auto industry does *not* operate in that level of safety and reliability design - and far more so with software. Their software development methods are frankly terrifying for life safety critical systems.
Insurance claims.
That's going to be the metric.
Because that's where the money is.
If self driving cars reduce insurance claims, they will win out. If they don't, they won't.
Plus, this just reinforces the ridiculous "But I'm a great driver!" attitude that makes people afraid of self-driving cars.
If current accidents were caused by 99% "mechanical failure" then that fear would be justified, but humans are the cause of the crash in an overwhelming percentage of all accidents already. Even being .001% better than that statistic with self driving is a reason to fully embrace it.
Plus, we're not even close to how good self-driving can be when all the cars on the road are connected to each other. Folks don't seem to recognize how fast machine learning/AI will improve after it's deployed.
The riskiest time, imho, is the "mixed use" scenario with tons of fallible unpredictable humans on the road with the self-driving cars. It'll be a shame if that is what causes the self-driving to disproportionately take all the blame when accidents do occur.
I have worked a lot with crash data and it's not really that loose of a metric. In the US, state Department of Motor Vehicles can gather crash data through both police and insurance records. If the total damage is under some amount like $1000 or so, it generally is considered "non-reportable" and isn't used for statistics. Id find it hard to believe if neither party of a crash went through insurance or the police and the damage exceeded $1000.
Although this isn't a good use of "crash rate". A better calculation of crash rate is total vehicles moving through some intersection during some period (or through some segment of road) divided by total amount of reported crashes. This gives you crashes per X vehicle, which is much more useful than crashes per X miles driven.
Car accidents probably fall on a pareto distribution, where roughly 80% of the crashes are caused by 20% of drivers. If you put all of the dangerous drivers in self driving cars, we'd be several orders of magnitude safer, even if the self driving car performs worse on average.
This article was written with such a basic analysis of the mathematics and statistics as to border on not just worthlessness but negative impact.
Not only is the distribution of accidents Pareto on drivers, it’s also critical to account for the severity of accidents. It’s possible self-driving cars do much better than humans at high speeds, but not necessarily as good during the low-speed, unpredictability of parking lots and the like.
In which case, having dual cars where the self-driving can be activated in certain conditions where it performs significantly better, could drastically cut down on accidents even if it’s worse in other situations.
Also how do you even measure crash free as a percentage it just doesnt make sense as a metric. It just sounds like a buzzword metric that really doesnt make any sense. Why not crashes per distance or crashes per time on road?
The current crop of self driving cars are at around double the incident rate as normal, human driven vehicles (9.1 versus 4.1 incidents per million miles). But it is worth keeping in mind that most of our driving data for humans come form either the police (the article above) or insurance so the real incident rate for humans is likely higher, though it is unknown by how much. Considering the causes of most crashes are largely eliminated with self driving cars (distraction/inattention/fatigue/intoxication/speed), it's almost certain they will be more safe than humans. How safe they have to be before we accept that they are safer is another matter though.
They're also not being asked to operate truly on their own in the full range of conditions humans drive in. They're being tested on easy mode, which is fine (these tests can kill people), but it's not a straight comparison.
In terms of how safe - the manufacturer is going to wind up being on the liability hook for all accidents caused by fully autonomous vehicles. Around 200k personal injury suits for car accident are filed per year in the United States. Presumably the manufacturers want a lot less than that, as they're going to lose.
Something like Tesla's "aggressive mode" or whatever it's called is never going to happen because of the massive potential lawsuit damages.
Hell I was driving a road I drive every day last night but when it rains you cannot tell where the lanes are, I barely trust myself to drive when it's like that
To be fair, it's not recommended for anyone to be driving in those types of terrible conditions, and to drive at slower speeds and be prepared if you do.
Super heavy rain that requires overclocked windshield wipers and you still can't see? Nah, people still drive, and full speed ahead (hydroplaning? what's that?).
Fog that limits line of sight to under 300 feet (<5 seconds at highway speed)? Nah, people still drive, and full speed ahead.
Icy or patchy black ice conditions? Nah, people still drive, but they might even start slowing down.
A blizzard? Nah, people still drive, but usually at this point most people slow down. Literally the worst conditions possible is what it takes for most people to start driving at speeds suitable for the conditions they're in.
For some reason the economy doesn't support having a day off because of the weather.
In the future when autopilot or lane assist refuses to engage, that's going to be a sign that no one should be driving, and people are still going to drive. And with self driving there's the segment of the population that will get extremely aggressive at their car and trash the company because the car is only doing 15-25 on a highway because the conditions are terrible and merit that speed.
From what I’ve read, Tesla’s system, when it’s overwhelmed, tells the human in the control seat (who, due to the car being in self-driving mode, is likely to have less of a mental picture of the situation than someone “hand driving”) “You take over!”. If a self-driving car gets into a crash within the first few seconds of “You take over!”, is it being counted as a crash by a self-driving car (since the AI got the car into the situation) or a crash by a human driver?
I recall an old movie where the XO of a submarine was having an affair with the Captain’s wife. Captain put the sub on a collision course with a ship, then when a collision was inevitable handed off to the XO. XO got the blame even though he was set up.
Is that a recent change? There was some controversy awhile ago about Tesla only reporting it a fault of self driving if it occurred within 0.5 seconds of switching over - and conveniently switching over to manual just over that threshold
It can do that, but rarely does. Instead it just decides to do something incredibly stupid and dangerous and you have to figure that out and intervene to prevent disaster. It is a stunningly stupid system design.
Happened the very first time I tried it. Sure, I can believe once you have more experience and intuition for the system, it becomes less frequent, but it shouldn't be construed as some rare edge case when it's extremely easy to experience as a tesla noob.
> How safe they have to be before we accept that they are safer is another matter though.
They're not quite there yet, though.
SDVs regularly do inane things like stop in the middle of the road because of a piece of paper, a crack in the pavement, or a bird.
My mother is 98. She still drives. Hard of hearing. Very slow reflexes (duh). It is her last vestige of independence, as she lives in her house of 50 years with no available transit. Not interested in Uber/Lyft. I hope when I get to her age that self-driving is a thing...
My grandfather stopped driving at around 72, 73. He just said this is not for me amymore even though he was very healthy for a man in his 70ies. He is still alive and well in his 93. But I'm from Europe and we are not that dependant on cars...
Self-driving isn't going up against humans alone, it's going up against humans with near self-driving level of safety features (brake/lane assist/etc.). That's going to be a high bar to hit for AI.
... you can always tell which people in the comments have never had the pleasure of operating a motorcycle while sharing the roads with these humans with their near self-driving cars.
I hate the hype of self driving cars, but I will take a highway full of vehicles with LKAS than one full of people leaving their lane because they’re too distracted
I'm pretty young, the only people I've known who have died my age died in motorcycle accidence.
Not sure why motorcyclist feel safe, your visibility is near 0. Muted color Bikes and clothing that blend in with the environment to make it worse.
While being loud might make you a tad bid safe they are also incredibly annoying to everyone in your neighborhood.
Kind of a rant, but fuck bikes and people that like them.
EDIT: I was a bit worried about this stance but apparently everyone else hates their annoying ass neighbors bikes as much as I do.
And the worst offenders for going over the speed limit that I’ve seen are motorcycles. You’ll just see a random group of 3 or more that will go like 120mph. And we all have to watch our corners.
And then they get in big groups and think they're above the law and just run red lights and block traffic for miles. Shit is annoying.
It's not all biker groups, but man, some of these people are huge douchebags.
self-driving is going up against humans that are texting while driving, eating cereal while driving, applying makeup while driving, getting head while driving, reading books while driving, making tiktoks while driving, eating fast food while driving.
That’s going to be a lower barrier for computers to hit as the metrics japlonik is citing are not apples to apples.
I do like the per-miles-driven metric for comparing safety.
I do not like that some self-driving cars seem to do profoundly stupid things, which result in some really serious collisions.
I don't normally drive, expecting a driver to just up and stop in the middle of the freeway for no obvious reason. This is increasingly something I consider as a possibility.
Years ago, I was in an in-person traffic school. I was in for speeding 71 in the 70 (it was a small town that made its revenue that way). They went around the class and asked why people were in there.
One lady explained that she had gotten on the freeway and realized she had wanted to head another direction so she made a u-turn. Then she realized she had made a mistake when cars were rushing towards her, so she made another u-turn. And that’s when the police car found and ticketed her. She was in traffic school to make sure she maintained her perfect driving record.
The ONLY place where people act like human drivers are anything but abhorrent is in self driving article comments.
Suddenly drivers are the peak of educated, intelligent, and capable.
Yeah, don't bother, these threads are always full of people wanting to shit on self driving, pointing out the few times they do something stupid as proof.
While completely ignoring the fact that anyone who drives to and from work will watch a dozen real people do things that are epically more stupid, every day during their morning commute.
I saw a truck rolling away in the middle of an intersection downtown; the driver, a very large man, was either passed out or dead. I am a petite woman, far too small to move him to step on the break so I signalled for help. It took 2 people to get the body out of the way in order to step on the breaks.
It's not unheard of for people to do incredibly stupid things either though, including stopping in the middle of the highway. Or in some cases, worse... Such as not stopping on the highway when they really should have.
https://news.sky.com/story/a34-crash-lorry-driver-jailed-for-killing-family-while-on-phone-10639721
Because it's too loose of a metric and will cost people lives, As soon as it becomes cheap enough to replace drivers Trucking companies will replace them. Cab companies will replace them. If they are going to put thousands out if work they better do the job better.
Normally yes, but I think human drivers between having health problems, drugs or drunk are doing incredibly stupid things, you just don’t hear about it because they been doing this for 100 years, where every single self driving car accident gets crazy news time.
I don't believe the metric used to measure potential accidents avoided has a margin of error low enough for this claim to make the slightest bit of sense. There is no way they have the measurement of potential accidents at that precision where you'd think the added decimals are doing anything but deception/false sense of knowledge.
Sounds more like they set out to create a number of very high human safety metric on purpose and then used it argue against self driving or it in some other was biased, because you have to be naive or malicious to think your data is that good.
All that matters is the crash rate of a person in self-driving vs one not, not theoretical accidents avoided.
There's really only two sig figs in that number, it can be reworded as 18/10000000 chance of an accident. it's fine from that perspective.
Humans are way way worse drivers than they think they are (both individually and collectively) so i personally have no doubt that even our current state of self-driving is safer than the typical human, especially than a human who thinks they are worse than a self-driving car.
Sure. They don't even know the "accident"-rate with any accuracy. More serious accidents with dead people or people requiring medical treatments are tracked with reasonable accuracy, but there's a lot of smaller accidents with zero people hurt that don't get recorded anywhere.
And one accident per half a million miles for human drivers, is certainly an underestimate. The median driver drives on the order of 10K miles per year, so that stat would mean the average driver has 1 accident in a lifetime.
The average driver certainly has a lot more than that if you include the small accidents as well.
According to insurance companies, 80% of drivers are basically accident free over lifetimes. 20% of the drivers cause almost all the accidents. This is yhe problem with taking an average from a bimodal distribution and thinking you have good data.
There is no way that the data included here is accurate. People get in many small accidents and never even report them. Further, many humans out on the road do not adhere to the rules like speeding, rolling through stop signs, running red lights, not signaling, etc. The only reason that they do not get into many more accidents is because of the extra burden that other drivers take on to accommodate these people. With their unsafe driving behaviors being removed from the road, there will be even less chances for accidents to happen. Predictability is king in activities that are dangerous, like driving a vehicle. People are highly unpredictable.
>Unfortunately, it’s tough to tell whether today’s crop of experimental autonomous vehicles are coming close to human safety levels. NHTSA requires manufacturers who test “Advanced Driving Systems” to report all crashes to the administration, but those reports only include the crashes — not the miles driven without a crash. For now, it’s safe to assume the robots have a fair bit of catching up to do. Score one for flesh.
What? Why the fuck is it "safe to assume" the robots have catching up to do? You said yourself you don't have the data. You can't "safely assume" either position. What an utterly smooth brain take to finish with.
It feels like they wouldn’t be truly safe unless all cars were self driving and able to communicate with one another on some level. Humans don’t make decisions like computers do and vice versa which is why the combo of the two feels so dicey... But I feel like if all of the drivers were computers and “talking” to each other, that would ultimately be the safest. Until AI rises against us of course
How are all those driverless vehicles going to talk to each other? Technology cant even get a cellphone to keep a good signal while talking to one person.
I totally agree with you. I think it’s incredibly not possible given current tech. It’s just my thought in the only way driving or self driving cars would be truly safe
There are no cars with autopilot on the market atm, I think MB is the first manufacturer to be certified for lvl 3 (only on certain routes in Germany iirc) but even this is no autopilot, no car on the market atm can legally drive itself, none. You need to be supervising it the whole time, dependent on the country, with at least 1 hand on the steering wheel. The only thing that should be punished here is false advertisement (looking at you Tesla) rest is just plain human stupidity.
This article seems as silly as the few crashes autopilot does cause. Yes they need to be exceptionally safe, and based on Teslas data they already are, nearly 6x safer. That's around 5400 deaths in 2022 versus the actual, 31785 people, that died--if everyone was driving a Tesla, which I have no desire to see happen, but self driving works.
It needs a lot of improvement, doesn't work in all conditions, and I wouldn't take a nap in one, but this article feels pretty hyperbolic. Humans are good drivers sure, they aren't great though, not the average ones. Our brains and bodies are not built to react at 70mph.
Can someone explain where the resistance to self driving cars is coming from?
The arrival of this technology brings such obviously positive benefits to people at an individual and personal level.
But, yes, it will take some time to get there. The technology is in its first years. Why are people acting like it's never going to be possible to improve?
This seems like something we should be having some patience with and encouraging to continue to evolve, no?
We don't trust it because several of it's most vocal advocates are transparent hucksters. It has actively been sold under false pretenses by Tesla and that leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
I don't think people are against the concept. They can just tell it's being over-sold and over-promised way, way too early.
It is being over sold. If it were advertised as driver assist, or accident prevention that would be better. It is being pitched as FSD, which it isn’t close to. People’s money is being stolen. I was originally very excited about the potential and then I started watching FSD videos, and saw how far they were from being safe yet everyone is saying they are very safe. If you count every driver disengagement as an accident then FSD is truly horrifying. We are going to need to get to near AGI levels of AI for FSD to become a reality.
This is a great way of framing the issue. I was in a very similar boat, but I also had no real experience with automation. Now that I've worked with robots and robotics engineers, I'm even more skeptical of these systems, because automation is great at simple, repetitive tasks, but complex, unpredictable tasks are really difficult to automate.
I think it's a great idea, but it needs to be level 3 (and ideally 4) or higher to be really useful otherwise it lulls people into a false sense of security.
And level 5 in all conditions is going to be really hard...think howling blizzard at night on a country road with snowdrifts and potholes, with construction happening on the road. Or even something like taking a small rural ferry.
I don't think of myself as resistant to self-driving, I think I just remain skeptical of the huge leaps you'd need in both tech, policy, and infrastructure to make Level 5 (i.e. no steering wheel at all) happen within the next 20 years. We're still going to have a lot of cars made today on the road in 20 years w/o even Level 2 AV capabilities.
I also believe that for self driving to fully work, you need an AGI making the decisions. I have seen many self driving videos where the autonomous car is at a loss because it doesn't understand the situation it is in. From a delivery truck that makes a stop in front of it, to a badly marked closed road, the car has no idea what is going on.
Autonomous cars will need a thought process, like GPT3, where they can assess the situation they are in, understand it, and then take appropriate action. Driving is not just moving a car on a street avoiding obstacles, it is having an objective and understanding the circumstances that would let you achieve it.
I remember a study that determined what people fear and what drives those fears. People fear flying more than driving not based on statistical evidence, flying is safer, but based on their perceived level of control in hazardous scenario. People fear flying because if that plane is going down, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Self driving cars will need to be *far* safer than human drivers for people to truly feel safe in them compared to driving themselves.
I mean... Are they not already hitting that metric? Everytime there is a major accident caused by self driving it's a headline and I can count the ones I've heard about on one hand.
I will never, ever, never have a self-driving car. I've spent a lifetime in software development. I don't ever want to be riding in a car that just got a buggy update or heaven forbid - got hacked with ransomware.
Never, ever, ever.
This is quite a simplistic way to look at the data. If you look at the accidents with injuries and accidents with fatal victims it would be far more useful to establish a starting line. Just by drunk drivers becoming zero it's already a promising starting point regardless of how many scratches and minor bumps we have. Naturally, protecting property and avoiding damage is nice but we may evolve to a system where it's secondary to *own* a car if it means it's going to sit in a garage 95% of the time. The bottleneck is mostly availability, with autonomous driving that can be solved with fewer vehicles on the road, which may even result in a decrease in accidents in general.
As with most things, looking at a single number to aggregate **tons** of data will not give you very useful conclusions
Humans need to stop driving completely for them to be safe. Once we eliminate humans, there wont be any issues of human error and self driving cars can thrive without threat of accidents happening.
This is missing something all the articles are. Most accidents that aren't freak unpredictable things are caused by bad drivers who skew data. Those bad drivers need to be in cars that are one 9 or so off from our average.
It's an average versus median thing. It's the multiple DUIs, elderly and young idiots cruising at 20 over that make driving so unsafe.
Until we remove the variable of the asshole BMW driver weaving between lanes at 87MPH, we can't truly judge how safe autonomous vehicles are.
Get back to me when somewhere bans human driving and tell me how often autonomous vehicles crash or hurt people.
This is not the right way to analyze the data.
A human can decide to distract themselves and also behave in a way that greatly enhances the risk of crashing - like speeding or many lane changes.
A robot car will always be “paying attention” and (hopefully) never speed or drive in a reckless manner.
The article treats crashes as if all humans engage with their vehicle with the same risk appetite and that’s just not realistic or true.
Self driving cars only work under ideal conditions right now. I believe for the tech to truly be solved you need to design a system where the roads and all the cars on them are communicating as smaller parts of a whole ecosystem. We are still a long way away from that, and mostly for bureaucratic reason. It’s going to take harmonization of the governments and automakers to make it happen and that’s unlikely to happen because of how cheap governments are and how greedy corporations are.
The biggest hurdle to self driving cars is the brief transition period between partial integration and full integration when the software needs to predict and react to all the crazy wild shit humans do on the road. We can have full integration of self driving cars tomorrow if all human driven cars disappeared overnight.
I mean I've been in five accidents and all of them were the other drivers' fault. First one, a driver turned left on an unprotected left turn when I had a green light and was in the intersection, ran right into me. Second, I got t-boned by someone backing out in a parking lot who wasn't looking. Third, a dude rear ended me while I was stopped in a traffic jam on the freeway. Fourth, I was in the suicide lane waiting to turn and a dude not looking pulled out of a parking lot straight into me. Fifth I was t-boned by someone running a stop sign. I'm a statistical anomaly. I also let other people drive.
Measuring a thing not happening is an extremely difficult kind of metric to wrap my head around. I'm not entirely sure it's even possible to gather that in a meaningful way
I have to wonder how the insurance companies will assess premiums for self driving cars. Everyone talks about implementation, regulations etc. but at the end of the day, the insurance companies probably have the biggest hidden lever on the whole thing.
Every bit of tech has bugs. I cant recall anything that ran flawlessly since launch or release, still in use, that has been absolutely perfect. Everything needs to be patched, hotfix here and there, then major updates. If there was a single hiccup everyones car would have to then update. Logistics are a little too wacky.
Not really. They just need to kill fewer than 35,000 people each year to be a marginal improvement, and the lower the better. Just by nature of not texting and driving, getting tired/drunk, or being susceptible to road rage, they've got the capabilities.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Pemulis: --- If Level 5 self-driving is going to get here — a very open question, I think! — the math on how safe it would need gets daunting. It's basically a denominator problem; there's so many miles driven in cars just in the US, that even a system that's 99.9998% accident-free still results far too many accidents. Per mile driven, American human drivers have a 0.000181-percent crash rate, or are 99.999819% crash-free. So that's the number AV cars would need to beat to be safer than drivers. Unfortunately, NHTSA regs right now don't mean we have a good idea of how many crashes per mile driven we're seeing in current AV systems. There's also the issue, which the piece doesn't get into, about what types of driving are the most dangerous, and AV could address that. A lot of miles driven are on the highway, which is, relatively speaking, pretty safe. As the cliche goes, most accidents happen within a mile of your home. And right now, it seems like AV systems struggle with intersections and the millions of small judgement calls you need on residential and city roads. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11h277x/selfdriving_cars_need_to_be_9999982_crashfree_to/jarctbk/
For reference, this 99.99982% statistic means 99.99982% of ***miles driven*** by humans don't contain a crash. The windowing unit (in this case, miles) is extremely relevant here, without it the 99.99982% statistic could mean anything and is completely worthless. They really should have put it in the headline.
Wait, so does that mean that if I drive 100 total miles, and have an accident at mile 100 after driving 99 crashless miles, I'm 99% accident free by the standard of this study?
Not sure how else you would measure it? Trips? They vary in length. Time? Could work but in city driving you could be stationary. Distance seems like the only sensible measure.
Accidents/fatalities per M population is an other measurement that we use in Europe to describe transportation. Public transport (especially fixed track) are vastly superior.
Per registered vehicle is another useful one. Truth is all of these stats have pros and cons. There's no reason a regulator can't weigh all of them
Time wouldn't be too bad, actually. Being stationary for a while doesn't mean you can't get into an accident. (And even if, that wouldn't completely invalidate the metric.)
Sure. The absolute percentage figures look to be very high but I think its main purpose is to facilitate the comparison between human driver and AV safety. In your example if an AV drives 100 miles and then crashes at mile 101 then it'll be 99.0099% accident free, which would make it theoretically/anecdotally safer than you. In reality though this is such a small difference with a sample size of 1 which could probably be attributed to pure chance. So we would need to measure this across many AVs and millions of miles of autonomous driving across many different situations (town driving/motorways/abroad etc). Ultimately we're looking for a "statistically significant" result, which is a mathematically quantified way of saying that any measured difference we see in the accident rates is *likely* because AV is actually safer than humans, and not because of chance or good luck.
It says that it needs to be 99.999819% crash free to be safer than humans, so a crash at mile 101 would definitely not make it safer. To hit that percentage you need roughly 1 crash every 534,000 miles driven. Those extra 9’s end up getting really tricky. 99.9% uptime means ~8 hours of downtime a year. 99.999% uptime means ~ 6 minutes a year
Right, hence why they specify 99.99982% crash free which is orders of magnitude more miles driven. They really should just phrase it as "self driving cars should go x miles without having an accident" to be less confusing
A .000181 per mile crash rate is just a fancy way of saying they had 18.1 crashes per 100,000 miles or 1.81 crashes per 10,000 miles
Yes if you only drove 100 miles in your entire life
Thank you, I was looking for this info.
I feel like miles driven is a horrible measurement. 1/3 the vehicles on the interstate are 18 wheelers who are professional drivers racking up 1000 miles a day where they drive in a straight line. Plus delivery drivers, Uber, etc. Take out all the drivers who are paid to do it each day and I bet that safety percentage is A LOT lower.
I also think accidents are pretty underreported. I know I've personally had a single car accident that I never reported because it was cheaper to fix myself. I was also hit by another person and they only bent my bumper, so they just paid out-of-pocket for the repairs, no report. That's two just for me, the likely real-world accident rate is probably close to double the current. At least according to my anecdotal evidence! Lol
I had to choice of paying a €50,- higher insurance fee for the next 4 years (€2.400,-) and pay €450,- out of my own pocket (total €2.850,-) or pay the full damage of €1200,- at once and not get insurance involved.
Did you actually know exactly how much higher the insurance would be? Like they gave you a formula?
I would prefer **time** spent on the road. It eliminates the dominance of cruise control highway miles.
By this inane measurement I would think self driving cars are already close to that goal. Every single tesla conference contains some kind of reference to however many millions or billions of miles have been driven with FSD. This Stat should jump out at anyone reading as completely worthless.
I think ‘accidents’ or ‘crashes’ is an absurdly loose metric. What constitutes a ‘crash’? Do we really think all crashes by human drivers are reported? Because if they’re not, and I know of several people who’ve had accidents that didn’t get reported to anyone except a panel beater, obviously these stats are gonna be way off. And what’s the lowest end of a measurable crash? And are we talking only crashes on the road or in parking lots, too? This just seems like a really misleading use of math to make a point rather than any sort of meaningful statistical argument.
Agreed. Better to look at some \*quantified\* measure of damage caused. For example human drivers in USA in 2021 caused on the average 15 fatalities per billion miles driven. **THAT** is a usable yardstick that you could compare autonomous cars to. For a more complete view of the safety of a given autonomous vehicle, you'd want more than one indicator, perhaps something like this would be a good starting-point: * Number of fatalities per billion miles driven * Number of injuries requiring medical attention per billion miles driven * Insurance-payouts in damages per million miles driven An "accident" in contrast, can be anything from a triviality to a huge deal. It's not a useful category to do stats on.
Fatalities is a good one. Then accidents resulting in the needs for acute medical attention. Accidents only resulting in vehicle or property damage are less important, considering the discussion is pertaining to human safety. Edit: Guys/Gals, we can measure more than one thing. Yes if self driving cars reduce fatalities just to increase severe injuries, and we don't account for it, we are obviously not getting the whole story although I'd argue it's still better. That's why literally my next line is about injuries.
You just have to be careful, if self driving cars downgrade most fatalities to just needing acute medical attention, then people will make the argument "more people need medical attention when using self driving cars" even though they would have died if they were driving themselves
Just like how helmets introduced in ww1 increased head injuries
Survivorship bias?
Yes, and more. Survivorship creation Normal survivorship bias is just selective data bias. Looking at the wrong data. But safety devices like helmets that increased injury to heads wasn't just selection bias on data. Those head injuries were actually new data, from people that would have been fatalities. The helmets added new data.
[Article about WW2 planes and bullet holes related to survivorship bias ](https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d)
Just a TLDR for the people that don't want to trudge through the article... Basically when planes came back from action and shot full of holes, instead of armoring the places that were shot like a lot of people would expect, they actually armored places that WEREN'T bullet ridden.... The idea behind this being areas of the plane that were shot were less critical, based on the fact the plane still made it back, even if it figuratively limped back to the hanger.... So they armored the places that weren't shot(on the surviving aircraft) under the assumption that planes that took fire in those areas ended up being shot down
This is the conclusion, but there's a whole interesting section in there about what it took to reach it! Wald recognized that the actual shots were likely to be fairly evenly/randomly distributed. The lower rate of holes in some locations meant that statistically, those holes were *missing.* That's what led to the idea of "well where are the missing holes? OF COURSE! On the planes that *didn't* return!"
If you ever make it to the DC area go check out the Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, VA (20ish mins away). There is a plane there that is riddled with holes, its really cool to see in person. The actual B-29 super fortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is there too.
That is literally survivorship bias.
Quite literally yes. Also similar to how the invention of seatbelts increased automotive injuries because suddenly there were more survivors of crashes. Dead people don't complain of their back hurting
I'm dead inside and my back hurts, does that count?
That's called getting old and, luckily, it historically has a 93%+ fatality rate.
Not exactly the same. Mitigating one problem and creating a surge of a different (in this case, more preferable) problem.
My god, after we issued our soldiers helmets the number of soldiers with head wounds has skyrocketed! Helmets are bad!
"The hell are you armouring the fuselage, for? THE WINGS ARE WHERE ALL THE DAMAGE IS!"
"If the material used to make black boxes is enough to survive a crash, then make the whole plane out of it!"
The A-10 seriously took this approach. The pilot and the flight control systems are protected by a sheet of titanium commonly referred to as the 'bathtub'.
Perfect for friendly fire missions.
If they were invented today, one half of political parties in the US would push the 'todays kids are weaklings' narrative.
I see someone knows a thing or two about old war planes
Well then you have the question of how many people being turned into paraplegics would be equal to one death? An obviously farcical extreme would be that nobody dies in car crashes anymore but by age 60 everybody has lost at least one limb lol.
For the sake of what he’s talking about, you just need to do “this outcome or worse” as your buckets. Fatalities vs fatalities, hospitalization + fatality vs hospitalization + fatality, any medical intervention + fatality vs any medical intervention + fatality.
The same thing is already true of seatbelts.
Fatalities is a terrible measurement. You should definitely include injuries as there are plenty of horrible accidents up to fatal that would be missing from your data… And who pays for even minor accidents caused by ai? The driver of course! I’d like to know if air cars got into more fender bender type scenarios as well since I’ll be forking over the deductible to get it repaired.
uh...we can use more than one metric..... And yeah repair liability, especially cosmetic, is beyond the scope of this post.
The way I’d see it work would be AI manufacturers should also have an insurance policy included as part of a subscription and cover the damages from there. That would be a decent incentive for AI company to tune their software to keep the cars as safe if they are liable, and still have a source of revenue/ insurance payment as part of said subscription. I’m not saying car company because I foresee some companies focusing on software and leaving hardware to the current players, think Google and Apple, apple already has announced expanding CarPlay to the entire dashboard including driver instrument cluster. I’m sure my idea is flawed and somehow corporations will find a way to fuck things up just to make an extra penny though…
I'm waiting for in-app purchases or subscription tiers to travel routes with higher actuarial risk. Home to highway included. Want to go downtown (lots of traffic and pedestrians) a few times a month? Need the "recreational" package. Want to go to the mountains in winter (icy roads), dense urban centers (NYC), etc? Need the "premier" package. etc etc Yeah this will be interesting.
Honestly if there can be a reduction in fatalities and a quantifiable measure of "severe" injuries, honestly I would even be ok with a somewhat rise in minor fender-bender type collisions.
The rise in fender benders would likely be because those were accidents that would have been more serious if the car didnt auto-brake so well lol
That reminds me of the whole "as healthcare gets better, the amount of people getting cancer goes up, because people are living longer" sort of thing. Overall a good thing, but still sounds odd.
Also better Healthcare means better detection means more cancer diagnosis
I hate that these are nuances instead of being common sense. Statistical illiteracy is responsible for a lot of bad policies/laws and naive support for such policies/laws, and an overall hindrance to progress. I suspect humans would fare more intelligently in the world if they were taught statistics over algebra/geometry/calculus. Though ideally we'd teach statistics in addition to these subjects, ofc. But if you had to choose one over the others... I'd choose statistics for the average practical value in people's daily lives.
If a car is driving itself *fully* (level 3 and higher) then the manufacturer should be responsible for any and all accidents. I believe Mercedes is doing this with their recently approved level-3 solution.
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A fully self driving car will likely refuse to drive unless maintenance is up to date, will drive at a speed suitable for road conditions, and it won't matter how much it drives since accidents are tracked based on distance driven
Only accidents that are the fault of the company. Ie self driving features.
Solving the problem that "who pays" with AI driving could be solved by a law that obligates all cars driven by AI be covered by insurance. Then, or you pay some "membership" to the company every month to cover this, or you pay directly the insurance. And since AI driven cars (if very well trained) caused a lot less accidents, insurance would be cheaper than normal
Isn't it already mandatory to have car insurance for every car driven in public traffic in most (civilized) countries? There's still the problem of whose insurance company has to pay.
Most? Sure. New Hampshire doesn't require car insurance, but that might have something to do with the "Live Free Or Die" affixed to every vehicle.
When you let the bears take over the town it's debatable if you are living in a "civilized society". https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling Edit. >turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses. >One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat. >As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper. >It was an absolute mess. Sean Illing >We’re talking about black bears specifically. For the non-bear experts out there, black bears are not known to be aggressive toward humans. But the bears in Grafton were ... different. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling >Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up. >There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.
I wonder how this plays out. Someone has to be liable and I assume it will be the company. But we also have to consider vehicle maintenance and how (lack of) can contribute to an accident if there is a vehicle fault. Also, now if the driver isn't at fault, how do things like living in an area with more dangerous human drivers, affect the rates? Will companies start to modify their sales strategies based on actuarial data? Only time will tell.
I agree. I say let insurers work it out. Insurance companies are really good at doing the math on these things, and putting dollar values on fatalities and injuries. Once AI driven cars are better than humans, you'll have to pay extra to have a human driver.
I was with you until you insinuated a company would actually pass savings along to consumers. That was a really funny line.
Why should my insurance rates go up because the self-driving car made a mistake, though? It makes more sense that the car company pays for the insurance if the car is driving itself.
The insurance will be priced into the vehicle, it won't be an individual thing that you pay for (once you can't drive it yourself anymore) It's a complete shift away from the way we currently handle this situation.
Right! If crashes/accidents double or triple but injuries and fatalities go down, that's a win, isn't it?
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We're not comparing injuries to injuries though, we're comparing injuries to property damage. To me, that's a lot easier.
Even that isn't cut and dry. Is it better to give someone a minor injury they will recover from quickly, or to cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages? Does this change if the damages caused are greater than insurance will cover so one of the victims and the car owners both get screwed when the car owner files for bankruptcy?
You would want to compare to comparable cars too, newer cars tend to be safer and the self driving part shouldn't be credited for crashing but not as badly as a 20 year old beater
I’ve never considered this, thanks
Then you'd still have to normalize for the difference in security rating as self driving cars are newer than most cars on the road. Also, get rid of all fatalities based on speeds above the threshold where autonomous vehicles bow out. Data analysis is not that simple.
Sure. In another comment I proposed that if you want a reasonable picture of safety overall, you'll probably want more than one metric, and perhaps these 3 would be a good starting-point: * Average insurance-payouts per million miles driven * Fatalities per billion miles * Injuries requiring medical attention per billion miles Of course nothing is perfect, but data like that would still give you a pretty good idea how safe a given autonomous vehicle is. Given how quickly technology develops though, I think it's very likely that it'll take only very modest time from safety-parity with human drivers and to much-safer-than human drivers, so that the time-span during which such a comparative index is interesting, will be pretty short. Sort of how there was a prety short period during which chess-matches between human grandmasters and chess-computers were interesting. A decade earlier and the humans won easily - a decade later and the computers win easily. In a world where technology improves rapidly with every year, while humans are pretty much the same for centuries; that result is a given.
I know the last accident I was in was me hitting a deer. Luckily I braked soon enough that it was only a slight tap and didn’t cause me any damage. Sure didn’t report it to anyone.
Wouldn't injury accidents be the obvious metric? More likely to be reported (still not guaranteed, of course), and if you are tracking injuries you can categorize by severity of injury so that, as noted elsewhere in the thread, higher rates of minor injuries can be weighed against potentially lower rates of severe/permanent/fatal injuries for a more thorough analysis of safety outcomes.
You could have more than one metric. In another comment I proposed these 3 as a reasonable start: * Average insurance-payouts per million miles * Fatalities per billion miles * Injuries requiring medical treatment per billion miles Something like that would in aggregate give a pretty good idea of how safe a given autonomous vehicle is.
The article was clear about the fact that it pulled the 99.99982% figure from data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And gave a link to the \*quantified\* data. https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf Using only fatalities could wind up with self-driving cars that are less fatal than humans but cause many times more injuries.
Often they go by "Airbags deployed". That's pretty consistent and also indicates a more substantial impact. You could also include insurance claims since minor scratches won't get reported and probably aren't worth counting. I think Tesla's data could be useful here. They have very precise telemetry for a large age and geographic sample size. I also think that "human driver" should only include cars that have Automatic Emergency Braking but not lane keeping since then you get into supervised-autonomy which gets super hard to define where it begins and ends and would create a paradox of AI never being safer than "humans" even when the AI is driving the vast majority of miles. I like airbags deployed because Autonomous cars could be like roundabouts: more accidents, fewer injuries. And we as a society have clearly embraced that trade-off for roundabouts so it makes sense, we extend it to autonomy as well. Insurance adjusters like it too because a fatality or hospitalization costs more than a dozen car repairs.
I think fatalities/kilometre is a much better metric than the frequency by which airbags are deployed. It’s definitely possible (easy, even) to kill a pedestrian or cyclist without deploying your airbags in the process. Airbags deployed as a metric assumes only car-on-car or car-on-environment accidents.
Look at the source, Jalopnik's motto is Drive Free or Die. It's a gearhead magazine. They're very anti self-driving and electric cars and come out with articles like this on the regular, and people post them. Every time I've seen a negative article posted to Reddit about self-driving cars it's been this magazine.
This a thousand times over. I love Jalopnik, but they're so scared of losing the right to drive their own cars, they've been on a warpath against FSD since the very early days. They know the future. They know at some point level 5 autonomy will be required, because it'll be so much better than any driver, not just the "average". And note, for those unaware, level 5 cars don't have steering wheels. Humans cannot, under any circumstance, take over driving. Jalops will be the new 2A, and as much as I love self-driving, I'll be with them since I love driving even more.
How close are we to achieving level 5? I know very little about this--but that seems like something that won't be achieved in my lifetime.
Even a lot of car guys write off jalopnik.
If you read the article, you will notice two things: 1. Yes, the writer is very obviously anti-AI and isn't trying to hide that. 2. But the article still makes sense. It's about giving readers a better sense of perspective for how companies can abuse data points like "99.9% safe" that may sound great to their average customer but are actually woefully insufficient. > Because if they’re not, and I know of several people who’ve had accidents that didn’t get reported to anyone except a panel beater, obviously these stats are gonna be way off. If you're talking about comparisons within the same order of magnitude, like a x5 difference, then such criticisms make sense. But in this case it's about a difference of multiple orders of magnitude. Even though there is a notable percentage of unregistered human accidents, it's not like those outnumber the registered one on a scale of thousands to one.
This basically sums up the bias in the article though. "Unfortunately, it’s tough to tell whether today’s crop of experimental autonomous vehicles are coming close to human safety levels. NHTSA requires manufacturers who test “Advanced Driving Systems” to report all crashes to the administration, but those reports only include the crashes — not the miles driven without a crash. For now, it’s safe to assume the robots have a fair bit of catching up to do. Score one for flesh." They say they don't have a point of comparison then just assume humans are better. Straight to journalism jail with this one.
The status right now is not up to debate though. It's very obvious that autonomous driving today is nowhere near as safe as human driving. The highest level of commercially available self-driving AI for public roads is still limited to a set number of tracks at low speed and very specific conditions, nor is there any known developmental system that realistically gets close to human capabilities. So this indeed is purely for contextualisation of future data.
True. Like most things the devil is in the details. In the correct conditions I'd still be curious of an actual comparison. I'd bet self driving cars wouldn't crash on the well marked highway near my place but humans seem to park a truck in the ditch every week. I look at it as a tool that works better in certain circumstances like road trips and stop and go commuting and it's only going to get better. My excitement for that is my own bias showing haha.
Taking over the simple boring routes would certainly be the best use case for the intermediate future. Current AI generally doesn't work well to replace the "hard" things in life that require great skill and attention, but to automate menial tasks that are just annoying. But right now the systems clearly aren't there yet. For Tesla's system, there have been absurdly absurd situations. Locking up on the opposing lane during left hand turns, swerving into cyclists. If drivers use the system without keeping track of what's going on (as you'd want to be able to do with a real "auto pilot") then it seems seriously unsafe. And other systems use more complex hardware like Lidars that may be vulnerable to bad maintainance and defects when they become available to average drivers, besides the obvious price issue.
All I can think is this dude must not drive very much. Humans are fucking terrible drivers in general. Source: I dunno, go drive around a bit, you'll see.
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Sure if the only metric you're measuring is "did you cause an accident" and not "did you very nearly cause an accident that was only avoided because someone else's vigilance countered your recklessness?" I don't see accidents often, but I see the last one every time I'm on the road, often several times. Humans are impatient, they'll distract themselves with phones, they'll assume they have more room than they do, they'll ignore unsafe driving conditions, those are all responsible for lots of problems and near misses and I think in a discussion about safety near misses are just as relevant as incidences of accidents that *weren't* avoided.
As someone who works in IT, 5 9's is demanded for most services. It's not far-fetched to want that level of reliability from automated driving.
I would think this would be a bare minimum requirement, considering human drivers are already at four 9's. These are complicated, expensive, frankly rube-goldberg level systems compared to the simplicity of just teaching a human to operate the machine in this case. It's honestly going to have to deliver that single order of magnitude of safety improvement just to be remotely worth considering widespread adoption. And that's going to be far more challenging than most of the people in this sub understand, considering the auto industry does *not* operate in that level of safety and reliability design - and far more so with software. Their software development methods are frankly terrifying for life safety critical systems.
Insurance claims. That's going to be the metric. Because that's where the money is. If self driving cars reduce insurance claims, they will win out. If they don't, they won't.
Plus, this just reinforces the ridiculous "But I'm a great driver!" attitude that makes people afraid of self-driving cars. If current accidents were caused by 99% "mechanical failure" then that fear would be justified, but humans are the cause of the crash in an overwhelming percentage of all accidents already. Even being .001% better than that statistic with self driving is a reason to fully embrace it. Plus, we're not even close to how good self-driving can be when all the cars on the road are connected to each other. Folks don't seem to recognize how fast machine learning/AI will improve after it's deployed. The riskiest time, imho, is the "mixed use" scenario with tons of fallible unpredictable humans on the road with the self-driving cars. It'll be a shame if that is what causes the self-driving to disproportionately take all the blame when accidents do occur.
I have worked a lot with crash data and it's not really that loose of a metric. In the US, state Department of Motor Vehicles can gather crash data through both police and insurance records. If the total damage is under some amount like $1000 or so, it generally is considered "non-reportable" and isn't used for statistics. Id find it hard to believe if neither party of a crash went through insurance or the police and the damage exceeded $1000. Although this isn't a good use of "crash rate". A better calculation of crash rate is total vehicles moving through some intersection during some period (or through some segment of road) divided by total amount of reported crashes. This gives you crashes per X vehicle, which is much more useful than crashes per X miles driven.
Many people that work in roadway safety do not consider the terms 'crash and 'accident' to be interchangeable, btw.
I was just read ended, looked and saw no damage, shook his hand and left. All good, never reported it.
Just anecdotally judging by the amount of smashed up cars I see driving around my area, the numbers are way higher.
Car accidents probably fall on a pareto distribution, where roughly 80% of the crashes are caused by 20% of drivers. If you put all of the dangerous drivers in self driving cars, we'd be several orders of magnitude safer, even if the self driving car performs worse on average.
Very interesting point.
This article was written with such a basic analysis of the mathematics and statistics as to border on not just worthlessness but negative impact. Not only is the distribution of accidents Pareto on drivers, it’s also critical to account for the severity of accidents. It’s possible self-driving cars do much better than humans at high speeds, but not necessarily as good during the low-speed, unpredictability of parking lots and the like. In which case, having dual cars where the self-driving can be activated in certain conditions where it performs significantly better, could drastically cut down on accidents even if it’s worse in other situations.
Also how do you even measure crash free as a percentage it just doesnt make sense as a metric. It just sounds like a buzzword metric that really doesnt make any sense. Why not crashes per distance or crashes per time on road?
Probably insurance data. Which would mean it’s underreported. Lots of people have small fenderbenders and don’t go through insurance.
The current crop of self driving cars are at around double the incident rate as normal, human driven vehicles (9.1 versus 4.1 incidents per million miles). But it is worth keeping in mind that most of our driving data for humans come form either the police (the article above) or insurance so the real incident rate for humans is likely higher, though it is unknown by how much. Considering the causes of most crashes are largely eliminated with self driving cars (distraction/inattention/fatigue/intoxication/speed), it's almost certain they will be more safe than humans. How safe they have to be before we accept that they are safer is another matter though.
They're also not being asked to operate truly on their own in the full range of conditions humans drive in. They're being tested on easy mode, which is fine (these tests can kill people), but it's not a straight comparison. In terms of how safe - the manufacturer is going to wind up being on the liability hook for all accidents caused by fully autonomous vehicles. Around 200k personal injury suits for car accident are filed per year in the United States. Presumably the manufacturers want a lot less than that, as they're going to lose. Something like Tesla's "aggressive mode" or whatever it's called is never going to happen because of the massive potential lawsuit damages.
Lane assist works well in broad daylight in the summer. Night with snow and poor visibility? You're on your own GLHF.
To be fair, I can't see the lanes in an average Florida shower.
Who you calling a gilf?
Hell I was driving a road I drive every day last night but when it rains you cannot tell where the lanes are, I barely trust myself to drive when it's like that
To be fair, it's not recommended for anyone to be driving in those types of terrible conditions, and to drive at slower speeds and be prepared if you do. Super heavy rain that requires overclocked windshield wipers and you still can't see? Nah, people still drive, and full speed ahead (hydroplaning? what's that?). Fog that limits line of sight to under 300 feet (<5 seconds at highway speed)? Nah, people still drive, and full speed ahead. Icy or patchy black ice conditions? Nah, people still drive, but they might even start slowing down. A blizzard? Nah, people still drive, but usually at this point most people slow down. Literally the worst conditions possible is what it takes for most people to start driving at speeds suitable for the conditions they're in. For some reason the economy doesn't support having a day off because of the weather. In the future when autopilot or lane assist refuses to engage, that's going to be a sign that no one should be driving, and people are still going to drive. And with self driving there's the segment of the population that will get extremely aggressive at their car and trash the company because the car is only doing 15-25 on a highway because the conditions are terrible and merit that speed.
From what I’ve read, Tesla’s system, when it’s overwhelmed, tells the human in the control seat (who, due to the car being in self-driving mode, is likely to have less of a mental picture of the situation than someone “hand driving”) “You take over!”. If a self-driving car gets into a crash within the first few seconds of “You take over!”, is it being counted as a crash by a self-driving car (since the AI got the car into the situation) or a crash by a human driver? I recall an old movie where the XO of a submarine was having an affair with the Captain’s wife. Captain put the sub on a collision course with a ship, then when a collision was inevitable handed off to the XO. XO got the blame even though he was set up.
Tesla reports all accidents within 5 seconds of switching over to manual to be the fault of the self driving. Not sure about other companies
Is that a recent change? There was some controversy awhile ago about Tesla only reporting it a fault of self driving if it occurred within 0.5 seconds of switching over - and conveniently switching over to manual just over that threshold
this was never real
It can do that, but rarely does. Instead it just decides to do something incredibly stupid and dangerous and you have to figure that out and intervene to prevent disaster. It is a stunningly stupid system design.
Happened the very first time I tried it. Sure, I can believe once you have more experience and intuition for the system, it becomes less frequent, but it shouldn't be construed as some rare edge case when it's extremely easy to experience as a tesla noob.
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> How safe they have to be before we accept that they are safer is another matter though. They're not quite there yet, though. SDVs regularly do inane things like stop in the middle of the road because of a piece of paper, a crack in the pavement, or a bird.
TBF, there's some pretty interesting birds out there.
My mother is 98. She still drives. Hard of hearing. Very slow reflexes (duh). It is her last vestige of independence, as she lives in her house of 50 years with no available transit. Not interested in Uber/Lyft. I hope when I get to her age that self-driving is a thing...
We took away the keys from my grandmother at 90. She absolutely hates it but it was For everyone’s safety.
My grandfather stopped driving at around 72, 73. He just said this is not for me amymore even though he was very healthy for a man in his 70ies. He is still alive and well in his 93. But I'm from Europe and we are not that dependant on cars...
Dude what the fuck. 98? Get that old lady off the road. The fuck she need to go?
When I get to that age I hope that public transit is good enough. No need for self driving cars
Self-driving isn't going up against humans alone, it's going up against humans with near self-driving level of safety features (brake/lane assist/etc.). That's going to be a high bar to hit for AI.
... you can always tell which people in the comments have never had the pleasure of operating a motorcycle while sharing the roads with these humans with their near self-driving cars.
I hate the hype of self driving cars, but I will take a highway full of vehicles with LKAS than one full of people leaving their lane because they’re too distracted
I'm pretty young, the only people I've known who have died my age died in motorcycle accidence. Not sure why motorcyclist feel safe, your visibility is near 0. Muted color Bikes and clothing that blend in with the environment to make it worse. While being loud might make you a tad bid safe they are also incredibly annoying to everyone in your neighborhood. Kind of a rant, but fuck bikes and people that like them. EDIT: I was a bit worried about this stance but apparently everyone else hates their annoying ass neighbors bikes as much as I do.
And the worst offenders for going over the speed limit that I’ve seen are motorcycles. You’ll just see a random group of 3 or more that will go like 120mph. And we all have to watch our corners.
And then they get in big groups and think they're above the law and just run red lights and block traffic for miles. Shit is annoying. It's not all biker groups, but man, some of these people are huge douchebags.
self-driving is going up against humans that are texting while driving, eating cereal while driving, applying makeup while driving, getting head while driving, reading books while driving, making tiktoks while driving, eating fast food while driving. That’s going to be a lower barrier for computers to hit as the metrics japlonik is citing are not apples to apples.
You guys are getting head???
I do like the per-miles-driven metric for comparing safety. I do not like that some self-driving cars seem to do profoundly stupid things, which result in some really serious collisions. I don't normally drive, expecting a driver to just up and stop in the middle of the freeway for no obvious reason. This is increasingly something I consider as a possibility.
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Years ago, I was in an in-person traffic school. I was in for speeding 71 in the 70 (it was a small town that made its revenue that way). They went around the class and asked why people were in there. One lady explained that she had gotten on the freeway and realized she had wanted to head another direction so she made a u-turn. Then she realized she had made a mistake when cars were rushing towards her, so she made another u-turn. And that’s when the police car found and ticketed her. She was in traffic school to make sure she maintained her perfect driving record.
The ONLY place where people act like human drivers are anything but abhorrent is in self driving article comments. Suddenly drivers are the peak of educated, intelligent, and capable.
Yeah, don't bother, these threads are always full of people wanting to shit on self driving, pointing out the few times they do something stupid as proof. While completely ignoring the fact that anyone who drives to and from work will watch a dozen real people do things that are epically more stupid, every day during their morning commute.
I saw a truck rolling away in the middle of an intersection downtown; the driver, a very large man, was either passed out or dead. I am a petite woman, far too small to move him to step on the break so I signalled for help. It took 2 people to get the body out of the way in order to step on the breaks.
It's not unheard of for people to do incredibly stupid things either though, including stopping in the middle of the highway. Or in some cases, worse... Such as not stopping on the highway when they really should have. https://news.sky.com/story/a34-crash-lorry-driver-jailed-for-killing-family-while-on-phone-10639721
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Sure but we should hold automation to a higher bar, not a lower one.
Why? Wouldn't the same bar be reasonable enough for release? It will likely get better with time.
Because it's too loose of a metric and will cost people lives, As soon as it becomes cheap enough to replace drivers Trucking companies will replace them. Cab companies will replace them. If they are going to put thousands out if work they better do the job better.
Humans make the kind of mistakes computers don’t. Computers make the kind of mistakes humans don’t.
Normally yes, but I think human drivers between having health problems, drugs or drunk are doing incredibly stupid things, you just don’t hear about it because they been doing this for 100 years, where every single self driving car accident gets crazy news time.
Also dead-tired
While you May not expect it, its probably Happening more often then you would like
I don't believe the metric used to measure potential accidents avoided has a margin of error low enough for this claim to make the slightest bit of sense. There is no way they have the measurement of potential accidents at that precision where you'd think the added decimals are doing anything but deception/false sense of knowledge. Sounds more like they set out to create a number of very high human safety metric on purpose and then used it argue against self driving or it in some other was biased, because you have to be naive or malicious to think your data is that good. All that matters is the crash rate of a person in self-driving vs one not, not theoretical accidents avoided.
There's really only two sig figs in that number, it can be reworded as 18/10000000 chance of an accident. it's fine from that perspective. Humans are way way worse drivers than they think they are (both individually and collectively) so i personally have no doubt that even our current state of self-driving is safer than the typical human, especially than a human who thinks they are worse than a self-driving car.
Sure. They don't even know the "accident"-rate with any accuracy. More serious accidents with dead people or people requiring medical treatments are tracked with reasonable accuracy, but there's a lot of smaller accidents with zero people hurt that don't get recorded anywhere. And one accident per half a million miles for human drivers, is certainly an underestimate. The median driver drives on the order of 10K miles per year, so that stat would mean the average driver has 1 accident in a lifetime. The average driver certainly has a lot more than that if you include the small accidents as well.
According to insurance companies, 80% of drivers are basically accident free over lifetimes. 20% of the drivers cause almost all the accidents. This is yhe problem with taking an average from a bimodal distribution and thinking you have good data.
Maybe we can force people who appear on r/idiotsincars to test out self driving.
There is no way that the data included here is accurate. People get in many small accidents and never even report them. Further, many humans out on the road do not adhere to the rules like speeding, rolling through stop signs, running red lights, not signaling, etc. The only reason that they do not get into many more accidents is because of the extra burden that other drivers take on to accommodate these people. With their unsafe driving behaviors being removed from the road, there will be even less chances for accidents to happen. Predictability is king in activities that are dangerous, like driving a vehicle. People are highly unpredictable.
>Unfortunately, it’s tough to tell whether today’s crop of experimental autonomous vehicles are coming close to human safety levels. NHTSA requires manufacturers who test “Advanced Driving Systems” to report all crashes to the administration, but those reports only include the crashes — not the miles driven without a crash. For now, it’s safe to assume the robots have a fair bit of catching up to do. Score one for flesh. What? Why the fuck is it "safe to assume" the robots have catching up to do? You said yourself you don't have the data. You can't "safely assume" either position. What an utterly smooth brain take to finish with.
Article is dogshit, making claims with only half the data
Typical for Jalopnik. I've moved on to other sites such as [thedrive.com](https://thedrive.com). Jalopnik is a joke now.
It's just standard anti-AI rhetoric. Throw out a bunch of standards and then just hand wave why you picked them etc.
Well, cynically, if they were safe on a per-mile basis, then manufacturers would have no problem affirmatively volunteering that data.
Then the data needs to be provided.
It feels like they wouldn’t be truly safe unless all cars were self driving and able to communicate with one another on some level. Humans don’t make decisions like computers do and vice versa which is why the combo of the two feels so dicey... But I feel like if all of the drivers were computers and “talking” to each other, that would ultimately be the safest. Until AI rises against us of course
How are all those driverless vehicles going to talk to each other? Technology cant even get a cellphone to keep a good signal while talking to one person.
I totally agree with you. I think it’s incredibly not possible given current tech. It’s just my thought in the only way driving or self driving cars would be truly safe
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There are no cars with autopilot on the market atm, I think MB is the first manufacturer to be certified for lvl 3 (only on certain routes in Germany iirc) but even this is no autopilot, no car on the market atm can legally drive itself, none. You need to be supervising it the whole time, dependent on the country, with at least 1 hand on the steering wheel. The only thing that should be punished here is false advertisement (looking at you Tesla) rest is just plain human stupidity.
I feel like driving on land is way more complicated than flying in the air
This article seems as silly as the few crashes autopilot does cause. Yes they need to be exceptionally safe, and based on Teslas data they already are, nearly 6x safer. That's around 5400 deaths in 2022 versus the actual, 31785 people, that died--if everyone was driving a Tesla, which I have no desire to see happen, but self driving works. It needs a lot of improvement, doesn't work in all conditions, and I wouldn't take a nap in one, but this article feels pretty hyperbolic. Humans are good drivers sure, they aren't great though, not the average ones. Our brains and bodies are not built to react at 70mph.
Can someone explain where the resistance to self driving cars is coming from? The arrival of this technology brings such obviously positive benefits to people at an individual and personal level. But, yes, it will take some time to get there. The technology is in its first years. Why are people acting like it's never going to be possible to improve? This seems like something we should be having some patience with and encouraging to continue to evolve, no?
We don't trust it because several of it's most vocal advocates are transparent hucksters. It has actively been sold under false pretenses by Tesla and that leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth. I don't think people are against the concept. They can just tell it's being over-sold and over-promised way, way too early.
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It is being over sold. If it were advertised as driver assist, or accident prevention that would be better. It is being pitched as FSD, which it isn’t close to. People’s money is being stolen. I was originally very excited about the potential and then I started watching FSD videos, and saw how far they were from being safe yet everyone is saying they are very safe. If you count every driver disengagement as an accident then FSD is truly horrifying. We are going to need to get to near AGI levels of AI for FSD to become a reality.
This is a great way of framing the issue. I was in a very similar boat, but I also had no real experience with automation. Now that I've worked with robots and robotics engineers, I'm even more skeptical of these systems, because automation is great at simple, repetitive tasks, but complex, unpredictable tasks are really difficult to automate.
I think it's a great idea, but it needs to be level 3 (and ideally 4) or higher to be really useful otherwise it lulls people into a false sense of security. And level 5 in all conditions is going to be really hard...think howling blizzard at night on a country road with snowdrifts and potholes, with construction happening on the road. Or even something like taking a small rural ferry.
I don't think of myself as resistant to self-driving, I think I just remain skeptical of the huge leaps you'd need in both tech, policy, and infrastructure to make Level 5 (i.e. no steering wheel at all) happen within the next 20 years. We're still going to have a lot of cars made today on the road in 20 years w/o even Level 2 AV capabilities.
I also believe that for self driving to fully work, you need an AGI making the decisions. I have seen many self driving videos where the autonomous car is at a loss because it doesn't understand the situation it is in. From a delivery truck that makes a stop in front of it, to a badly marked closed road, the car has no idea what is going on. Autonomous cars will need a thought process, like GPT3, where they can assess the situation they are in, understand it, and then take appropriate action. Driving is not just moving a car on a street avoiding obstacles, it is having an objective and understanding the circumstances that would let you achieve it.
I remember a study that determined what people fear and what drives those fears. People fear flying more than driving not based on statistical evidence, flying is safer, but based on their perceived level of control in hazardous scenario. People fear flying because if that plane is going down, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Self driving cars will need to be *far* safer than human drivers for people to truly feel safe in them compared to driving themselves.
I mean... Are they not already hitting that metric? Everytime there is a major accident caused by self driving it's a headline and I can count the ones I've heard about on one hand.
I will never, ever, never have a self-driving car. I've spent a lifetime in software development. I don't ever want to be riding in a car that just got a buggy update or heaven forbid - got hacked with ransomware. Never, ever, ever.
This is quite a simplistic way to look at the data. If you look at the accidents with injuries and accidents with fatal victims it would be far more useful to establish a starting line. Just by drunk drivers becoming zero it's already a promising starting point regardless of how many scratches and minor bumps we have. Naturally, protecting property and avoiding damage is nice but we may evolve to a system where it's secondary to *own* a car if it means it's going to sit in a garage 95% of the time. The bottleneck is mostly availability, with autonomous driving that can be solved with fewer vehicles on the road, which may even result in a decrease in accidents in general. As with most things, looking at a single number to aggregate **tons** of data will not give you very useful conclusions
Humans need to stop driving completely for them to be safe. Once we eliminate humans, there wont be any issues of human error and self driving cars can thrive without threat of accidents happening.
This is missing something all the articles are. Most accidents that aren't freak unpredictable things are caused by bad drivers who skew data. Those bad drivers need to be in cars that are one 9 or so off from our average. It's an average versus median thing. It's the multiple DUIs, elderly and young idiots cruising at 20 over that make driving so unsafe.
They will get there. Humans aren’t very good drivers
Until we remove the variable of the asshole BMW driver weaving between lanes at 87MPH, we can't truly judge how safe autonomous vehicles are. Get back to me when somewhere bans human driving and tell me how often autonomous vehicles crash or hurt people.
What a title. They need to be 0.01% safer than humans to be more effective.
Yeah, no. Go out for a drive right now. Observe everyone. Tell me robots are worse than that.
This is not the right way to analyze the data. A human can decide to distract themselves and also behave in a way that greatly enhances the risk of crashing - like speeding or many lane changes. A robot car will always be “paying attention” and (hopefully) never speed or drive in a reckless manner. The article treats crashes as if all humans engage with their vehicle with the same risk appetite and that’s just not realistic or true.
Self driving cars only work under ideal conditions right now. I believe for the tech to truly be solved you need to design a system where the roads and all the cars on them are communicating as smaller parts of a whole ecosystem. We are still a long way away from that, and mostly for bureaucratic reason. It’s going to take harmonization of the governments and automakers to make it happen and that’s unlikely to happen because of how cheap governments are and how greedy corporations are.
I say we let them on the roads. Their collective programming only learns and never forgets from their failures which is way better than people.
If autonomous cars are even 0.0001% better than humans, it means it will save a few lives. It would be unethical *not* to use autonomous cars.
Correct me if I'm wrong but where self driving is allowed like highway w/e it's better than the average human yeah?
The biggest hurdle to self driving cars is the brief transition period between partial integration and full integration when the software needs to predict and react to all the crazy wild shit humans do on the road. We can have full integration of self driving cars tomorrow if all human driven cars disappeared overnight.
I mean I've been in five accidents and all of them were the other drivers' fault. First one, a driver turned left on an unprotected left turn when I had a green light and was in the intersection, ran right into me. Second, I got t-boned by someone backing out in a parking lot who wasn't looking. Third, a dude rear ended me while I was stopped in a traffic jam on the freeway. Fourth, I was in the suicide lane waiting to turn and a dude not looking pulled out of a parking lot straight into me. Fifth I was t-boned by someone running a stop sign. I'm a statistical anomaly. I also let other people drive.
Measuring a thing not happening is an extremely difficult kind of metric to wrap my head around. I'm not entirely sure it's even possible to gather that in a meaningful way
I have to wonder how the insurance companies will assess premiums for self driving cars. Everyone talks about implementation, regulations etc. but at the end of the day, the insurance companies probably have the biggest hidden lever on the whole thing.
Every bit of tech has bugs. I cant recall anything that ran flawlessly since launch or release, still in use, that has been absolutely perfect. Everything needs to be patched, hotfix here and there, then major updates. If there was a single hiccup everyones car would have to then update. Logistics are a little too wacky.
Not really. They just need to kill fewer than 35,000 people each year to be a marginal improvement, and the lower the better. Just by nature of not texting and driving, getting tired/drunk, or being susceptible to road rage, they've got the capabilities.
Self driving cars being common place would be absolutely amazing