Tesla’s ‘phantom braking’ problem is getting worse

How much better than a human driver does a self-driving system need to be before we as a society will accept fully autonomous vehicles? That seems like the key question which we are spending very little effort trying to understand.

Until we have a national conversation about this, I suspect self-driving will be an intractable problem.

An anecdote in a sea of data - My 2022 Model 3 had a pretty serious phantom braking problem until 2 or 3 software releases ago. Now it seems to be entirely resolved in my use case. For context, I drive 200-400 miles a week, 95% of which using autopilot on divided highways and well-marked two or four lane roads.

>Seems real easy to get rear-ended.

Which, in this age of cheap ubiquitous dash-cams, isn't nearly as likely to be the "inconvenient waste of time but zero financial risk" deal it used to be

Edit: Since apparently this needs explaining, insurers will consider evidence and happily doll out blame to a party that does something dumb in proportion to their fault (with slight variations per differences in law from state to state). The fact that said dumbness results in the back of your car getting hit with the front of another only matters in the base case in which no other reliable information about the situation is available. In the case of a car that just stops in the roadway with no reason to do so some of the blame is likely to land on the driver thereof. Insurers are well aware that the rules of the road are built around redundant requirements so that crashes don't happen when one party can't or won't hold up their end. Infantile "but the other guy is responsible for.." arguments don't tend to hold much water with them when there's evidence (video or otherwise) that in the events that lead up to the accident your hand was no more forced than the other guy's were because both drivers are still bound by whatever the default responsibility to operate their vehicles in a safe manner is (wording varies by state).

A human driver is no longer the null hypothesis they have to beat. Most vehicles in the US are now sold with collision avoidance systems. The alternative to an autonomous vehicle is a vehicle with the combined efforts of humans + automated systems.

Also, until there's a SAE level 5 vehicle in existence, we're comparing different sample sets. The situations humans crash most often in are many of the same situations where current autonomous vehicles simply won't operate at all.

We may see these sample sets get even more skewed as we partially automate driving in levels 3 and 4. Because humans will have to drive in the more demanding scenarios where automated systems refuse to do so.

Beating the national average never should have been seen as the finish line. The average is dragged down into the gutter by a minority of drivers who choose to engage in very poor behavior, like driving drunk, speeding, making unnecessary trips at night and bad weather, street racing, etc. By simply avoiding these few behaviors, it's easy to put yourself well above the average. (inb4 "everybody thinks they're better than the average"; most people who think this are correct. Bad driving doesn't have a normal distribution.)

If you want to impose self-driving on everybody, it should be at least as good as the best drivers. It would be a grave injustice to force it on the best drivers if it can't match their performance.

As for the bar to pass for simply allowing, not mandating, self driving: I think they should first exceed the skill of a student driver. If they can't then they don't belong on the road without supervision, just like a student driver.