"Europe" is very vague when it comes to driving. Italy and Greece and all of eastern Europe have some of the worse (aggressive) driving on earth.
Anecdote: I drive in Italy at least once a year and never found it particularly bad or aggressive. I’ve driven in Greece too and also found it normal. Data: Both are substantially safer than the US https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...
Yeah, the US is also mixed given its size depending on where you are.
The most dangerous driving I’ve witnessed was in Jamaica and the UAE, but that was a while ago.
The US does seem somewhere in-between those and Europe/uk.
The easiest solution is to just pull Cruise's licenses because they've been and continue to be the worst offender -- the only reason they got significantly faster approval than Waymo to do things even more autonomously was because they're GM and leveraged their massive lobbying power to get away with breaking shit in production.
> For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path. It seems like almost every day I run into some Cruise or Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle stuck in the middle of the street blocking traffic, and that should not be excused a…
It's a lot higher than 0.1 people. 40 people died in SF last year due to traffic accidents. I've yet to hear about a self driving car killing someone despite how many there are in the city. I also disagree that coning a self-driving car's sensor is a "regular day to day situation". Throwing paint on someone's windshield or slashing their tires is a crime. E: making stat accurate
People on HN said the same thing about Tesla before they started ramming bridge abutments, etc.
Absolutely right. To situate in terms of recent events, there have been three stages of trying to delay / influence the California CPUC robotaxi expansion approval vote: 1. Tried a politician scare campaign. Failed because it was too transparent it was an attempted distraction from their terrible public safety record. 2. Tried coning and disabling the vehicles. Failed because it was too transparently astroturfed, leg…
sorry, confused > their terrible public safety record whose public safety record? the politicians'? or, who would even be materially interested to lobby against robocars and Google? honest q. automakers seem to be generally onboard with robocars and trying their own. Cabbies have been wiped out as a force by Uber. Even Uber seems generally onboard with robocars. So who is this mysterious powerful Luddite villain?
SF anti-tech “activists.” I was going to post a sarcastic description, but I’ll just say they tend to have a lot of student debt and are frequently devoted Marxists. They also tend to sincerely believe that if tech imploded, the homeless would all suddenly be able to afford apartments.
Absolutely right. To situate in terms of recent events, there have been three stages of trying to delay / influence the California CPUC robotaxi expansion approval vote: 1. Tried a politician scare campaign. Failed because it was too transparent it was an attempted distraction from their terrible public safety record. 2. Tried coning and disabling the vehicles. Failed because it was too transparently astroturfed, leg…
I don't know why the other reply to this post got downvoted to hell. THe person has a point. Fully autonomous cars are cool... don't get me wrong. But electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably not the right solution to our person transport needs. using energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200 lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is spent just moving the vehicle…
Baby steps. Once people learn to delegate transport entirely to a third party, that third party can more easily facilitate the transition to more efficient transport vehicles. Do you care what type of airplane you fly in?
I don't know why the other reply to this post got downvoted to hell. THe person has a point. Fully autonomous cars are cool... don't get me wrong. But electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably not the right solution to our person transport needs. using energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200 lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is spent just moving the vehicle…
> A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst using far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to operate it) and space. E-bikes are great for the situations, climates, and people who can use them. E-bikes are not a substitute for the majority of people’s transportation needs. I think the young, healthy people who live in moderate climates with good weather, short commutes, and little need to haul a…
Data appears to be freely available here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto... . I reviewed a couple dozen incidents and in every case human drivers are to blame. The most extreme example of this was an incident in which a manually operated vehicle repeatedly rear-ended an autonomous vehicle out of spite, then followed it back to the dispatch lot and made a variety of verbal threats.
So the autonomous vehicle pissed off some human driver, not a good sign either.
I think creating anything that doesn’t have the potential to anger American drivers is a ridiculously high bar. People have literally shot other drivers for the most insane “reasons.”
Tbh this seems like the opposite argument I think you’re making. Humans (on average) are not really competent to be in command of a large deadly machine and road rage just proves my point.
Driverless cars are probably safer in the US, because ppl here suck at driving :)
In Germany you have to take driving lessons with professional instructors, including highway and night drives.
The driving test in the US is ridiculously easy. You don't even need to be able to reverse-park.
> The city assigned a guy to go around and document every time an AV does something Want to provide a citation to back that up? > They didn't count them before and now they do. They've apparently been counting since spring of 2022; the large increase in incidents started a year later. > If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report. Lovely dose of whatab…
> That also raises another point: as an example, we know that some drivers text while driving. Not all drivers do this; hopefully it's a minority. I would be surprised if it was a minority. I am an extremely active pedestrian and cyclist in Toronto and if you pay attention to people in their cars stopped at red lights you'll find a majority will be glancing down at something. It could be a phone.. could be the radio.…
Sure you shouldn’t be distracted while driving, but distractions occur, and some of them may require attention e.g driving directions don’t make sense, or music too loud. The best time to service this kind of distraction is at a stop light because you have a couple seconds of acceptable reaction time unlike just about any other time while driving. I’m not surprised or concerned about distractions at stop lights, I have seen very little evidence of accidents caused by that kind of distraction. I’m concerned about distractions while moving (especially at speed), and the two are not necessarily correlated.
We can drive people and goods around without having a human waste his time driving stuff around. Not wasting money paying people to do stupid stuff is gigantic gain.
The person the tech is replacing will still need to work and earn a wage to afford the goods the system that replaced them is delivering. It's not replacing a relatively high risk job or allowing that driver to scale themselves and improve their efficiency in any way. It's just eliminating their job, because. As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey sligh…
Don't work in the industry, but I'm blind and a self-driving car sounds like actual heaven.