Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 740 posts

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#281

Post by johnfn »

giantg2 wrote: post #234

Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in. Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive beca…

As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#282

Post by redox99 »

sensanaty wrote: post #208
binary0010 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc. It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.

You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead. The best par…

Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#283

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

Veserv wrote: post #228
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad." I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close,…

The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash. The mean driver in the context of the USA driving envir…

Remember, I'm responding specifically to how good people are at driving, not how likely they are to die while driving. How likely a person is to die is mediated by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how good they are as a driver, like airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones.

In thread context, you're conflating a bunch of things, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.

1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.

2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.

3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.

4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.

5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.

Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:

If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#284

Post by webdood90 »

PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #246
sensanaty wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead. The best par…

>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait? I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the…

The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.

The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#285

Post by Gigachad »

jeffbee wrote: post #278
Gigachad wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.

You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?

No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#286

Post by nxm »

johnfn wrote: post #281
giantg2 wrote: post #234

Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in. Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive beca…

As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.

[flagged]

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#287

Post by Denatonium »

jeffbee wrote: post #172
Denatonium wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic braking can also be hazardous! In a front-wheel drive car, understeer is a fact of life. When you're approaching a bend in the road with your foot in the accelerator, you're going to be pointed at the guardrail, since the car's going to rotate around the bend when lift your foot off the gas. Now imagine you're driving a car with AEB and it slams on the brakes while you were lightly accelerating towards the…

This is the perfect expression of chronic windshield brain. If you are driving anywhere near the limits of dynamic stability on a public road, then you are already driving dangerously. Also, computerized stability control works better than 99.99% of human drivers.

The limits of dynamic stability go down drastically when the brakes are locked up. You can be _far_ from the limits of dynamic stability when going around a bend in the road, but if your car locks up the brakes mid-bend, you can unexpectedly go from nowhere close to those limits to exceeding them in the blink of an eye. A human driver would wait until they've straightened out to brake hard, but the computer in a car is entirely at the mercy of whoever programmed it. Hopefully it would do the same, but do you really trust Tesla (or whomever) with their move-fast-and-break-things additude?

Then there's the fact that automatic emergency braking requires the software algorithm to make decisions based on data that is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the data used by electronic stability control and ABS systems. It's much easier to detect steering angle and wheel slippage than it is to detect how an object in the distance is likely to behave.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#288

Post by jeffbee »

Gigachad wrote: post #285
jeffbee wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?

No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.

I see. But Waymo investments are also vanishingly small compared to PT OpEx. If you for some reason could tap all of the Waymo money, operations and R&D and all of the rest of it, you could fund WMATA and that's it. Americans spend 100x more just on motor fuels than Waymo spends on itself. If you wanted to raise a similar amount of money you would need a mere 5¢ incremental gas tax. Private Americans furthermore spend $1 trillion every year just replacing and fixing their cars. You could double the public transit subsidy across the nation with a 5% car tax.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#289

Post by [deleted] »

amelius wrote: post #200
ElijahLynn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited. But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing…

> when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited. That's like a 15 minute walk. And with sufficient infrastructure investments this can be 5 minutes.

[deleted]

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#290

Post by hamdingers »

giantg2 wrote: post #234

Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in. Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive beca…

> rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.

Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers.

Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconfident. I would be very surprised to find out they are above average drivers.

Post reply on HN