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Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

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Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#311

Post by eldaisfish »

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.

i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.

As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.

Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.

Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#312

Post by Fricken »

EA-3167 wrote: post #248
sensanaty wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famously warm and dry countries of Norway[1] and Finland[2]! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCedclz03uI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

The famously small conurbations and the reality that Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year . They have cars and public transit for the rest. I'd add that these discussions tend to handwave the reality of safety when you're on an open platform movie at high speeds, the reality that not all people are physically able, and a lot of others issues that the vocal "cars are the devil" folks don't engag…

Scandanavians have been getting around without cars for millenia. Nobody had even heard of a car until just over a century ago.

Car dependent infrastructure is definitely not helpful for the physically disabled, as well as those too young, too old, and too poor to drive a car. This and a lot of other issues that the vocal and active "cars aren't the devil" crowd don't engage seriously with.

It's getting really old, and increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "Pitbulls make great family dogs" crowd.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#313

Post by dzhiurgis »

tempestn wrote: post #296
hamdingers wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 overconf…

Per mile driven I expect it's true, just given their greater experience than most drivers. Not that I disagree with you that many Uber drivers are not actually great at driving, but neither is the average driver in North America. I expect we just notice rideshare drivers' mistakes more, and get exposed to them at a greater rate.

There's probably some sort of bias here when you observe someone else driving - it's like that joke - if someone drives slower than you - just curl up and die already boomer, and if they are driving faster than you - what an absolute psychopath.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#314

Post by madamelic »

embedding-shape wrote: post #137
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…

> the last mile it's pretty limited. Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here ( https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-... ) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mou…

Another consideration that needs to be made before tossing out private transit because "public transit is better" is not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.

If it is 2am and you need to get home as a woman, it would be a no brainer to get in an autonomous vehicle while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.

If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.

If you have sensory difficulties that make public transit uncomfortable, private transit is always the better option.

The list goes on for many reasons and people that having only public transit would harm. The idea we can get rid of or otherwise push out private transit marginalizes everyone who isn't prototypical nor should we hand-wave that they can just rely on runs-on-other-people's-time disabled specific transports to get them into city centers because private transport isn't allowed in.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#316

Post by abeppu »

MelonArmiger wrote: post #258

It doesn't really matter whether autonomous cars crash less than human drivers. A computer can never be punished, so a computer must never be allowed to kill any humans.

I do think that currently we're at the stage where Waymo is trying to convince most of the world of the _quality_ of its offering, so for the moment, things are well aligned.

But in 5 years if there are multiple self-driving offerings competing on things like price, door-to-door time, OPEX (e.g. does a camera-only system with no moving parts need less skilled maintenance?), then someone may try to be the cheap but good enough self-driving service that cuts corners -- and we should want some execs to actually go to prison rather than just some cost-of-doing-business fines.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#317

Post by saltcured »

hamdingers wrote: post #294
nradov wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most US states have some sort of assigned risk pool which makes minimum coverage available to even the worst drivers, as long as they still have a valid license. (I'm not claiming that this is necessarily a good public policy, just pointing out that it exists.) https://insurify.com/car-insurance/knowledge/assigned-risk-a...

I'm happy to make the claim this is terrible policy that literally kills people. Every dollar spent on this should go toward transit funding instead.

But, when the (sad) alternative is that person keeps driving without insurance and the unfortunate victims are left with the full bill, I think the absurd insurance may be better than not?

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#318

Post by dzhiurgis »

davidgay wrote: post #254
Veserv wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven. So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.

80% of the data (for fatalities per km) in that table is missing

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#319

Post by abeppu »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #301
danieldevries wrote: post #17

Of course. This seems so obvious. More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue. No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system. Fyi. Long robotaxis.

But they still cannot drive cars. All this stuff can do is react very slowly, maybe, if it detects it, to a change in the environment. Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers. If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.

> Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.

You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.

Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#320

Post by snackbroken »

EA-3167 wrote: post #248
sensanaty wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famously warm and dry countries of Norway[1] and Finland[2]! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCedclz03uI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

The famously small conurbations and the reality that Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year . They have cars and public transit for the rest. I'd add that these discussions tend to handwave the reality of safety when you're on an open platform movie at high speeds, the reality that not all people are physically able, and a lot of others issues that the vocal "cars are the devil" folks don't engag…

> Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year.

They very much bike all year round, even in the north where it regularly gets to -20C(-4F) in winter. Biking in snowy sub-freezing weather is really not a big deal as long as you maintain the bike paths as well as the streets.

Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used. The only time I can recall where people I knew who usually commuted by bike didn't do so was during an unusually heavy snowstorm. They instead had to walk about half a kilometer to/from where the city had managed to plow the streets and take a taxi. That was decades ago.

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