I can’t believe anyone would question that autonomous cars are safer than human drivers. In my opinion, several (tens of?) thousand people die a year because we don’t have the legal framework to handle autonomous cars. If self driving cars killed 1,000 folks a year that would be unacceptable (and admittedly, still sad), but it would mean 39,000 fewer people dead than the status quo. America is a weird place sometimes.
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And how many regular cars are on the road vs. autonomous cars? There are far fewer autonomous cars right now, meaning of course there are more fatalities caused by human drivers. I think this is showing that autonomous cars might not be the panacea that google, uber, etc, are promoting.
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Measured by incidents (let alone fatalities) per miles driven, robot cars outperform meatbags by a pretty wide margin. I will cop to that being my impression rather than as the result of rigorous research, so I’m open to being wrong. Wide deployment of autonomous vehicles may not be a panacea, but it’s hard for me to imagine it not being a drastic improvement.
But zooming out from the specifics of Herzberg’s crash, the more fundamental point is this: conventional car crashes killed 37,461 in the United States in 2016, which works out to 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber’s cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States.
Based on a cursory search, nobody in the field has driven more than 2 to 4 million miles over the entire operating lifespan of their programs. I would be surprised if the figures from every company added up to much more than 10 million total collective miles. Uber’s single fatality has already dug autonomous vehicles as a whole into a huge statistical pit that will take the entire industry years of flawless performance to climb back out of.
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Welp! It looks like my feelings were not congruent with reality! I admit it will cause me to reconsider my opinions. I’m still buying into the idea that computers are better suited to the task of driving than people, but the tech is not as far along as I had thought it was. Thanks for the reply.
You’re ignoring the fact that there are far fewer autonomous vehicles working in the real world compared to the number of manned vehicles (millions, just in the US alone). As @alahmnat noted, these are programs that have only been around for a short while and for a few years.
For profit corporations have a long history of hiding or fudging results of tests - I mean it’s barely been a couple of years since we found out how VW and other German automakers were willfully deceiving the public. Do you honestly trust Google, Uber or whoever to be honest with you? Because they’ll lie to the public if it nets them a few more billion dollars.
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I love the logic that says machines are capable of responsibility.
And corporations are people, right???
Responsible in that computer driven cars don’t have road rage. They don’t tail gate. They let others in who need to change lanes (if they are talking to each other). Basically they aren’t assholes like real people (and sure, corporations) can be.
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