Those damn things are not ready to be used on public roads. Allowing them is one of the more prominent examples of corruption that we’ve seen recently.
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Statistically they're still less prone to accidents than human drivers.
I never quite undestood why so many people seem to be against autonomous vehicles. Especially on Lemmy. It's unreasonable to demand perfection before any of these is used on the public roads. In my view the bar to reach is human level driving and after that it seems quite obvious that from safety's point of view it's the better choice.
This is just such a bad take, and it's so disappointing to see it parroted all over the web. So many things are just completely inaccurate about these "statistics", and it's probably why it "seems" so many are against autonomous vehicles.
- These are self-reported statistics coming from the very company(s) that have extremely vested interests in making themselves look good.
- These statistics are for vehicles that are currently being used in an extremely small (and geo-fenced) location(s) picked for their ability to be the easiest to navigate while being able to say "hey we totally work in a big city with lots of people".
- These cars don't even go onto highways or areas where accidents are more likely.
- These cars drive so defensively they literally shut down so as to avoid causing any accidents (hey, who cares if we block traffic and cause jams because we get to juice our numbers).
- They always use total human driven miles which are a complete oranges to apples comparison: Their miles aren't being driven
- In bad weather
- On dangerous, windy, old, unpaved, or otherwise poor road conditions
- In rural areas where there are deer/etc that wander into the road and cause accidents
- They also don't adjust or take any median numbers as I'm not interested in them driving better than the "average" driver when that includes DUIs, crashes caused by neglect or improper maintenance, reckless drivers, elderly drivers, or the fast and furious types crashing their vehicle on some hill climb driving course.
- And that's all just off the top of my head.
So no, I would absolutely not say they are "less prone to accidents than human drivers". And that's just the statistics, to say nothing about the legality that will come up. Especially given just how adverse companies seem to be to admit fault for anything.
These cars don't even go onto highways or areas where accidents are more likely.
Accidents are less likely on highways. Most accidents occur in urban settings. Most deadly accidents occur outside of cities, off-highway.
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Avoiding dangerous scenarios is the definition of driving safely.
This technology is still an area under active development and nobody (not even Elon!) is claiming this stuff is ready to replace a human in every possible scenario. Are you actually suggesting they should be testing the cars in scenarios that they know wouldn't be safe with the current technology? Why the fuck would they do that?
So no, I would absolutely not say they are “less prone to accidents than human drivers”.
OK... if you won't accept the company's reported data - who's data will you accept? Do you have a more reliable source that contradicts what the companies themselves have published?
to say nothing about the legality that will come up
No that's a non issue. When a human driver runs over a pedestrian/etc and causes a serious injury, if it's a civilised country and a sensible driver, then an insurance company will pay the bill. This happens about a million times a week worldwide and insurance is a well established system that people are, for the most part, happy with.
Autonomous vehicles are also covered by insurance. In fact it's another area where they're better than humans - because humans frequently fail to pay their insurance bill or even deliberately drive after they have been ordered by a judge not to drive (which obviously voids their insurance policy).
There have been debates over who will pay the insurance premium, but that seems pretty silly to me. Obviously the human who ordered the car to drive them somewhere will have to pay for all costs involved in the drive. And part of that will be insurance.
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I never quite undestood why so many people seem to be against autonomous vehicles.
People aren't against autonomous vehicles, but against them getting let lose on public roads with zero checks or transparency. We basically learn what they are and aren't capable of one crash at a time, when all of that should have been figured out years ago in the lab.
The fact that they can put a safety driver in them to absorb any blame is another scandal.
Statistically they’re still less prone to accidents than human drivers.
That's only due to them not driving in the same condition as humans. Let them drive in fog and suddenly they can't even see clearly visible emergency vehicles.
None of this would be a problem if those companies would be transparent about what those vehicles are capable of and how they react in unusual situations. All of which they should have tested a million times over in simulation already.
With Tesla the complaint is that the statistics are almost all highway miles so it doesn't represent the most challenging conditions which is driving in the city. Cruise then exclusively drives in a city and yet this isn't good enough either. The AV-sceptics are really hard to please..
You'll always be able to find individual incidents where these systems fail. They're never going to be foolproof and the more of them that are out there the more news like this you're going to see. If we reported about human-caused crashes with the same enthusiasm that would be all the news you're hearing from then on and letting humans drive would seem like the most scandalous thing imaginable.
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Let them drive in fog and suddenly they can’t even see clearly visible emergency vehicles.
That article you linked isn't about self driving car. It's about Tesla "autopilot" which constantly checks if a human is actively holding onto the steering wheel and depends on the human checking the road ahead for hazards so they can take over instantly. If the human sees flashing lights they are supposed to do so.
The fully autonomous cars that don't need a human behind the wheel have much better sensors which can see through fog.
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You don’t understand why people on Lemmy, an alternative platform not controlled by corporations, might not want to get in a car literally controlled by a corporation?
I can easily see a future where your car locks you in and drives you to a police station if you do something “bad”.
As to their safety, I don’t think there are enough AVs to really judge this yet; of course Cruise’s website will claim Cruise AVs cause less accidents.
I can imagine in the future there will be grid locks in front of the police station with AV cars full of black people when the cops send out an ABP with the description of a black suspect.
We’ve seen plenty of racist AI programs in the past because the programmers, intentionally or not, added their own bias into the training data.
Any dataset sourced from human activity (eg internet text as in Chat GPT) will always contain the current societal bias.
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You're putting words to my mouth. I wasn't talking about people on Lemmy not wanting to get into one of these vehicles.
The people here don't seem to want anyone getting into these vehicles. Many here are advocating for all-out ban on self-driving cars and demand that they're polished to near perfection on closed roads before being allowed for public use even when the little statistics we already have mostly seem to indicate these are at worst as good as human drivers.
If it's about Teslas the complain often is the lack of LiDAR and radars and when it's about Cruise which has both it's then apparently about corruption. In both cases the reaction tends to be mostly emotional and that's why every time one provides statistics to back up the claims about safety it just gets called marketing bullshit.
Honestly? I don’t want anyone to use AVs because I fear they will become popular enough that eventually I’ll be required to use one.
I honestly haven’t done enough research on AV safety to feel comfortable claiming anything concrete about it. I personally don’t feel comfortable with it yet since the technology is very new and I essentially need to trust it with my life. Maybe in a few years I’ll be more convinced.
I hear you. I love driving and I have zero interest in buying a self-driving vehicle. However I can still stand outside my own preferences and look at it objectively enough to see that it's just a matter of time untill AI gets so good at it that it could be considered irresponsible to let a human drive. I don't like it but that's progress.
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Fine by me, as long as the companies making the cars take all responsibility for accidents. Which, you know, the human drivers do.
But the car companies want to sell you their shitty autonomous driving software and make you be responsible.
If they don't trust it enough, why should I?
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I saw a video years ago discussing this topic.
How good is “good enough” for self-driving cars?
The bar is much higher than it is for human drivers because we downplay our own shortcomings and think that we have less risk than the average driver.
Humans can be good drivers, sure. But we have serious attention deficits. This means it doesn’t take a big distraction before we blow a red light or fail to observe a pedestrian.
Hell, lot of humans fail to observe and yield to emergency vehicles as well.
But none of that is newsworthy, but an autonomous vehicle failing to yield is.
My personal opinion is that the Cruise vehicles are as ready for operational use as Teslas FSD, ie. should not be allowed.
Obviously corporations will push to be allowed so they can start making money, but this is probably also the biggest threat to a self-driving future.
Regulated so strongly that humans end up being the ones in the driver seat for another few decades - with the cost in human lives which that involves.
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I'm not gonna join in the discussion, but if you cite numbers, please don't link to the advertising website of the company itself. They have a strong interest in cherry picking the data to make positive claims.
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They can't come quick enough for me. I can go to work after a night out without fear I might still be over the limit. I won't have to drive my wife everywhere. Old people will not be prisoners in their own homes. No more nobheads driving about with exhausts that sound like a shoot out with the cops. No more aresholes speeding about and cutting you up. No more hit and runs. Traffic accident numbers falling through the floor. In fact it could even get to a point where the only accidents are the fault of pedestrians/cyclists not looking where they are going.
All of these are solved by better public transport/safe bike routes and more walkable city designs. All of which is we can do now, not rely on some new shiny tech so that we can keep car companies profits up.
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Are you talking about AVs or about humandrivers, which drive drunk, been overtired, after a bad night, emotionally, texting during driving etc?
drive drunk, texting while driving
those things are also illegal, mind you
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I believe from what I read is that some of these driverless car companies in the US are releasing their fleet, flooding the street 24/7. Some of them will take up parking places, cause traffic jam, or just stall in the middle of the road.
Maybe it's different in the Europe, where there's stricter regulation, since from the comments here, many who are okay with driverless car are mostly from European countries. Unless if you own stock in those companies, then there's incentive caused bias.
Just like how drugs need to go on multiple clinical trials before going on the mass market, I believe that if you want driverless vehicles, a lot of testing is needed.
But this is not testing / gathering data phase, Cruise has 300 cars at night, 100 during the day in SF, while Waymo has around 250 cars. Again, this is not testing phase, there's no driver to safeguard in case things go wrong, these are actual driverless taxi that charges people.
The main rationale of these companies is not to bring a safer environment with driverless cars, the main rationale is how to get rid of gig workers that causes problems to Uber or Lyft, problems such as demanding living wage, proper employment status, unions, etc.
If you want to look at a better approach, maybe look at how Singapore is doing it
- it's operated by SMRT and SBS bus, which are regulated and owned by government
- it's self driving bus
- "drivers will remain essential to the operation of autonomous vehicles even when these do take off, although their job scope will change"
So if you wanna support, maybe don't support what Cruise is doing, but more of what Singapore is doing
- it's still highly regulated
- it's a bus, it's a public transportation, so it still helps in tackling climate issues.
- it's not being used to fire workers,
- there's still failsafe, the drivers are standby, in case the bus goes haywire
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Maybe don't allow autonomous cars on public streets then? The tech is nowhere near ready for prime time.
We should ban police cars too - because allegedly an empty police car was also blocking the ambulance.
The AV spokesperson said they reviewed the footage and found there was room to pass their vehicle safely and another ambulance and other cars did so.
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When these things were originally being tested, at least the Waymo ones I'm familiar with, there was a driver who could manually override in case of issues. Honestly, if these things still have issues with emergency situations (and other unexpected situations), they absolutely still need a driver with the ability to manually override the car. That way, they can still test the self-driving function while being able to actually maneuver the car out of the way of things like this.
Don't worry, they'll continue to fail upwards.
These people never should’ve been allowed to beta test with our lives when no one approved it
I'd really like to see the stats on how many human driver issues they had during the same time span
The wonderful thing about human drivers is that they generally listen to instructions from first responders and are pretty good at realizing when they need to get out of the way. Even when they do not speak English, they are typically responsive to gestures.
Entirely unsurprisingly, existing resources are putting together plans on how to deal with this problem and what they'd like to see in terms of changes from AV operators and the companies which operate them.
I disagree that human drivers in general act more responsible than AV. And for exactly this use case as well, I read too many stories about emergency cars stuck in traffic causing death of someone.
The only country where emergency corridor works well is Germany, afaik.
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It's not really an apple-to-apples comparison. These are taxis, so they should only be compared to professional taxi drivers. Then, unless you're comparing per ride statistics, you have to factor in the fact that drivers typically park in between customers while AVs roam leading to additional traffic and chances for "glitches".
This is before you begin to consider whether AV taxis are a societal benefit in one of the least car-centric places in the country.
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I don't get it, why isn't there an option for a Cruise employee or a first responder to just take control of the thing when it gets stuck?
Drive to the right edge of the road and stop until the emergency vehicle(s) have passed
That is a direct quote from the California DMV and from the sounds of it that's exactly what the autonomous car did.
The right answer, in my opinion, is to allow the first responders to take control of the car. This wasn't just a lone ambulance that happened upon a stationary car. It was a major crash (where a human driven car ran over a pedestrian) with a road that was blocked by emergency vehicles. A whole bunch of cars, not just autonomous ones, were stopped in the middle of the road waiting for the emergency to be over so they could continue on their way. Not sure why only this one car is getting all the blame.
I just actually bothered to read the article, and it sounds like it was an empty police car blocking the way between two Cruise cars that had pulled over leaving a space, and there in fact was a way to manually move them but it took critical time.
These cars get stuck all the time and are a major local controversy, so I'm guessing this was the click-baitiest headline they could go with. "Police officer carelessly gets in the way of paramedics" just doesn't have the same ring.
Not sure why only this one car is getting all the blame.
Because it generates clicks.
Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or** locate an officer who could move the police car**.
So, in conjunction with a cop car, the road was blocked. I'd love to see an actual picture or diagram of the blockage.
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Obviously it is a sad story for the deceased and it's family but according to the cruise spoke person there was supposed to be enough space so the emergency car could pass. And later the article mentioned there were 55 more situations where these cars caused problems. Well there are car accidents everywhere in the word every day because of careless drivers so this is kinda common. So I really don't think banning these cars should be an answer, but to keep improving them.
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