Self-Driving Cars Have a Problem: Safer Human-Driven Ones

https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-cars-have-a-problem-safer-human-driven-ones-11560571203?mod=rsswn

by Bostonian • 7 years ago

101 176 7 years ago

vikramkr• 7 years ago

If fully self driving is ever going to be fully safer than humans, which I think is almost a given, then this is not a problem as much as it is a great new way to monetize that tech en route to full self driving cars. If it isnt going to be better than self driving tech + a human at the wheel, then oops.

simion314• 7 years ago

The self driving tech would still be used for driver assist functions, if today would be possible to replace all the cars in the world with new models that include all the safety features and a system to detect a drunk or sleepy driver I think we would get better statistics then Tesla or Google AI(for the same driving conditions)

pjc506• 7 years ago

A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately. It's just that a mostly self-driving system erodes human attentiveness.

And we're not going to get to a system that's so much safer as to render human attention irrelevant without a much more solid and theoretically sound approach to safety engineering.

dsego2• 7 years ago

As assisting systems mature, we will get humans paying less and less attention to driving. Just last night I was watching air crash investigations and there were a series of accidents on a 777 where the pilots where "expecting" the airplane do something because usually the automated system picks up the slack, well except in that particular circumstance when the accident occurred. And these are trained pilots and they understand these systems fairly well (at least when they are told about them). I don't think the general population will ever be trained or have a deep understanding of their car's assistance modes, they will expect it to work. Overall, cars will probably be safer, but we are probably going to witness freak accidents as a combination of driver inexperience and software bugs.

nradov2• 7 years ago

You're probably thinking of a different airplane? The Boeing 777 is pretty much the safest airliner and hasn't had any "series of accidents".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#Accidents_and_incid...

melling3• 7 years ago

No, it isn’t.

Perhaps in the short-term, but if you listen to Elon Musk compare it to like having elevator operators, it makes sense that computers will eventually do a much better job and humans will only introduce problems.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/elon-musk-on-teslas-autopilot-...

close04• 7 years ago

Depends what you consider short term. Do you expect autonomous cars to get to human level in all conditions in the next 5 years? 10? 25?

Most likely computers will become far better than humans at some point. But it may be far enough in the future that it doesn’t really contradict the point made above. Contrary to popular belief, “640K should be enough” isn’t the kind of statement meant to cover all eternity.

lm284692• 7 years ago

if you listen to Elon Musk

If you listen to Elon Musk we have fully autonomous cars every 2 years since 2015 and we'll have Mars cities in 2050.

Recurecur12• 7 years ago

"A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately."

No. Stating something as a fact without analyzing it in the slightest is bad.

Example:

(1) Only a computer is "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role. The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second. Within 2/100 of a second of a qualifying event, the vehicle will be in full antilock brake mode.

(2) A human and a computer are "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role (this is a little silly in that the human is already the primary brake operator...). The computer still has 1/100 s reaction time, but the human's reaction time is 25/100 s. What exactly is the human bringing to the table? It is true that the human may detect an actual threat the computer doesn't...however that slow reaction time means it likely won't make a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, the human may "detect" a false alarm, and emergency brake by mistake. That activity often leads to wrecks!

I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer. Further, all of these "human in the loop" systems suffer from a fatal flaw - the inability of people to pay attention unless it's absolutely crucial.

The way people use Tesla Autopilot shows that full autonomy is necessary, and will in fact be safer than any "assisted" system.

FabHK• 7 years ago

Presumably, GP means as a whole, confronted with the entire array of challenges, not for a single simple task at which the computer happens to be unambiguously better.

tomatocracy• 7 years ago

The human can often predict that some type of avoidance will be needed several seconds earlier in a way that computers can't at the moment and thus avert the need for emergency braking entirely.

The two can, and should, be complementary.

vageli• 7 years ago

"A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately."
No. Stating something as a fact without analyzing it in the slightest is bad.
Example:
(1) Only a computer is "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role. The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second. Within 2/100 of a second of a qualifying event, the vehicle will be in full antilock brake mode.
(2) A human and a computer are "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role (this is a little silly in that the human is already the primary brake operator...). The computer still has 1/100 s reaction time, but the human's reaction time is 25/100 s. What exactly is the human bringing to the table? It is true that the human may detect an actual threat the computer doesn't...however that slow reaction time means it likely won't make a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, the human may "detect" a false alarm, and emergency brake by mistake. That activity often leads to wrecks!
I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer. Further, all of these "human in the loop" systems suffer from a fatal flaw - the inability of people to pay attention unless it's absolutely crucial.
The way people use Tesla Autopilot shows that full autonomy is necessary, and will in fact be safer than any "assisted" system.

I think your example is uncharitable because you allow for a human to react to a false alarm in the second but don't account for a computer to react similarly in the first. Personally speaking, I have seen very few occasions of people exercising extreme braking wrongly. I feel computers would be less apt at discerning from a false positive than a human operator with even a little experience behind the wheel.

Given that autonomous cars can be misled by painting roadways certain ways [0], it's clear to me that the number of unknown unknowns that must be handled by a car are large in number, and I have less faith in the skillful handling of those events by a computer than a human.

[0] https://nerdist.com/article/trap-a-self-driving-car/

radcon• 7 years ago

I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer

You're choosing to ignore the fact that computers still make mistakes.

My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident.

This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives.

pjc506• 7 years ago

The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second.

.. to objects that it can identify as a hazard. We've already seen incidents where it fails to spot hazards such as cyclists and crash barriers, due to limitations such as having to filter out stationary objects from radar returns.

zaroth2• 7 years ago

I find, for example, in heavy stop and go traffic my car drives safer on AutoPilot than I do manually. I can get tense or fed up with stupid drivers around me causing me to drive less than ideally, while the AutoPilot just smoothly moves along, perfectly centered in the lane, never caring if the car ahead stays stopped too long, never getting flustered from being cut off.

Switching on the AutoPilot also makes me suddenly care a lot less about optimizing for that 1/10th of a second here and there. When the car’s driving, I get there when I get there. I can just relax and the traffic matters that much less.

aidenn0• 7 years ago

I do not know how safe I am in heavy stop-and-go because I completely zone out. Traffic is pretty light where I live now, but in other areas, I've had the subjective sense of falling asleep, only to "wake up" several miles down the road an hour later. That's really scary.

m4634• 7 years ago

never getting flustered from being cut off.

But sometimes it would be nice to have a 0 below the 1-7 following distance setting. (sort of like going to 11)

pishpash2• 7 years ago

Not even true in theory. A human and a computer can disagree and be less safe.

lowlevel• 7 years ago

Exactly why I turn off all assist systems in our vw. I can't tell you how many times it misread the lines and nudged my steering into oncoming traffic. Eventually everyone will realize this stuff is just a bad idea.

m4634• 7 years ago

I think it would be nice to have a heads-up display (or other status system) that shows what the AI is seeing. That way it would actually be "assist".

seqastian• 7 years ago

human vs human road interaction is mostly based on trust, and it usually works out because most humans are sane and healthy while driving.

the same thing can not work with machines cause they are bad at detecting when humans are not all right and humans are bad at trusting machines.

as soon as we just accept that the save way to operate in close proximity of others, is to do it at way slower speeds. we will have very save roads with humans and robots behind the wheel.

ocdtrekkie3• 7 years ago

Speed is not the issue, difference in speed is the issue. Road safety actually improves when you raise the speed limit to the speed most drivers are actually driving.

AdamHede• 7 years ago

This is only true in a very theoretical sense. Going 180 km/h will 9/10 be more dangerous than going 120 km/h. Reaktion time, brake time, requirements to equipment, everything is tougher at higher speeds.

jchanimal• 7 years ago

Road safety on the highway is a rhetorical trap. Who cares how insane it is there? Just please drive human speed when you are on surface streets.

_nosaj• 7 years ago

This makes a lot of sense intuitively as vehicles moving at the same speed will mean fewer variables for a human driver to worry about. Although it must have its limits.

Do you remember where you saw the data on this?

your-nanny2• 7 years ago

I'm sorry, but no. Yes, important all going same speed, but all else equal slower = safer. more time to react to unexpected events. better traction to road. less energy in a crash.

bryanlarsen• 7 years ago

"Road safety actually improves when you raise the speed limit to the speed most drivers are actually driving."

Number of accidents drop, but the number of fatalities increase when you raise the speed limit because the accidents that do happen have so much more energy in them (e=mv^2). So "safety" only improves if you have a bad definition of safety.

seibelj• 7 years ago

The industry’s PR team starting to place stories about why self driving cars will take longer than they promised their investors. Tens of billions of dollars invested and it’s still decades away. I guess we blame other drivers now(?)

TomMarius• 7 years ago

I thought we blamed human drivers all the time up until now? It's human drivers that make the chaos on the road, if everything was driven by a computer the issue would be much easier.

Recurecur12• 7 years ago

"Tens of billions of dollars invested and it’s still decades away."

"Decades away"? LOL

Fully autonomous vehicles are already on the road in large numbers. See Waymo in AZ and Voyage in Florida...

The economic and safety incentives are huge. I predict by 2030 over half of new vehicles sold will have L5 autonomy.

glogla• 7 years ago

Also see Uber where they killed a woman, faked evidence (with purposefully making the video look darker) and got away with it.

brandmeyer• 7 years ago

I predict that an autonomous car will never be sold as a personally-owned vehicle. The entire point of the industry is to get a continuous revenue stream through taxi services.

IgorPartola9• 7 years ago

Here is my proposal for self driving cars: forget trying to make them drive on local roads at first. Add transponders to all interstate tarmac that can be used to detect location and lane position. Then use a much cheaper LIDAR just to map where the other cars are. Boom: you have made long haul driving autonomous. You can then slowly expand this to smaller roads. But why try to recreate human drivers when machines can use much better sensors than us, but can process visual info much slower, and gather it with worse fidelity?

Eire_Banshee• 7 years ago

$$$. If you put the cost on taxpayers it will never be approved. Needs to be privately funded.

throwaway743• 7 years ago

Would rather not have a privately nor publicly funded and owned physical panopticon. Too much room for control and abuse.

IgorPartola9• 7 years ago

Yes, let's have the Ford highway that only Ford vehicle can drive on because the transponders are proprietary. We don't have privately painted lane markings, why would we have privately installed radio lane markings?

agildehaus4• 7 years ago

Because yours is a ludicrous proposal. It'd be well more expensive to modify infrastructure than to build a computerized driver. Not only is the modification expensive, you have to convince the local authority to foot the bill, do it right, maintain it, etc. Never going to happen.

Your proposal also lacks reliability. What if one of these "transponders" fails? We can build redundancy into a self-driving car quite easily (a second computer, never relying on just one sensor). Providing redundancy to road infrastructure planet-wide is ... a much larger problem.

devoply• 7 years ago

Roads are extremely expensive, adding sensors to new roads should actually be a rounding error.

pishpash2• 7 years ago

Roads are modified and maintained all the freaking time, new lanes, new lights, new cameras, new surfaces, etc. This is in the end the cheapest and most realistic way to automated transport.

briatx2• 7 years ago

You could easily convert HOV lanes into Automated Driving lanes. And if we have the ability to fund HOV lanes, we could also fund Automated Driving lanes.

Self driving cars are already dependent on standard infrastructure markings such as lane lines, and whenever those markings are confusing or faded it has lead to fatal crashes, such as the fatal Tesla crash on 401.

I predict self driving will not fully succeed until we build infrastructure to support it into the roads.

myself248• 7 years ago

We could've had self-highway-driving cars in the 60's if we wanted to tear up the roads and install guide cables under every lane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars#1...

Someone• 7 years ago

”Providing redundancy to road infrastructure planet-wide is ”

IgorPartola doesn’t talk about “planet-wide.

”Not only is the modification expensive, you have to convince the local authority to foot the bill, do it right, maintain it, etc. Never going to happen.”

Not in the USA, where government solutions are “socialism”, and voters rather pay for individualized solutions (example: not allocating money to maintain roads, but letting individuals bear the cost of repairs caused by potholes (https://www.wired.com/2015/07/heres-much-citys-crappy-roads-...)

Other countries may act differently.

”What if one of these "transponders" fails?”

You use passive transponders that rarely fail, and put them at every x meter, where cars work fine if they’re at every 2x or 5x meters, and maintain your roads.

I don’t see why that would have to be more expensive than the existing practice of adding, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_eye_(road) and various lane markers to roads (cat’s eyes probably could be sufficient for relatively good lane keeping)

Even if it is, it may still be a net win if it means lanes can be made less wide, or distances between cars can go down, or even if it ‘just’ means fewer people getting killed and maimed in road accidents.

pjc506• 7 years ago

This goes out the window as soon as someone places a single traffic cone on the roadway. Lanes are not a fixed property of the road.

IgorPartola9• 7 years ago

That means they would need to use new cones with transponders. Yes, it's more expensive, but also way more reliable.

stevenwoo2• 7 years ago

This was last year, but I live off of San Antonio Road and the one day that the Los Altos municipal maintenance staff placed the cones on the median instead of in the lane (I think in prep for the workers to trim the plants in the median), a Waymo self driving car in front of me stopped immediately upon encountering the coned region - there were no cars in front of it or pedestrians or workers within sight and we were going probably 35mph. I'm sure they changed the programming/data for that situation but there are several erosion drop offs on highway one along the coast that are coned off in unique ways, and everyone in a car is going by at 55-75 mph.

mirceal4• 7 years ago

i believe (and someone correct me if wrong) that driving on the interstate (and self driving cars/trucks) is a somewhat [way] easier problem than driving on any road. you’re not going to get a lot of value from what you’re proposing, but it’s going to be super expensive.

IgorPartola9• 7 years ago

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, not so much. Sure, we may see prototypes of self-driving cars going on the interstate in California on sunny days. But I have yet to see a self-driving car make it through a blizzard in Montana. You can't see lane markings with a LIDAR if you can't see the road covered in an inch of hard packed snow. But radio signals of correct frequencies have no problem with that.

Think about it this way: the roads themselves are very expensive. But they make each car much cheaper. Most cars don't have to be equipped to drive over rocks and roots (we have tarmac), or lakes/ponds/rivers (we have bridges). We already spend a ton of taxpayer money to make it so that a 15 inch wheel with a mostly smooth tire and 5" of suspension travel is all a car needs. Why not install transceivers to make cars not require to have a super complicated LIDAR system?

elviejo79• 7 years ago

Your proposal is exactly how self-driving cars were created:

"Back in 1995 the goals for self-driving cars were more modest than they are today. They weren’t called autonomous, but self-driving. And there was no plan to have cars drive themselves on city streets, just on freeways and highways — on the Interstate. The plan was to bury cables in the pavement over which all the cars would drive and communicate with each other and with the road, itself. The goal was to fill the road with cars driving at the speed limit, spaced precisely one meter apart" [0]

[0] https://www.cringely.com/2016/08/25/self-driving-car-old-eno...

05• 7 years ago

Given a LiDAR of a sufficient range, freeway driving is a solved problem. Google did it in 2013.

IgorPartola9• 7 years ago

And yet I don't see a single self driving car for sale.

Given sufficient energy we can create anything because E = mc^2, but we have yet to actually produce enough energy to create whatever matter we want.

thebruce87m• 7 years ago

Ice and snow are real conditions outside of the Bay Area.

Edit: Downvoters, please explain yourselves. If you have evidence that ice and snow have been solved for level 5 I’d love to see it.

kybernetikos• 7 years ago

Maybe even separate long distance roads that only autonomous cars are allowed on.

slfnflctd• 7 years ago

I've been saying this for a couple years now. Naysayers don't fully understand the problem. There is no safe way to do self driving on our current roads in all climates without at least some infrastructure enhancements. Pretty much any of those enhancements you can imagine are orders of magnitude cheaper than building dedicated roads, which is the only other sufficiently safe option. The moment we start trying to take the driver out of the equation for real en masse, this will become obvious to everyone.

693471• 7 years ago

LIDAR is a dead end

m4634• 7 years ago

I think Elon Musk is basically correct when he made that statement. It probably wouldn't change the way current cars drive.

He was also right because, I believe the LIDAR units on say a waymo car probably cost more than an entire tesla vehicle.

But I couldn't help thinking if one of these LIDAR startups comes out with an "automotive pricing cheap" chip, it would be a great sensor fusion thing to add.

m4634• 7 years ago

That is the "boil the ocean" solution to the problem.

Basically, "update all roads on the planet".

ChicagoBoy112• 7 years ago

As a private pilot it astounds me how the self-driving car industry has seemingly taken every lesson we've learned from automation in aviation and chucked it out the window in these systems.

There's a "trust but verify" element of airplane automation that is ingrained in you as a pilot. The ML aspect of self-driving cars generally make it a lot less easy to reason about and predict. That's problem 1. Problem 2 is then speed; Even in the airline world, there are published minimums at which pilots need to be absolute certain that the AP is doing the right thing before they commit to land, even in cases where the autopilot is responsible for the entire landing (Autoland is a capability that a lot of airliners have had for many decades).

What we're talking about here is several seconds heads-up with visual AND instrument confirmation, that the computers are doing what they're supposed to before we allow the plane to land. Not only that, but we bend over backwards ensuring that there is all kinds of redundancy and procedures in place to ensure the accuracy of the system: Multiple instruments using different kinds of technologies confirming one another, greater separation between aircraft to guarantee ILS radio beacon accuracy, etc. Conversely, in the self-driving world, we're having these ML algorithms make split-second decisions with no real way of informing the driver what it is basing it on in an environment that is far less predictable and constantly-changing with someone who is not a professional behind the wheel.

ozim• 7 years ago

Self driving car approach has to be different because whole idea is different than airplane automation. You want self driving car to be autonomus without need to rely on trained and disciplined human element. End goal is totally different and you cannot make progress to have fully autonomous car if you would come from: "yeah human will be in control all the time, not being stupid or drunk".

nradov2• 7 years ago

It's by no means clear that the end goal and approach should be different. Personally I think that aiming toward level 4-5 autonomous vehicles right now is misguided and unlikely to succeed (outside of a few controlled access roads in limited areas).

A better approach would be to require the human driver to actively control the vehicle at all times, but have the computer step in to brake or steer when it detects a high probability of a dangerous situation. Like how auto GCAS works on modern aircraft.

tlb• 7 years ago

I'm not sure what you're proposing instead. If you built self-driving cars that required pilot-level skills and training to operate them, who would use them?

wil421• 7 years ago

The main point He is trying to make is the AP has several redundant systems and 2-3 humans double checking the instruments and AP.

With self driving cars we use some fancy ML/AI where we don’t exactly know why the machine chose to do what it did.

ChicagoBoy112• 7 years ago

I don't have a great solution. But to me the contrast in infrastructure/training/redundancy in that system versus what we see in cars is pretty astounding. My only point is that if you applied the same kind of safety mindset that exists for this stuff in aviation, you'd think you were MUCH FURTHER away from full self-driving cars than what all of the marketing and hoopla is like. Just trying to say that the gulf between where we're at with safety in aviation versus cars seems pretty large to me, and larger than most people would care to admit.

kazinator2• 7 years ago

Airplanes don't have to react to a three-year-old on a tricycle suddenly emerging from between parked cars.

JamesBarney3• 7 years ago

Autonomous car's don't have to be nearly as safe as airplanes because existing cars are orders of magnitude less safe than airplanes.

jandrese• 7 years ago

Isn't that one of the problems autonomous cars are trying to solve?

LoSboccacc• 7 years ago

citation needed. notice how incident per mile statistic where quickly submerged by Tesla around their fourth autopilot death. also note how autopilot are currently d enabled in the less risky part of the journey. also notice how autopilot stat in most articles are compared toward national averages, which include older car with less safety features and bikes.

perl4ever4• 7 years ago

This is an oft-expressed sentiment that seems totally and obviously wrong to me. If autonomous vehicles are safer than the average texting drunk, but much more dangerous than, say, a bus driven by a sober professional, what is the point? We could just invest in mass transit and incentivize people to use it. I mean, regardless of the drawbacks, if safety is the primary goal...

nostrademons• 7 years ago

It's different because the market for (and culture of) pilots is dramatically different from the market for drivers.

I have never met a pilot that didn't religiously follow their checklists. If there is ever any doubt as to whether something is safe, there is no doubt: it is not. Weight limits, weather reports, etc. all are carefully attended to.

Meanwhile, 30% of adults sitting in the back seat of a car forget to buckle their seatbelts. About 5% admitted to driving drunk within the last month. I see people on their cell phones all their time. I've ridden with a young woman who was driving with her knees while doing her hair in the rearview mirror (yes, I was freaked out, and no, I never rode with her again).

Pilots are professionals, and they act professionally, and they respect the possibility of death every time they get into their vehicle. Drivers are not. There's a long history of every safety innovation in cars actually making accident rates go up, because drivers start taking them for granted and then behaving in ways that compensate for the increased safety and maintain the same level of subjective risk (like driving faster, driving more, or becoming more distracted). The only way to break that loop is to take the human out of driver's seat entirely.

gus_massa2• 7 years ago

I have never met a pilot that didn't religiously follow their checklists.

Someone forgot to follow the second page of the checklist of a 737 in Argentina in 1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPA_Flight_3142

holri• 7 years ago

Let a professional drive the system. Welcome to mass transportation. Massively more secure.

stcredzero2• 7 years ago

There's a "trust but verify" element of airplane automation that is ingrained in you as a pilot...

What we're talking about here is several seconds heads-up with visual AND instrument confirmation, that the computers are doing what they're supposed to before we allow the plane to land.

Let's say we never get to full autonomous driving on roads mixing autonomous cars and human drivers. In that case, is it ultimately going to be that different from the way we teach people to look both ways before they cross the street, and teach new drivers how to deal with highway on-ramps and intersections?

jhayward• 7 years ago

It's difficult to see what your main point is, but what I take from it is the idea that aircraft autopilots and self-driving cars are two completely separate problem domains, with very different requirements, resources, and operating regimes.

It would seem to be foolish to have a goal of having "no fatalities per 100 billion miles", or whatever the current spec level for airline travel is, as the minimum operating requirement for automobiles. Likewise requiring two expert-level operators at the controls, with re-certification every six months seems to be out of scope. So why should the AP try to be designed assuming those things are true?

hector_vasquez• 7 years ago

For many years, manually flown aircraft have required radically different safety practices from manually driven cars. I wonder why you think the addition of automation changes that.

rexgallorum22• 7 years ago

Just a few points:

1. Addressing (and reducing) major causes of road accidents and fatalities such as impaired and/or distracted driving (alcohol, drugs, sleep deprivation, inattentiveness, fiddling with phones, radios, touch screens, etc.) would make a tremendous difference, and automated driving systems and sensors could potentially intervene in such situations without necessarily being online all the time.

2. Inattentiveness and distraction caused by (over)dependence on automated systems (as in jets with autopilot) could become a major hazard. This is already a problem with road designs that minimise driver engagement by removing obstacles to traffic and designing roadways entirely for cars (compare European style traffic calming to US style widening of lanes and rounding of corners).

3. As mentioned above, infrastructure and urban planning practices are major issues, both in terms of maintenance and design. Automating passenger cars may improve safety in some respects, but perpetuating the dominance of individual motor vehicles (and the vast infrastructure outlay they require) as the dominant mode of transport is probably the wrong approach. Gradually transforming urban planning and design to promote mass transit, reduce commuting, and accommodate bicycle and pedestrian traffic would generally reduce the need to use cars in the first place. One difference between traffic death statistics in countries like Germany and the US is that virtually everybody has to drive long distances on a daily basis in much of the US, with few if any alternatives, and urban sprawl encourages lengthy detours to travel trivial distances between fully separated residential/commercial/industrial zones, whereas e.g. in urban Germany, there are many alternatives, and driving is not a necessity (compare death rates per capita vs. per km driven). In Germany and much of Europe, driving is and has always been a privilege, and one that requires a degree of skill to earn, whereas in the US driving is viewed more or less as a right, something everyone does and has to do on a daily basis, i.e. it's easy to get a license and you only lose it for serious infractions, and even then penalties for driving without a license (as many people do!) are comparatively minor.

What I am getting at is that the best way to tackle road safety and environmental problems is to gradually abandon the passenger car as the dominant mode of transportation. Hybrid automated/human-operated vehicles could be a great improvement in the short term, but using bikes would be better in the long term. Freight transport might be another matter though.

mannykannot• 7 years ago

This is an odd way of looking at it. Far from being a problem for self-driving cars, the development of ever-more capable assistance and warning technologies is the rational way to go about refining the technologies that will be needed for fully self-driving cars.

This situation is only a problem for those manufacturers who want to pass off partial autonomy as the real thing.

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

I basically agree with you, but after some head scratching, I think I follow their argument, which seems to be this:

1. Lack of higher reasoning is a disadvantage that self-driving cars won't escape any time soon.

2. But SDCs can more than make up for that by making fewer dumb mistakes, giving them a better overall safety.

3. However, if you use machines to take away the dumb mistakes from humans, you change that equation, and the overall stats could go the other direction.

In reality, I don't think it's that simple. When ABS was newer, they studied it (https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...) and found that ABS improved overall safety, but safety paradoxically got worse in slick conditions (rain, snow, ice). The effects of safety improvements aren't always what you'd expect, so theorizing doesn't tell you much.

dejaime• 7 years ago

Automatic emergency breaking and other "safer human-driven" cars is not making the human-driven aspect any safer, but rather putting the working and stable parts of autonomous vehicles as a tool for unsafe human-driven vehicles. That said, it will obviously fare better than fully autonomous vehicles, but it is still just a part of autonomous vehicles in general. In this sense, these cars are not "a problem self-driving cars have" as the title implies, they are actually a stepping stone for self-driving cars.

torpfactory• 7 years ago

I suggest everyone take a look at the most recent available NHTSA data to help create informed opinions on the topic of car safety with respect to fatal accident causes:

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

My personal takeaways:

1) The sum of speeding + alcohol is 55% of the total number of fatalities. Self driving cars won't get drunk (we hope) and speeding is something which could certainly be limited in software. Lots of reasons to believe self driving will make a significant impact here, whenever it finally arrives.

On the other hand, you don't really need self driving to prevent these. You could force all vehicles to have a breathalizer interlock before driving (assuming these devices could be made to be very accurate and not spoofable, I believe these are both technically feasible goals). Or just enforce the living daylights out of it - driving drunk, lose your license for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year. Speeding is a similar story. Why not put a GPS device in every car (I think this may already be the case) and geo-fence speed limits? Technically very feasible. Some people will claim you need to speed sometimes but I believe these arguments to be total bullshit. Ambulances may need to speed sometimes. Or again just enforce the living daylights out of it. Speeding over 5MPH above the speed limit, license gone for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year.

We probably won't do any of the non-self driving things I mentioned above because they are politically untenable in America. Death on the roads is such a normalized facet of modern life that most people don't really consider the alternative: limited loss of freedom with many fewer deaths and injuries.

2) The wearing of seat-belts seems to still be a big problem for some people. 44% of motor vehicle occupants who died were not wearing one. No self driving needed here. In fact, this problem is somewhat orthogonal to self-driving. You would still want to be restrained in a self driving car. It would be easy enough to create an occupant sensor and seat belt interlock to operate the car. The car already beeps at you if you're not wearing it. Why not take the beeping a step further.

3) Running into cyclists (both motorized and human-powered) is also a reasonably large problem. Self driving will almost certainly help here (uber's incident not withstanding) but there are non technological solutions to consider. What about increasing the liability for drivers who injure or kill cyclists? What about steep criminal penalties for hitting a cyclist?

4) There isn't even a category for "mechanical failure". Cars don't really crash due to problems with the car per-se. Or at least not a rates that matter compared to the others.

5) Rural driving seems pretty dangerous - 50% of fatalities but only 19% of the population lives there. I don't think they dig into the details here but I'd be interested to see the cause breakdown for rural users. Growing up in Wisconsin, driving home drunk from rural bars was basically ubiquitous. I always advise to stay off the roads around bar time if possible.

It is important to consider that our roads are unsafe mostly because of the system of policies we have set up governing them. We still aren't serious enough about drunk driving. The debate around safety and speeding is hardly even happening. Hitting and killing non-automobile road users is often just a traffic citation. The licensing system is a joke. In what other safety-critical certification system can you take one exam at age 16 and then renew your certification for the rest of your life without any kind of additional training or examination? There is a ton we _could_ be doing outside of self-driving technology to make the roads safer.

Personal preferences on the above discussion: FOR self driving cars, even ones that are only marginally safer than humans. FOR geo-fenced speed limits. FOR breathlizers in all vehicles. FOR steep penalties for drunk driving, speeding, and killing non-automobile road users. FOR much more stringent licensing requirements. Death on the roads ought not be a feature of modern life.

rexgallorum22• 7 years ago

A major problem with your idea about self-limiting vehicle speeds is that speed limits are usually safe driving speeds under ideal conditions only. Speed itself isn't really the problem, but rather poor judgement and unsafe driving habits (often including speeding).

Speed is also an interesting topic in that speed limits are often kept artificially low in order to generate revenue. Any automated system to force cars to respect limits would likely meet resistance from municipalities that are dependent on traffic fines for revenue.

High speeds are allowed on highways in Germany, but only in certain areas, and German drivers are extremely disciplined with regards to lane changing and the 'hierarchy' of the road. However, traffic deaths are lower than the US, even when adjusted to reflect deaths per km traveled. Driver discipline and skill undoubtedly play a role here, but infrastructure quality and maintenance (and urban planning!) is also a big issue. US roads are comparatively poorly designed and maintained, and outdated engineering and planning practices are still widespread (widening streets and removing barriers instead of using traffic calming--perhaps counter-intuitively, the former causes more serious accidents by encouraging speeding and disengaged driving).

I tend to think that at least in urban areas of the US, ditching zoning and onerous anti-alcohol laws (i.e. putting pubs within easy walking distance of where people live) would drastically cut down on drunk driving. Rural areas are of course different.

Just my two cents

machiaweliczny• 7 years ago

Nice stats. From my personal experience, most crashes/very dangerous situations I've seen were because of someone going over speed limit or doing hazardous stuff (eg. driving on red, drunk, opposite lane). One was old person not knowing driving rules. Others were attention problems usually from non drivers (cyclist, walking person).

At least in my country we have rules that going 2x speed limit is loss of driving license.

There's also interesting traffic light system on entrances to cities, that if someone goes over speed limit - light is turning red for a short while. This is very nice, as lights are more respected than speed limits.

Eric_WVGG• 7 years ago

Excellent list.

What I think gets overlooked in this conversation is, human drivers routinely break the law in "innocent" ways. If self-driving cars follow the rules in ways that human drivers fail to, the self-driving cars are already safer in numerous ways.

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

Rural driving is dangerous for a number of reasons, butd I doubt it has that much to do with greater alcohol consumption.

It is simple: highway speeds + opposing traffic. e.g., 55mph -> <- 55mph = bad accident

mcguire• 7 years ago

"ultra-detailed, centimeter-accurate maps of much of the U.S. highway system"

Is this a joke? The roads aren't centimeter-accurate from day to day.

happppy• 7 years ago

I DO NOT FEAR MACHINES!!!

YeGoblynQueenne• 7 years ago

> Initially, all fully self-driving vehicles will be Level 4—that is, they have to be in geographically constrained areas, and will only operate in good weather, as does Waymo’s fleet of self-driving vans that it is testing in Phoenix. Truly autonomous, aka Level 5, cars are still science fiction.

Nobody has actually created a level 4 system yet, not even a prototype, let alone one ready for production. So level 4, too, is still science fiction. The same goes for level 3, actually. It's science fiction. And so are claims like the following:

> Researchers at Cleveland State University estimate that only 10 to 30 percent of all vehicles will be fully self driving by 2030.

2030 is in ten years from now. In ten years from now, we'll reach "full self-driving"? Waymo was founded ten years ago and its cars are still in level 2 (allegedly, trying to "jump over" level 3 and go straight to level 4). How are we going to be suddendly, magickally transported from level 2 to level 5 in the next ten years, when we haven't budged from level 2 in the last ten?

Self-Driving Cars Have a Problem: Safer Human-Driven Ones

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