What do these cars (with no steering wheel) do, if involved in an accident?
How would the owner / police move the car to the side of the road?
2009, humans in US:
185 crashes per 100 million VMT
1.13 deaths per 100 million VMT
all weather, incl. intoxication, bad luck, etc.
current google car tech relies on brute forcing visual mapping, breaks down in snow.
self-driving cars are controlled by software, written by humans, riddled with bugs. see Nest on how awesome this works for physical stuff. the aircraft industry has the correct coding practices, NONE of which are being applied by the current research teams. multi-redundant systems in play, with even more training for the operator. competing with human drivers is really hard. a shit ton of signal processing, etc. going on. all this techy-BS is belittling the awesomeness of the human brain and central nervous system.
It's also important to take note where the driving is. In densely populated regions, you are more likely to have minor accidents such as fender benders than on the open road. However, the open road is more likely to get you killed if you are involved in an accident due to speed.
All this "techy-BS" is not belittling humans by creating self driving cars. I strongly believe the opposite is true, humans are amazing because we can build artificial intelligent systems to handle these kinds of tasks for us and let us focus on bigger and better problems than steering a car. Your same argument falls flat with other technologies. Why have a computer add numbers when we have a wonderful brain that can do the same? I argue that it is because we build systems to augment and work around our deficiencies. One of those deficiencies is our driving skill. Over 30,000 in the US alone die due to auto accidents. Self driving cars has the potential to eliminate most of these deaths. Ideally, we'll get to a point where a death on the road makes national news because of its rarity.
1. Autonomous google crashes have been entirely small rear end fender benders. It might be 10x or more safer when accounting for this. You must look at the speeds and types of crashes and account for this in the safety calculation.
2. For safety it's less relevant but for insurance purposes Google has yet to (technically/legally) cause a crash so already it's cheaper for your wallet than a human driver. Progress =)
Do you have any other information?
but i guess even this will get downvoted, rather than PROVEN wrong. why even bother debating anything on HN anymore?
This should be included in the safety comparison as looking at raw crash number is not enough.
Self driving cars have been driven up and down various parts of the SF bay region for several years now. Google's self driving cars have driven over 1 million miless. They report that their vehicles have been involved in 12 accidents, none of which are the fault of the vehicle's self driving capabilities.
The only reason they will appear to 'pop' into the consumer market overnight is because this technology is politically charged and simultaneously so important to society that it is being overengineered to improve success and safety. The moment self driving cars has its first accident after being released to consumers, the media will likely flip, ignoring mountains of data demonstrating how much more safe these vehicles are to provide a sensationalized report on the dangers of self driving cars. The safer they are and the more data backing this up, the less likely this will derail the technology.
1 million miles: https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/iMHEMH9crJb
12 accidents: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-cars-20150603-s...
CMU ALV: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/index.html