33,000 people die each year on US roads and self driving cars offer the chance to dramatically reduce that figure over time. The more aggressively we can test self-driving software now, the faster the software can be improved.
So as long as the accident rate for autonomous Teslas is initially no more than for human drivers, the Tesla approach will lead to fewer deaths in the long run.
It's unlikely that Tesla gets much useful data from vehicles. To debug a vision system, they'd need the camera data from all the cameras, and that's too big to upload over the cell phone data link.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2017/04/23/tesla...
They just need to send back data from a few seconds before either of those scenarios to quickly accumulate a giant library of one-in-a-million edge cases they can test future algorithm tweaks against. I think it's a reasonable strategy.
This article summarizes the latest AP2 software release: https://electrek.co/2017/03/30/tesla-autopilot-2-0-camera-8-...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/28/tesla_autopilot_dea...
Here's an article which describes a 40% drop in the accident rate:
https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh...
The NHTSA's figures show a drop from 1.3 crashes per million miles before Autosteer to 0.8 crashes after Autosteer.
Would any of those crashes have been fatal? I don't have the numbers to answer that but I posit that introducing Autopilot has prevented more deaths than it has caused.
However, in a society where people can observe the actions of others and form motivations in response to policies, etc, you'll find that because society reacts fairly poorly to organ harvesting, because organ harvesting is implausible to do at scale without extra bad things happenning, etc, the utilitarian solution is actually not to go about doing it.
Only a naive utilitarian wouldn't try to also remain consistent with something like a Kantian imperative of global self-coherence.
Now, as for cars and testing self-driving on real folks, well, this may be something where the water is pretty murky. I think that society will react poorly enough to early bad events in self-driving that a measured approach is actually the best for saving lives in the long term.
The critique here shouldn't be that "well, utilitarianism sure looks good from afar, but would you murder your neighbor?" It should be "The problem is too difficult to address with utilitarianism because it involves complex societal factors and responses."
> Tesla has not done a good job educating their customers on the limits of their "Autopilot" system
The death was preventable, even with the technology deployed.
Given that the technology is useless if you use it as 'intended' (Be aware, and in control of your vehicle 100% of the time[1]) I don't think this debate will be settled anytime soon.
[1] My 97 Avalon drives just fine when operated under those conditions.
Even though what they released isn't a self-driving car but a glorified cruise control. I personally don't really see how that is reckless at all.
The problem comes when the Large Print promises things that the system does not do.
Another problem came from the implementation of the system where Tesla did not verify that the driver maintains hands on the wheel.
people have died using teslas autopilot
(Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)
I'd be curious to know if Waymo vehicles experience more, less, or the same number of not-at-fault accidents per mile driven as human-driven ones.
Also, there are some network effects at play here, the higher the percentage of self driving cars the more rare that situation should become.
Autonomous cars really have to be able to handle these scenarios at least as good as, and ideally better than, humans: there's not a complicated split-second balancing act to worry about.
There may be ways to avoid some of the other types of accidents, but those ones (which have happened several times) are difficult to escape.
The real question is what's the safety threshold - safer than median human? 90th percentile? 99th?
The same way defensive (human) drivers have been doing for a long time: leave room between you and the car in front of you. Gauge cars coming up behind you and roll forward if they need extra room to stop.
Does not prevent 100% of rear-endings, but a large portion of them. Most rear-enders are not cars plowing full-speed into you, it's someone misjudging their braking and not being fully at-rest when they needed to be. Leaving some margin for this kind of error helps avoid the whole incident.
That is more cautious, but that doesn't, on its own, suggest better tech. That is that the Google cars are actually safer, more advanced, etc.
Those are the Koala cars. Before those, there were the Lexus which went in highways too.
Either way there's not nearly enough data to draw conclusions from.
Just to clarify the downvotes.
Highway driving is safer.
> I don't think there was a single death directly because of autopilot (not 100% sure though).
There was a death, and it was very prominent.
The outfall is that it led to bad PR for self-driving cars.
Bad PR? Example? I haven't seen much negative spin on self-driving cars in mainstream coverage recently. If anything it's been highly optimistic while still being honest by mentioning the difficulties the companies are trying to overcome.
I don't think people are under-estimating the challenge here, even the layman. But the potential ROI when it does work would dramatically be safer, environmentally friendly, and efficient with human time.
Given the current state of driving is highly dangerous, we'd benefit from iterative progress towards self-driving cars, ala what Tesla is doing. Controlling risks doesn't have to mean holding tech back until it's perfected.
Do we know how many lives have been saved from Tesla's autopilot? I've only seen anecdotes but I get the impression that it's already a big net win for safety.
Their current implementation doesn't seem to be learning any higher level behaviors (there's a Youtube video of guy using it in a park where it repeatedly accelerates towards islands in the road and then flails off the road as it goes too fast around the island).
The problem seems to be that Tesla's system is extremely dependent on a nice clear white line at the outer edge of the road. On this road, near the traffic islands, the roadside grass sometimes overgrows the road edge and obscures the white line. The white line has also been scuffed by cars near the edge of the road. [1] The Tesla runs off the road in that situation.
There are two kinds of self-driving. One came up from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was off-road. That kind first looks at the terrain and obstacles, and figures out where it can physically drive safely. There's LIDAR profiling of terrain. Then it looks at road markings and figures out where it's supposed to go. If the road markings lead into an obstacle or drop-off, it will stop or go around the obstacle. That's Waymo.
The second kind came up from lane-keeping and auto-brake systems. Those are very dependent on highway markings, and only work right on freeways. That's Tesla's original system.
It's hard to tell about the others. Volvo has an extensive sensor suite. Otto seems to be mostly a lane-keeping system for freeways. Uber hasn't released much detail.
Imagine if the video didn't have the friendly European accent and patches of green. Imagine if that was a real life scenario and the greens were a hazard.
I wonder if there are more such videos that show Tesla Autopilot freaking out. It would be an eye opener, Tesla's stock price is dependent on Autopilot among other innovations.
It may have gone the other way. Remember, the primary sensor technology in 99.999% of cars out there is two front facing visual-light cameras pointing the same way on a swivel and couple of mirrors.
There's no evidence to suggest that is the case. If anything, Tesla has made it more dangerous to assume that it's safe and falsely autonomous.
When you create new drugs, the FDA definitely doesn't look to kindly on people who think like Silicon Valley. "Killing people is product testing" won't fly in pharmaceuticals.
I'm glad that we don't have people like you designing drugs for the masses!
Is there any evidence that these companies haven't gone through closed circuit tests and passed before testing in public roads?
The next step in drug trials is, in fact, testing on humans and some do suffer serious injury or death. I don't think there's any way around it and the greater good of having a pharmaceutical industry at all outweighs those unfortunate incidents.
Not sure you can attribute that thinking to any of the actual engineers working on this.
There's little evidence that anything Tesla has deployed is an important step towards viable self driving vehicles.
They are apparently mapping the locations of odd situations, but that is pretty meh (and doesn't require the mapping system to be in control of the vehicle).
Ethic issues arise when the expectation is that the occupants will live and then your product falling short on those critical constraint.
Because when you design something for the masses, you are directly responsible for the deaths caused by your product.
This is not a matter of philosophy, from one engineer to another, it's our duty.
While Tesla and Uber have both just recklessly (imo) jumped in and started setting loose self driving cars and making bold claims, Google/Waymo has really taken a slow and measured approach and given great care to making sure their cars are actually safe.