Also, while there may be fewer of some types of accidents, there will be lawsuits for a potentially very large set of other types that never used to get litigated. For example today when a driver causes their own accident, nobody gets sued.

Sure you can imagine some class action / criminal legal disaster but the auto industry has survived repeated scandals. Corporate criminal negligence is extremely rare.

In five or ten years this technology could be saving 100,000 lives every year. I hope we are not so risk adverse that these benefits are needlessly delayed.

http://www.insurance.com/auto-insurance/auto-insurance-basic...

Yes, anyone putting out such a system is going to get sued, but so does every car company that exists today. It's just the cost of doing business and ultimately just get's passed on to consumers.

More likely the bar for level 4 will just be significantly higher than parity with human error, if only for liability reasons.

So, at similar rate to human drivers that's ~24* million dollars per fatal crash in saved wages. Plus presumably higher truck utilization and lower management costs etc. Don't forget the driver is often not at fault and automated trucks should have plenty of footage of accidents to demonstrate who was at fault. So it's a fraction of both fatal and non fatal accidents, with non fatal accidents generally having lower associated costs. Also, most importantly it's only the truck involved in many accidents associated with bad weather and more generally the driver's medical bills etc do not need to be covered if there is no driver.

Further, technology is unlikely to degrade over time so they just need a profitable starting point. Also, if the self drive button cost ~25c / mile there are plenty of times I would hit it.

*Granted, there will be labor costs linked with automated trucks, but a 95% savings seems likely.

25c/mile just for the insurance surcharge, you mean? Sounds like we're in agreement that mere parity with human error would be expensive from a liability perspective.

Hell go to sleep and wake up in another city 500-1000 miles away without going to the airport or needing a rental is a major benefit even if your not saying money.

I've never seen them pulled over in the bike lane on Valencia like very other Uber/Lyft, which is a good thing, but picking up and dropping off is far from autonomous friendly in that neighborhood.

Of course sometime it's obvious a person is in control and presumably they're generating training data.

Does anyone know off-hand, how much testing have autonomous vehicles had at night (as in, full dark/need to use headlights).