In other words, it is you that is taking your own opinion for the universal truth. You reason in a model where the driver is the only responsible party for reckless driving.
An even bigger driving factor (pun intended) will be that the cost of a driver relative to operation is much, much higher in a car. A solution that is better on both safety and cost will be quickly adopted.
It does not matter how well your car can brake. Can your autonomous driving system guarantee it will always brake as hard and as fast as required when you will need it? Can you guarantee that the system will not have a bug the day it needs to brake?
Trains brake very well. There are even rubber wheel metros that brake so well we have to limit them in order not to sent everyone flying in the wagons :).
But in the safety calculations, standards like IEEE 1474 assumes degraded braking capability, and also considers that the preceding train is at stop. In other words, to be declared safe for mass usage, you can't assume average case. You must assume adverse case. You will not have a driver to notice that the car brakes poorly or to be confident enough to drive very close to the preceding car.
For the second paragraph, again, this is certainly true for driving assistance, but will most likely not be enough for driverless, as it was / is not enough for trains. Of course you may disagree.
EDIT: this is a good reference: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/safe-braking-model-explained-...
you are using appeals to authority and emotion rather than the scientific method.
I have no substantial comment other than to note that when a driverless car is insurable by Liberty Mutual at normal rates, with all liability held by Tesla, then it's probably reasonably safe.
However I don't see how the fears of an industry that needed to have extremely good results immediately need to be extended to one in which all signs point to progressive improvement. The danger being that the general public is fast to jump on blind trust, but to be compared with a vastly different ratio of number of people who are / can be in control to number of people affected, at least for cars and trucks which as far as I know are the first POIs in this industry. Autobuses might get automation slower than the rest of the fleet (no source, just from the top of my head).
First, you do not need self driving car to achieve 5x improvement. Good driver assistance systems will get you there.
Then, put yourself in the choose of the politician that is authorizing this technology to be used massively. Picture the amount of cars that are going to run everywhere once this authorization is given and ask yourself: what will happen to him once the first hundred people have died because of a wrong autopilot decision (it will be such figures, since you are OK with x5 reduction). Do you think he will be sleeping well at night? Do you think his political career will be better, especially if you consider my first point? Would you step in his shoes?
> You are willing to take the risk, but society as a whole will not.
What are you talking about? People very objectively ride planes that are not completely safe. Airlines that are nowhere near completely safe still get tons of customers.
But more importantly a couple paranoid regulators don't really represent "society as a whole", so you're not drawing on particularly relevant experience here when you talk about something as locked-down as rail or planes. With the constant looming death toll of human car crashes and state by state regulation there's a lot of room for getting these systems on the road.
But in the end, we all accept the risk of riding planes that we don't control because we entrust our lives to /trained pilots/ not because of such systems. As an illustration, the debate is still vigorous about whether or not a computer should be allowed to sit betwen the driver and the actuators [2]. It is also the case for cars, especially after the Toyota blunders [3] so I do believe all this body of experience is relevant and cannot be easily "disrupted".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy... [2] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/149/what-are-th... [3] http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
EDIT: theses standards are applied worldwide, despite the EN prefix.
EDIT: good reference site: http://en50126.blogspot.it/2008/07/velkommen.html?m=1
> Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, "already an improvement when compared to a typical driver".
I don't necessarily think this is true (perhaps age-correlated?). Let's set aside the issue of whether or not we can do it, for now, and assume that we have a scenario where self-driving cars are safer than human drivers.
In this context, I can easily imagine a political campaign à la "Think of the children!" that paints human drivers as fundamentally unsafe, advocating for a self-driving mandate in urban areas. Perhaps with a Cash-for-Clunkers type of deal to aid the transition. I am not saying this is desirable, merely plausible; it has all the elements of good politics: an easily-grasped bright-line dichotomy, emotional manipulation, and massive corporate benefits (for vehicle manufacturers, self-driving software vendors, and transportation providers like Uber).
For the second part of your argument, there are multiple problems, again backed by examples in the railway world.
First, a politician will think twice before casting a devilish image of drivers. Having all the professional drivers against you is essentially a political hara-kiri. There is a reason why it took 10 years to migrate Paris Line 1 to driverless, and it is not technology.
Second, you would not believe how difficult it is to reach consensus on the fact that drivers are unsafe compared to a machine. Still today, even after decades of operations with no incident, there are still people in the industry that argue otherwise... The most telling example is the high speed derailment in Santiago de Compostela, essentially due to the fact that the driver is considered a good enough guarantee to drive a high speed passenger train up to 200 KPH... Sigh.
EDIT: References [1] https://www.witpress.com/Secure/elibrary/papers/978184564494... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derai...
Not in the daily lives of the vast majority of Americans.
The three train systems I've used on a regular basis in the last half decade (NJ Transit's NE Corridor, Amtrak's Northeast Regional, and Caltrain) very much do not have driverless trains.
Two of those are in the top 10 commuter rail systems in the US.
I'm ranting here, but you're on an undeservedly high horse.
http://www.uitp.org/sites/default/files/Metro%20automation%2...
There has been 1 accident in 30 years attributed to driverless rail mass transit control system, despite millions of kilometers travelled and a constant worldwide growth. Yes, rail has understood what driverless safety means. You may call it a high horse but driverless /is/ a high horse. That's my point.
In a way, your comment confirms this success. You think it is easy because you are used to it at an instinctive level. And that is the goal, precisely.
But it is not as simple as what you imagine. For instance, trains have multiple degree of freedoms. As an illustration, train builders calculate carefully the dynamic enveloppe of the cars (e.g. its worst lateral deformation due to bogie flexibility) and check against the tunnel walls geometry.
http://www.railsystem.net/structure-gauge-and-kinematic-enve...
> I don't think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation.
And inferring that you meant that rail understands safety, generally, better than any other mode of transportation which I took issue with. I believe you 100% when you say that only one accident in 30 years ahas been attributed to driverless trains.
What I find horrifying about rail is how simple PTC should be: "am I exceeding the maximum speed for this stretch of rail? is there a train in front of me? if yes to either, slow down" and yet Amtrak says it will take billions of dollars and decades to install. I'm thinking of accidents like the NE Corridor derailment in 2015.
PTC is a problem of ROI for operators. The incentive is apparently not so great, so it will take decades. Also, and this is frequent in rail, any complicated solution that will leverage the existing infrastructure will be explored, further entangling the situation. In more controlled economies, the state has enforced for long the technology to be used. [1] Some may say it is a case where free market cannot be trusted to take the correct decisions. It is a societal debate, no longer an engineering topic. [2]
[1] Not too bad: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Safety_Improvement_Act_...
> the derailment was caused by the train's engineer (driver) becoming distracted by other radio transmissions and losing situational awareness, and said that it would have been prevented by positive train control, a computerized speed-limiting system
Remember, I was initially referring to rail's approach to safety generally, not just in the context of automation.
The second you put the train in the open air where other people are, where weather is, where nature is, those things kill people on the regular.
Get out of your tunnel, and suddenly your "success" has nothing to do with the control system.
I don't want to sound obnoxious but driverless metros routinely operate in the open air :). Tunnels are not a mandatory condition for such systems. They manage strong winds, strong rains with reduced adhesion conditions, etc. They manage the possibility for people or non-protected trains to intrude on the track. A lot of brain was put into automating decisions related to fire scenarios or emergency evacuations. Metro lines like Paris line 1 are extremely busy. There are plenty of ways to kill people, yet they don't. Just the "stuck hand-bag" scenario is a nightmare to manage. Yet.
A driverless system is truly a massive piece of software. You guys should come in the tunnels and have fun with us!
This is demonstrably false. There are many metro systems with tracks on viaducts and at-grade (e.g. "open air"), with GoA 4 control systems.
These systems can and do detect objects on the track. They also deal with severe weather (heavy thunderstorms, snow, etc).
I think you're discounting the experience of delivering railway systems without considering lessons that could be learned in deploying them, and applying that to self-driving cars.
> If you substitute, you have to do much much much better. Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, "already an improvement when compared to a typical driver". Is it fair? Maybe not, but that's the whole point for entrusting lives to a machine.
I've heard Elon mention this and while I don't know exactly it's measured, he claimed that fully autonomous cars would have to be 10x "better" at driving than a human before they would be allowed. I'm paraphrasing when I say "better" but I'm sure I could find the video of him talking about it.
At any rate, your comment is interesting.
I don't know where Elon gets his numbers from, but according to EN 50126 practioners, human error is in the range of 2E-4 / 1E-3 whereas safety functions are classified at least SIL2 and that means 1E-6. In other word, the system must be x1000 better than a human.
Here is a good reference: http://en50126.blogspot.it/2009/10/safety-integrity-levels-s...
If human flight was possible, surely they would have done it hundreds or thousands of years ago.
Your argument disregards not only advancement in theoretical knowledge, but also advancement engineering in the form of computational power and sensor sensitivity.
In the case of establishing the correct position of vehicles, whatever the technology used it will have an error of measurement. This error accumulates over time, especially if you are measuring displacement. You will need reference points to retain your positional uncertainty within an acceptable value. An autonomous vehicle uses a map containing features that can be used as reference points and triangulate its position based on that. A human brain does this constantly using its eyes, ears and memory. It is an example of diversity: you correlate the perceived displacement by your internal ear with what your eyes sees, using a reference learned in your brain about your surroundings and sensors' ability.
To reach 1E-9, we cannot rely on such self-learned things: we can agree that the probability for the landscape to change is quite higher than 1E-9. In the case of trains, driverless trains use coded beacons / loops or GPS diversity. Such techniques imply that the infrastructure around your vehicle collaborates to the safety of the system. Hence my statement.
This being said, the rail industry has been dreaming for long of a completely vehicle centric solution. There are high stakes for that: reduced costs, competitive advantage, etc. Last attempt here: http://www.alstom.com/products-services/product-catalogue/ra...
On the bad side, this risk culture destroys large scale innovation, and even safety in the long run. The problem is that we've adopted an attitude that safety is always first, meaning that it is immoral to do something in a less safe way, no matter what the other benefits might be. This means we get a regulatory, tort, and engineering culture that is willing to use existing systems, because they are grandfathered and therefore "reasonable", but will only adopt new systems if they can be shown to be perfectly safe.
This culture is fairly new. I date it to sometime in the seventies. Ralph Nader and the Pinto were both symptoms and causes. You can see the transition in, for example, how America responded to the Apollo 1 fire vs. the Challenger accident.
Since you're a a rail engineer, let's look at rail mass transit systems. The NYC subway has a limit of roughly 30 trains per hour, a two minute headways. All of the braking rates, margins of safety, and signaling systems do their job, and you never see two trains hitting each other. During rush hour though, trains are packed way over capacity, and this is mostly because of this headway limitation. If you were to imagine this on the freeway, you'd have to leave two miles between you and the next car. The cost for this level of safety is that about half a million people have to spend an hour every day in miserable conditions. Many of them choose to drive or take cabs instead, to avoid this.
When they make this decision, none of them even give the slightest thought that driving is maybe 10x more dangerous than taking the train. They understand that safety for both is plenty good, and the way that they spend two hours of their day, 13% of their waking hours, is a lot more important than some tiny difference in their risk of dying on the way to work.
Ultimately, while very well intentioned, this safety culture is inhuman. It's pessimistic. It says "nothing in your life could possibly be so important that it's worth any possibility of you being injured. "
So, this is what we face now, over and over. With self driving cars, it's, "sure, the chance of you getting killed is half as much as if you had driven, plus you get all of that time back to have a nice conversation, read a book, or idly stare out the window, but since it doesn't meet our aviation/rail transit level of safety, you can't have it." You even see it with kids -- your twelve year old kids can't be allowed out of the sight of an adult, or you're a dangerous, neglectful parent. It does not matter that childhood is the process of learning how to be an adult, and that becoming an adult is a process of progressively mastering greater and greater freedoms -- the most important thing is that we are never seen to expose children to even the most minute level of risk.
I really want us to have a real conversation about acceptable risk, informed consent, and human progress. We need it badly to regain our souls.
So true. Its an issue in General Aviation where there has been huge progress in safety devices (electronic cockpit gauges, airbag seat belts, etc) but it has been illegal to install them in older aircraft because of the FAAs very slow, expensive certification process. Finally, in the last year or so, the FAA got serious about what's called "Part 23 reform" which will vastly streamline the process for safety upgrades in older aircraft.
Also, I don't want this comment to be interpreted as shitting on the FAA. I'm a libertarian leaning former liberal who generally has very low confidence in our government but I consider the FAA, with their insane safety record of which I'm a massive fanboy, to be a exception.
I don't think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation. It's not about running miles and miles without accidents and basically saying "see"? It's about demonstrating /by design/ that the /complete/ system over its /complete/ lifetime will not kill anyone. In terms of probability of failure it translates in demonstrated hazard rates of less than 1E-9 /including the control systems/. This take very special techniques and if that could've been done using only vehicle sensors, it would have been adopted by us long ago. I am also sorry to report that doubling cameras and sensor fusion will not get you an acceptable safety level. We've tried that too, rookies.
Is it "fair", to use Elon's argument? After all, isn't additional safety enough compared to existing situation. Ah but we have been there too! For driver assistance it is indeed better. Similar systems were deployed during the second half of 20th century (e.g. KVB, ASFA, etc). But the limit is clear. It only /improves/ driver's failure rate. It does not substitute for the driver. If you substitute, you have to do much much much better. Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, "already an improvement when compared to a typical driver". Is it fair? Maybe not, but that's the whole point for entrusting lives to a machine.