"The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat."

The result of this statement and the functionality that matches it is it creates a re-enforced false sense of security.

Does it matter whether the driver of the model X whose auto pilot drove straight into a center divider had his hands on the wheel if the outcome of applying autopilot is drivers focus less on the road? What is the point of two drivers one machine one human? You cannot compare car auto pilot to airplane they're not even in the same league. How often does a center divider just pop up at 20k ft?

Usually machinery either augments human capabilities by enhancing them, or entirely replaces them. This union caused by both driver and car piloting the vehicle has no point especially when it's imperfect.

I'm not opposed to Tesla's sale of such functionality, sell whatever you want, but I am opposed to the marketing material selling this in a way that contradicts the legal language required to protect Tesla...

There's risks in everything you do, but don't market a car as having the hardware to do 2x your customers driving capability and then have your legal material say: * btw don't take your hands off the steering wheel... especially when there's a several minute video showing exactly that.

Tesla customers must have the ability to make informed choices in the risks they take.

Tesla have sold people that the hardware they buy now will be capable of this in the future, but not now.

First let me state that I agree with this 110%!

I'm not sure if this is what you are getting at but I'm seeing a difference between the engineers exact definition of what the system is, what it does, and how it can be properly marketed to convey that in the most accurate way. I'm also seeing the marketing team saying whatever they can, within their legal limits (I imagine), in order to attract potential customers to this state-of-the-art system and technology within an already state-of-the-art automobile.

If we are both at the same time taking these two statements verbatim than which one wins out:

> Autopilot is not a fully-autonomous driving system. It's a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred. Just as with autopilots in aviation, while the tool does reduce workload, it's critical to always stay attentive. The car cannot drive itself. It can help, but you have to do your job.

and

> The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.

If that's the crux of the issue that goes to court then who wins? The engineering, legal, marketing department, or do they all lose because the continuous system warnings that Autopilot requires attentive driving were ignored and a person who already knew and complained of the limits of that system decided to forego all qualms about it and fully trust in it this time around?

I feel like when I was first reading and discussing this topic I was way more in tune with the human aspect of the situation and story. I still feel a little peeved at myself for starting to evolve the way I'm thinking about this ordeal in a less human and more practical way.

If we allow innovation to be distinguished for reasons such as these will we ever see major growth in new technology sectors? That might be a little overblown but does the fact that Tesla's additions to safety and standards thus having a markedly lower accident and auto death rate mean nothing in context?

If Tesla is doing a generally good job and bringing up the averages on all sorts of safety standards while sprinting headlong towards even more marked improvements are we suddenly supposed to forget everything we know about automobiles and auto accidents / deaths while examining individual cases?

Each human life is important. This man's death was not needed and I'm sure nobody at Tesla, or anywhere for that matter, is anything besides torn up about having some hand in it. While profit is definitely a motive I think the means to get to the profit they seek Tesla knows they have to create a superior product and that includes superior features and superior safety standards. If Tesla is meeting and beating most of those goals and we have a situation such as this why do I feel (and I could be way wrong here) that Tesla is being examined as if they are an auto manufacturer with a history of lemons, deadly flipped car accidents, persistent problems, irate customers, or anything of the like in this situation?

For whatever reason it kind of reminds me of criminal vs. civil court cases. Criminal it's upon the State or Prosecution to prove their case. In the civil case the burden is on the Defense to prove their innocence. For some reason I feel like Tesla is in a criminal case but having to act like it's a civil case where if they don't prove themselves they will lose out big.

To me it feels like the proof is there. The data is there. The facts are known. The fact that every Tesla driver using Autopilot in that precise location doesn't suffer the same fate points toward something else going on but the driver's actions also don't seem to match up with what is known about him and the story being presented on the other side. It's really a hairy situation and I feel like it warrants all sorts of tip toeing around but I also have the feeling that allowing that "feeling" aspect to dictate the arguments for either side of this case are just working backwards.

And for what it's worth I don't own a Tesla, I've never thought about purchasing one. I like the idea, my brother's friend has one and it's neat to zoom around in but I'm just trying to look at this objectively from all sides without pissing too many people off. Sorry if I did that to you, it wasn't my intent.

My concern is that it looks like Tesla is 90% of the way there to full autonomy and the way the feature is marketing will lull even engineers who know more about how these systems work into a false sense of security and end up dying as a result -- they'll trust a system that shouldn't be trusted. There isn't a good system for detecting a lack of focus especially when it won't take more than a few milliseconds to go from good to tragic.

The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don't take your hands off the wheel - that's bs.

The human toll is absolutely relevant to the conversation: this is about people dying now and in the future. It seems cruel to discuss it in a "I'll sacrifice X to save Y" later, but it can reasonably be reduced to that.

I think it's safe to assume that this will drastically reduce driving related injuries and deaths.

Is the life taken by auto pilot worth less than the life taken by the aggressive driver who takes out an innocent driver? No.

I hope we eventually save lives as in net improvement in current death totals by using these technologies but the risks are not well communicated, the marketing is entirely out of sync with the risks and the "martyrs" we create thus to me look like victims.

I think beliefs such as these is fueled by the extremely naive implication that each death will cause the learning algorithm to "improve itself" so every self driving thing out there is safer owing to that death..

Some number of people, N are willing to risk their lives to use autonomous vehicles they'll die as a result. It should be just as clear to person using autopilot the risks involved not misled with marketing fluff that doesn't come close to reality. Martyrs not victims

This assumes that the self driving tech will continue to increase in competence and will at some point surpass humans. I somehow find that extremely optimistic, bordering in on being naive.

Consider something like OCR or object recognition alone, where similar tech is applied. Even with decades of research behind it, it really cannot come any where close to a human in terms of reliability. I am talking about stuff that can be trained endlessly with any sort of risk. Still it does not show an ever increasing capability.

Now, machine learning and AI is only part of the picture. The other part is the sensors. This again is not anywhere near the sensors a human is equipped with.

From what we have seen in the tech industry in recent years is that trust in a tech by the people, even intelligent ones such as people who are investing in it, is not based on logic (Theranos, uBeam etc). I think such a climate is exactly what is enabling tests such as these. But unlike others, these tests are actually putting unsuspecting lives on line. And that should not be allowed..

Please note that I artfully omitted a due date on my assumption. There's so much money involved here and so much initial traction that it is indeed reasonable to think that tech can surpass a "normal" driver.

I'm also biased against human drivers, plenty of whom should not be behind the wheel.

I don't think it is reasonable at all to reach that conclusion based on the money involved...You just can't force progress/breakthrough just by throwing money at all problem..

>I'm also biased against human drivers, plenty of whom should not be behind the wheel.

So I think it would be quite trivial to drastically increase the punishment of dangerous practices if caught. I mean, suspend license or ban for life if you are caught texting while driving or drunk driving.

You're also ignoring a key point: we have "self-driving" cars right now, but they're not good enough yet. Computer hardware is getting cheaper day by day, and right now the limiting factor appears to be the cost of sensors.

Both are not true. It does not need money for a man to have a great breakthrough idea. It is also not possible to guarantee generation a great idea by just throwing more and more money at researchers...

The best thing is to build a system to analyze your driving and figure out if you are in that 40% of people and then let it drive for you. Maybe drunk drivers, for example. It can do this per ride: “oh you’re driving recklessly, do you want me to take over?”

EVERYTHING ELSE SHOULD BE A STRICT IMPROVEMENT. Taking over driving and letting people stop paying attention is not a strict improvement.

The argument should NOT be about playing with people’s lives now so im the future some people can have a better system. That’s a ridiculous argument. Instead WHY DON’T THE COMPANIES COLLABORATE ON OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE AND RESEARCH TO ALL BUILD ON EACH OTHER’S WORK? Capitalism and “intellectual property”, that’s why. In this case, a gift economy like SCIENCE or OPEN SOURCE is far far superior at saving lives. But we are so used to profit driven businesses, it’s not likely they will take such an approach to it.

What we have instead is companies like Waymo suing Uber and Uber having deadly accidents.

And what we SHOULD have is if an incremental improvement makes things safer, every car maker should be able to adopt it. There should be open source shops for this stuff like Linux that enjoy huge defensive patent portfolios.

Ain’t gonna happen I’m afraid.

Why not? That's how pioneers make progress, in new aircraft and spacecraft.

If people want to be on the bleeding edge, why not let them?

How can the cars improve if they are never allowed to drive?

The pioneers in this case are putting other people’s life at risk.

Wayne seems to demonstrate that improving self-driving cars without leaving a trail of bodies behind seems in the realm of possibility, so let’s measure Tesla against that standard.

They don't just say it in the legal language. The car is continually reminding the driver of it, as the article makes clear.

The problem is that Uber needs self driving cars in order to make money, and Tesla firmly believes that their system is safer than human drivers by themselves (even if a few people who wouldn't have otherwise died do, others who might have died won't and they believe those numbers make it worth it).

The problem is that you cna only learn so much without actual practice.

I think we need to keep the human driver in control, but have the computers learning through that constant, immediate feedback.

And get rid of misleading marketing and fatal user experience design errors.

I don't know what is stopping them from simulating everything inside a computer.

Record the input from all the sensors when a car equipped sensors is driven through real roads by a human driver. Replay the sensor input, with enough random variations and let the algorithms train on it.

Continue adding to the library of sensor data by making the sensor car by driving it through more and more real life roads and in real life situations. Keep feeding the ever increasing library of sensor data to the algorithm, safely inside a computer.

Obviously they've already tried that, and it doesn't work. The map is not the territory.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

What I mean is that. Do not "teach" the thing in real time. Instead collect the sensor data from the cars a human is driving (and also collect the human input also), and train the thing on it, safely inside the lab.

You say, they have done it already. But I am asking if they have done it enough. And if that is so, how come the accidents such as these are possible, when the situation is pretty out of a text book in basic driving?

It also will not ensure exclusion of manual vehicles, so it won't create the exclusion necessary for the predictable driving environment.

Sounds like requiring exclusive access - I apologize if that was a misinterpretation.

If you have human and automated drivers in the same roads, the computers have to be able to cope with the vagaries of human drivers.

How can you then get away from '"beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators' if that is their deployment environment?

This is the definition of a false dichotomy and it implicitly puts the onus on early adopters to risk their lives (!) in order to achieve full autonomy. Why not put the onus on the car manufacturer to invest sufficient capital to make their cars safe!? To rephrase what you said with this perspective:

> ...developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of billions of investor dollars in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem.

This seems strictly better than the formulation you provided. How nuts is it that the assumption here is that people will have to die for this technology to be perfected. Why not pour 10x or 100x the current level of investment and build entire mock towns to test these cars in - with trained drivers emulating traffic scenarios? Why put profits ahead of people?

I generally agree with this philosophy but this is very optimistic, at least in the United States. This is a country where we can't even ban assault rifles let alone people from driving their own vehicles. You're going to see people drive their own vehicles for a very long time even if self driving technology is perfected.

Compare the above to hop in my car, drive to the freeway, turn on self-driving, turn off self-driving once i get off the freeway, find parking near where i'm going and walk in.

As a society, we've done alot more in the name of convenience.

And you need a fleet of rental cars so that people can actually get to their destination.

What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?

Commuter rail systems run at 2 minute headways or less. Long-distance trains mostly don't but that's largely due to excessive safety standards - for some reason we regulate trains to a much higher safety standard than cars. Even then, the higher top speeds of trains can make up for a certain amount of waiting and indirect routing. (Where I live, in London, trains are already faster than cars in the rush hour).

> What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?

When you include the land use and pollution? Cars can be cheaper for intercity distances when there's a lot of similarly-sized settlements, but within a city they waste too much space. And once you build cities for people rather than cars, cars lose a lot of their attraction for city-to-city travel as well, since you're in the same situation of having to change modes to get to your final destination.

That "some reason" is physics. According to a quick Google search, an average race car needs 400m of track length from 300 km/h to 0 km/h. A train will require something around 2500m, over 5x the distance, to brake from the same speed. Trains top out at -1.1m/s² deceleration, an ordinary car can get -10m/s² deceleration.

Part of the reason why is also that in a car, people are generally using their seatbelts - which means you can safely hit the brakes with full power. In a train, however, people will be walking around, standing, taking a dump on the loo - and no one will be using a belt. Unless you want to send people literally flying through the carriages, you can't go very much over that 1 m/s² barrier.

Because of this, you have the requirement of signalling blocks spaced in a way that a train at full speed can still come to a full stop before the next block signal. Also: a train can carry thousands of people. Have one train derail and crash into e.g. a bridge or crash with another train and you're looking with way, way, way more injuries and dead people than even a megacity could support, much less in a rural area.

If the cars are electric, I'm less sure.

Though your train of cars would likely have such low passenger density that a series of buses would be just as good. Special lanes just for buses are already a thing.

The point is driving is a freedom and getting rid of it in this country will be hard. I'd imagine self driving vehicles having more prevalence in China where the government can control what destinations you have access to and monitor your trips.

Many states (red) won't ban them for a very long time.

the impact on freedom to travel will have to be secured and decentralized without any government kill switches.

Which states? Maybe a few in New England, but I don't see that happening anywhere else. Counties perhaps, but there are rural areas pretty much everywhere, and people are going to want the freedom to drive their own vehicle.

In comparison, the economic impact/benefit of banning assault rifles is negligible (and definitely not transformative) even if I personally think it is the morally right thing to do. (Maybe we can make the case later if school security and active shooter drills become prohibitively expensive and/or annoying)

So people will relocate to avoid traffic? Why doesn't this happen today? Suppose San Francisco decided to not enforce self driving laws to protect small businesses and preserve community infrastructure and culture. Now suppose Phoenix (only picked because they've been progressive with self driving technology) does enforce self driving laws, would you expect a mass exodus from San Francisco to Phoenix?

Right now Phoenix is not even on the map for most of us. If they did something like this (at the right time), then it might be.

Why would the less-risky drivers move to self-driving cars first? Wouldn't some of the higher-risk demographics (e.g. the elderly) make the move first since they have more incentive to do so?

> Second, cities that go to self driving only will have a huge advantage in infrastructure utilization and costs as roads are used more efficiently (with smoother traffic) and parking lots/garages become a thing of the past. Residents will just push for it if it means not being stuck in traffic anymore.

I think self-driving cars will be really cool and reduce traffic accidents once they're perfected, but a lot of these assumptions don't make sense. Unless a critical mass switches to car-sharing, autonomous cars and no parking will make rush hour worse because now each car will make the round trip to work twice a day instead of just once. Also, what happens to the real-estate where the parking lots are now? The financially sound thing to do will probably be converting these lots to more offices/condos/malls. So urban density will increase - increasing traffic.

Even if autonomous cars radically improve traffic flow, I suspect we'll just get induced demand [1]. More people will take cars instead of public transit and urban density will increase until traffic sucks again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Elderly aren't usually considered higher risk. The young kids are, enthusiasts are, people who drive red sports cars are.

> Unless a critical mass switches to car-sharing, autonomous cars and no parking will make rush hour worse because now each car will make the round trip to work twice a day instead of just once.

Autonomous cars should be mostly fleet vehicles (otherwise you have to park it at home).

Isn't that just like in most of the major world cities where taxis are the norm rather than the exception? It isn't weird for a taxi in Beijing to make 5-6 morning commute rounds. But even then, there are a lot of reverse commutes to consider.

> The financially sound thing to do will probably be converting these lots to more offices/condos/malls.

While density can increase, convenient affordable personal transportation also allows the opposite to occur. Parks, nice places, and niche destinations, are also possible.

Think of it this way, once traffic is mitigated, urban planning can apply more balance to eliminate uneven reverse commute problems. There will still be an incentive to not move, but movement in itself wouldn't be that expensive (only 40 kuai to get to work in Beijing ~15km, I'm sure given the negligible labor costs, autonomous cars can manage that in the states).

We are asking that self driving cars be ALLOWED if the user chooses, even IF the safety is in doubt. This is because of just how extremely important this issue is.

Peopl I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it till eventually the tide turns on HN and elsewhere.

You will not have full autonomy unless you control the road itself.

At which point you are better off just making it mass transit.

Also, people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them and just like computers, the human brain can be cheated, overloaded, inept or inexperienced leading to an accident.

Now we have cars with lane assist, smart breaking, auto pilot features and that's only in the past 5-10 years.

Of all the places where technology can save lives, its definitely in vehicles/transportation.

How many optical illusions do you usually see in the roads while driving, that can result in an accident?

I am not even talking about the "people are terrible at detecting objects directly in front of them" part.

I mean, how can you be a human being and say this? If we were "terrible at detecting objects directly in front of us", we would have been predated out of existence a long time ago..

Sometimes you'll see multiple white lines, or lanes that appear to vere off due to dirt on the road. A bit of litter looks like a person, a kid looks like they might run out.

A lot of times I find I'm searching for something and can't see it but it was in my visual field. I think this worsens with age.

No. None of those qualify as brain being cheated.

That is the only thing I was responding in the start of this discussion. Essentially the person was saying human brain can be cheated just like a computer.

I am saying, No. Not just like a computer. Human brains does not get cheated so easily like a computer. Claiming that is outrageous and shows you have no idea of what you are talking about...

Check out this article, it is easy to never see a bike you're on a collision course with. https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-th...

You may consider humans as bad drivers but Tesla's autopilot is even worse than that:

It can't even look in one direction!

I'm not claiming Tesla's system is currently better than a human, just that there is plenty of potential for a machine to outperform humans perceptually. As it is, Tesla's system isn't exactly the gold standard.

Last time I checked, I could move my eyes, up and down, side to side. I could also rotate my whole head, that also up and down and side to side.

And I am a human being.

Actually, one thing that I was curious about regarding this incident -- they say that authorities had to wait for a team of Tesla's engineers to show up to clean up burning mess of batteries. Luckily for everyone else trying to get somewhere on 101 that day, Tesla's HQ isn't too far away. What if next time one drives into a barrier it happens in a middle of Wyoming? Will the road stay closed until Tesla's engineers can hitch a ride on one of Musk's Falcons?

And $879B in USA per year.

It is thus very important.

For the 1.3 million people and their loved ones and to 20-50 million injured EVERY YEAR, yeah, it's really that important.

Is it ready today? No. We're in pretty violent agreement on that.

Will we get there? I don't see much reason to doubt that we will, eventually. It may require significant infrastructure changes.

It's pretty clear Waymo/Uber are pushing the envelope too hard, without adequate safeguards, but "only be acceptable if it were you and Mr. Musk...on Tesla's private proving grounds" is probably not pushing the envelope enough.

Even Waymo is "unleashing their stuff onto unsuspecting public" by driving them on public roads - lots of innocent bystanders potentially at risk there.

Both Waymo and even Uber do not pretend that their systems are ready for public use and at least allegedly have people who are paid to take over (granted, in Uber's case it's done as shadily as anything else Uber does). Tesla sells their half-baked stuff to everyone, with marketing that strongly implies that they can do self-driving now, if only not for those pesky validations and regulations. I think there's quite a bit of a difference.

A lot of deaths and injuries on the road happen in countries with bad infrastructure and rather cavalier attitude to rules of the road. Fixing those could save more people sooner than SDVs that they won't be able to afford any time soon. Not to consider that an SDV designed in the first world (well, Bay Area's roads are closer to third world, but still...) aren't going to work too well when everyone around drives like a maniac on a dirt road.

Not to say that SDVs wouldn't be neat, when they actually work, but this is a very SV approach, throwing technology to create overpriced solution to problems that could be solved much cheaper, but in a boring way that doesn't involve AI, ML, NN, and whatever other fashionable abbreviations.

Whose lives are we sacrificing? In the case of the Uber crash in Tempe and this Tesla crash in California, the people who died did not volunteer to risk their lives to advance research in autonomous vehicles.

I highly respect individuals who choose to risk their lives to better the world or make progress, like doctors fighting disease in Africa and astronauts going to space, but at the same time, I think this must always be a choice. Otherwise we could justify forcing prisoners to try new drugs as the first stage of clinical trials. Or worse things. Which is why there are extensive vetting before approval for clinical trials is given.

I do think that, once the safety of autonomous vehicles have been proven on a number of testbeds, but before they are ready for deployment, it is justifiable to drive them on public roads. Maybe without safety drivers. But until then, careful consideration should be given to their testing.

Uber should not have been able to run autonomous vehicles with safety drivers where the safety driver could be allowed to look away from the road for several seconds while the car was moving at >30mph. The car should automatically shutoff if it is not clear whether the safety driver is paying attention. And there should be legislation that bans any company that fails to implement basic safeguards like this from testing again for at least a decade, with severe fines. Probably speeds should also be limited to ~30mph for the first few years of testing while the technology is still so immature, as it is today.

Similarly, Tesla should not be allowed to deploy their Autopilot software to consumers before they conduct studies to show that it is reasonably safe. Repeated accidents have shown that Level 1 and Level 2 autonomous vehicles, where the car drives autonomously but the driver must be ready to intervene, is a failed model unless the car actively monitors that the driver is paying attention.

Overall I think justifying the current state of things by saying that people must be sacrificed for this technology to work is ridiculous. Basic safeguards are not being used, and if we require them, maybe autonomous vehicles will take a few years longer to reach deployment, but that thousands of lives could become tens.

Edit: I read in another comment that the Tesla car at least "alarms at you when you take your hands off the wheel". In that case I think what Tesla is doing is much more reasonable. (Not Uber, though.) Although I still feel like it is going to be hard to react to dangerous situations when the system operates correctly almost all the time (even if you are paying attention and have your hands on the wheel). But I'm not sure what the correct policy should be here, because I don't fully understand why people use this in the first place (since it sounds like Autopilot doesn't save you any work).

Cars should just be phased out in favor of mass transit everywhere.

Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can.

Now think about how you would enable that to happen. What local politicians are you willing to write to, or support, in order to enable a better mass transit option for you? And how would you enable more people to support those local politicians that make that decision?

This is the correct solution, since the AI solution of self-driving cars isn't going to happen. Their high fatality rates are going to remain high.

Maybe, but unless you can change the laws of nature, you can't build a mass transit system that can serve everyone full-time with reasonable efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and that's just meeting the minimum requirement of getting from A to B, without getting into all the other downsides of public vs. private transportation in terms of health, privacy, security, etc.

Let's see what that imagination can craft.

Achieving 24/7 mass transit, available with reasonable frequency for journeys over both short and long distances, would certainly require everyone to live in big cities with very high population densities. Here in the UK, we only have a handful of cities with populations of over one million today. That is the sort of scale you're talking about for that sort of transportation system to be at all viable, although an order of magnitude larger would be more practical. All of those cities have long histories and relatively inefficient layouts, which would make it quite difficult to scale them up dramatically without causing other fundamental problems with infrastructure and logistics.

So, in order to solve the problem of providing viable mass transit for everyone to replace their personal vehicles, you would first need to build, starting from scratch or at least from much smaller urban areas, perhaps 20-30 new big cities to house a few tens of millions of people.

You would then need all of those people to move to those new cities. You'd be destroying all of their former communities in the process, of course, and for about 10,000,000 of them, they'd be giving up their entire rural way of life. Also, since no-one could live in rural areas any more, your farming had better be 100% automated, along with any other infrastructure or emergency facilities you need to support your mass transit away from the big cities.

The UK is currently in the middle of a housing crisis, with an acute lack of supply caused by decades of under-investment and failure to build anywhere close to enough new homes. Today, we're lucky if we build 200,000 per year, while the typical demand is for at least 300,000, which means the problem is getting worse every year. The difference between home-owners and those who are renting or otherwise living in supported accommodation is one of the defining inequalities of our generation, with all the tensions and social problems that follow.

But sure, we could get everyone off private transportation and onto mass transit. All we'd have to do is uproot about 3/4 of our population, destroy their communities and in many cases their whole way of life, build new houses at least an order of magnitude faster than we have managed for the last several decades, achieve total automation in our out-of-city farming and other infrastructure, replace infrastructure for an entire nation that has been centuries in development... and then build all these wonderful new mass transit systems, which would still almost inevitably be worse than private transportation in several fundamental ways.

And that's not taking into account the fact that bicycle is a very viable way to move around in cities < 200 000 inhabitants.

I have actually never owned a car, I just rent some once in a while to go out somewhere where regular transports don't get me. I have lived in Sweden, France and Spain, in 10 cities from 25 000 to 12 million inhabitants. Never felt restricted. I actually feel much more restricted when I drive because I have to worry about parking, which is horrible in both Paris and Stockholm. Many people I know, even in rural Sweden or France, don't own a car because it is just super costly and the benefit is not worth it. It's very much a generation thing tough because my friends are mostly around 26-32 whereas nearly all the person I know over 35 owns a car, even if they don't actually have that much money and sometimes complain about it.

To provide a viable transport network, operating full-time with competitive journey times, without making a prohibitive financial loss or being environmentally unfriendly, you need a critical mass of people using each service you run. That generally means you need a high enough population density over a large enough urban area that almost all routes become "main routes" and almost all times become "busy times".

I lived car free in a small industrial UK city, we couldn't manage that with kids (too expensive for one).

Bus seats are awful, why?, because they're made vandal resistant (and hard wearing). They're too small for a lot of people now as well. So you need to remodel buses IMO; your going to need to be hotter on vandals, so change the approach of the courts. Things bifurcate across areas of society like that: Supermarkets, houses, zoning, etc. all are designed with mass car ownership as a central tenet.

No, I can't. Don't presume to tell other people what they need to live their lives.

A laudable goal doesn’t give anyone the right to kill people by taking unnecessary risks. The reason that Tesla and Uber do what they do the way they do, instead of a more conservative approach is an attempt to profit, not save lives. If you don’t have to spend lives to make progress, but choose to do so for economic experience, there’s s word for that: evil.

Racing drivers have also reported that when they are not driving at 100%, they are more prone to make mistakes or crash. Most famously, Ayrton Senna's infamous crash at Monaco when he was leading the field by a LONG way. When he was asked why he crashed at a fairly innocuous slow corner, he said that his engineer had asked him over the radio to 'take it easy' as there was no chance he would be challenged for 1st place before the finish line, so he relaxed a fraction and started thinking about the victory celebrations. And crashed.

Basically this: https://xkcd.com/1138/

You're not alone. I find the act of modulating my speed is what keeps me focused on the task of driving safely. Steering alone isn't enough; I can stay in my lane without tracking the vehicles around me or fully comprehending road conditions.

Until a Level 5 autonomous car is ready to drive me point A to point B while I watch a movie I will remain firmly in command of the vehicle.

Public roads are not laboratories. It’s not just Tesla owners who are participating in this, it’s everyone on the road with them.

It really annoys me when I have to constantly look at the speed to avoid getting above the limit and it is very tiring for long drives.

This is similar to the problem for pilots, who can be distracted by mundane tasks due the complexity of controls in modern aircraft. If these tasks are removed, the pilot can focus on what's more important.

According to NASA " For the most part, crews handle concurrent task demands efficiently, yet crew preoccupation with one task to the detriment of other tasks is one of the more common forms of error in the cockpit."

https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/publications/directline/dl10_distr...

The moment the back of my mind doesn't have to handle precise throttle control I find my mind wandering and my spacial awareness is shot. I guess maintaining speed is the fidget spinner that keeps me focused on the task of driving.

Does anyone know of psychology studies that measure human reaction time and skill when sometime like autopilot is engaged most of the time? I remember taking part in a similar study at Georgia Tech that involved firing at a target using a joystick. It was also simultaneously a contest because only the top scorer would get prize money. The study was conducted in two parts. In the 1st phase, the system had autotargeting engaged. All subjects had to do was press a button when the reticle was on the target in order to score. In the 2nd phase, which was a surprise, autotargetting was turned off. I won the contest and my score was miles ahead of anyone. I can't fully confirm it but I feel this happened because I was still actively aiming for the target even when autotargetting was active.

Yes. That's been much studied in the aviation community.[1] NASA has the Multi-Attribute Test Battery to explicitly study this.[2] It runs on Windows with a joystick, and is available from NASA. The person being tested has several tasks, one of which is simply to keep a marker on target with the joystick as the marker drifts. This simulates the most basic flying task - flying straight and level. This task can be put on "autopilot", and when the marker drifts, the "autopilot" will simulate moving the joystick to correct the position.

But sometimes the "autopilot" fails, and the marker starts drifting. The person being tested is supposed to notice this and take over. How long that takes is measured. That's exactly the situation which applies with Tesla's "autopilot".

There are many studies using MATB. See the references. This is well explored territory in aviation.

[1] http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~archerj/Course%20Deliverables/IE%... [2] https://matb.larc.nasa.gov/software/

I don’t find that particularly challenging and in fact, when the autopilot is INOP, flights are slightly more mentally fatiguing because you have no offload and complex arrivals are much more work, but in cruise, you have to be paying attention either way. It’s not a time to read the newspaper, autopilot or not.

What I noticed that when I was following posted/safe speed limit, I was quickly losing focus, mind started wandering and eventually I felt I was falling asleep.

I do not remember what made me to speed up, but once I was about 30% faster than posted speed limits, and once I reached part of the way where road was quite bad + a lot of road work was happening, I realized that I much more alert.

As soon as I slowed down to posted speed limit speed I began drifting away again..

If anything, my anecdote confirms your theory - as soon as we perceive something safer, we pay way less attention. And Autopilot sounds like one of these safety things, which makes drivers less attentive and potentially missing dangerous situation, which otherwise would be caught by driver's mind.

I wonder if there is a way to introduce autopilot help without actually giving sense of security to the driver. Granted Tesla would lose so precious marketing angle, but if their autopilot would work somewhat like variable power steering system on background without obvious taking over control of the car, in the long haul that would be more beneficial?

I find rough motorway surfaces in my current vehicle induce heavy drowsiness at motorway speed limits (slight reduced at marginally higher speeds when the pitch is higher).

It's not a question of zero deaths, it's a question of reducing the number which means you need to look beyond individual events. Remember the ~90 people who died yesterday from a US car accident without making the news are far more important than a few individuals.

No we don't. Tesla likes to compare their deaths per mile to the national average. The problem is that their autopilot is not fit to drive everywhere or in all conditions that go into that average. There is no data to support that autopilot is safer overall. It may not even be safer in highway conditions given that we've seen it broadside a semi and now deviate from the lane into a barrier - both in normal to good conditions.

And really, driving conditions are responsible for a relatively small percentage of vehicle fatalities. Most often it's people doing really dumb things like driving 100+ MPH.

The only thing we actually know is these cars are safer on average than similar cars without these systems. That's not looking at how much they are used, just the existence of said safety system and likely relates to them being used when the drivers are extremely drunk or tired which are both extremely dangerous independent of weather conditions.

The US just mandated all new cars have backup cameras, but it seems like mandating AEB would make a bigger difference.

What do you know that the rest of us don't? The ones statistics I've seen on anyone's self-driving cars so far would barely support a hypothesis that they are as capable as an average driver in an average car while operating under highly favourable conditions.

I've been saying this for a while and it's interesting to see more people evolve to this point of view. There was a time when this idea was unpopular here--owed mostly to people claiming that autonomous cars are still safer than humans, so the risks were acceptable. I think there are philosophical and moral reasons why this is not good enough, but that goes off-topic a bit.

In any case, some automakers have now embraced the Level-5 only approach and I sincerely believe that goal will not be achieved until either:

1. We achieve AGI or

2. Our roads are inspected and standards are set to certify them for autonomous vehicles (e.g. lane marking requirements, temporary construction changes, etc.)

Otherwise, I don't believe we can simply unleash autonomous vehicles on any road in any conditions and expect them to perform perfectly. I also believe it's impossible to test for every scenario. The recent dashcam videos have convinced me further of this [0].

The fact that there are "known-unknowns" in the absence of complete test-ability is one major reason that "better than humans" is not an ethical standard. We simply can't release vehicles to the open roads when we know there are any situations in which a human would outperform them in potentially life-saving ways.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopilot_b...

The solution might be a system where the driver drives at a higher level of abstraction, but ultimately still drives. Driving should be like declarative programming. For example, the driver still moves the steering wheel left and right, but the car handles the turn. Or when the driver hits the breaks, which is now more of a on/off switch, the car handles the breaking. The role for the driver is to remain engaged, indicating their intention at every moment and for the car to work out the details.

Edit: On second thought, that might end up being worse. I can think of situations where it might become ambiguous to the driver of what they are handling and what the car is handling. Maybe autopilot is all or nothing.

I can't even drive an automatic transmission car without getting way too distracted at times

Glad I'm not the only doing it. When driving on a highway I increase or decrease my car's speed by 10-15 km every 10 minutes or so, so that this variation can help me keep attentive about my surroundings.

Not saying it invalidates your argument, just that there are pretty wide-reaching consequences to that idea.

I think people that say that "autopilot" is a bad name for this feature don't really understand what an "autopilot" does.

> Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars

> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

Whatever theory you have for Tesla's naming of their feature, it doesn't match with their marketing.

The page's title is "Autopilot | Tesla". It is the first result for "tesla autopilot" in search results. And "autopilot" appears 9 times on the page. So if that's not an intentional attempt to mislead consumers into conflating Autopilot with "full self-driving", then what would such an attempt look like, hypothetically?

That is damn crazy. You should consider your users to be complete idiots when improper use of the thing can endanger lives.

Why are we even debating this?

For this standard it would have to apply to every driver. Should drivers who do not google "Tesla autopilot", let alone ones that do and read on in a section about said autopilot feature, be punished with death in a two ton metal trap?

It doesn’t; what it does say is perfectly clear to me.

It remains an answer to "what would such an attempt [to intentionally mislead consumers] look like, hypothetically?"

This is actually harder to do then just driving the car.

Personally, I do not think calling Tesla's system 'autopilot' is the issue, but your claim that it is accurate is based on misunderstandings about the use of autopilots in aviation. It is not the case that their proper use puts airplanes on the edge of disaster were it not for the constant vigilance of the pilots.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/06/25/air_france_fli...

People who say that "Autopilot" is a bad name for this feature aren't basing it on an imperfect understanding of what autopilot does in airplanes. They're basing it on how they believe people in general will interpret the term.

The funny thing is that it is the same people who are arguing for self driving tech by saying that "Humans will do dumb shit", is the same ones who justify Tesla by saying "Humans should not do stupid things (like ignoring the cars warning)"..

They aren't going to literally fall asleep, but much of the time pilots are reading a book and not directly paying attention in the same way that a driver is.

Since then, air traffic control procedures have been improved to avoid these situations, but nowadays e.g. over the Baltic Sea, Russian military planes are routinely flying with their transponder turned off so that flight control does not know where they are. So, this risk is still there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Airwest_Flight_706#Prob...

Imagine the possible breaking components in that chain too. Bluetooth can fail, satellite can fail, cell can fail, WiFi can fail, a USB cable can fail, there isn't a single piece of connectivity technology that would make me confident enough to delegate alerts to another device.

There is also an inherent failure of alarms in general in that even very loud ones can be ignored if they give false positives even once or twice. There is a body of study trying to address it. Some of the most fatal industrial accidents occured because alarms were either ignored or even fully switched off. We aren't good with alarms.

I think the meat of it though is that unless Auto-pilot works perfectly then you can't leave it alone. And if you can't leave it alone then what's the point?

The sell for autonomous cars isn't that people are just so darn tired of turning the steering wheel that they would really rather not. It's that we could potentially be more productive if we could shift our full attention to work/study/relaxation while commuting.