Mostly the message is that regulators shouldn't be investing their resources in checking if the car breaks too often (from false positive in obstacle detection) because the car company has strong incentive to reduce unnessary breaking or driving would be unpleasant and slow for a large portion of the drivers.

The regulators should only test for false negatives, where the car should have stopped, but did not detect the obstacle (false negative), because there, it is a clear threat to safety, and the car company's incentive, while definitely still present, is less pure, as the amount of false negatives is a direct trade off with the quantity of false positives (because it is a treshold: a minimum confidence level from which you decide that there is indeed something in front of the car and you need to break), which make driving more awkward for 99% of drivers

Does any regulator actually give a damn about a self-driving car braking too often?

The persistent use of "break" instead of "brake" is difficult for me in this specific context.

This comment page has dozens of this misspelling. I'm used to it on reddit, I thought the HN crowd is more intelligent than reddit...

The TL;DR as I read were

1. Regulators want aggressive breaking but carmakers want smoother driving

2. Manually tuning all the edge cases for cases where the software is uncertain what's happening will lead to fragile monolith black boxes

Aggressive random braking is also a safety issue.

Yep, this is the thing that worries me the most on some of these systems right now. They are going to get rear-ended a lot for the next few years, IMO.

Rear ends have basically no fatality rate though. They do have material costs but if optimizing for no loss of human life it sounds more appealing.

These kind of tradeoffs were things every self-driving car software developer KNEW they were going to have to deal with - the most extreme being the one where the software has to decide who to kill and who to save:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/technolo...

And rules out use on snowy roads.

Why? Brakes works fine on snowy roads. Distances can be adjusted for snowy roads. It happens every winter where it snows a lot. I don't see a problem.

Not sudden random braking, no. The most important advice for driving on slippery surfaces is to avoid sudden braking, and in general to be careful when you brake.

That'll teach people to keep their damn distances!

I second the motion.