I am skeptical of that, because I expect that even if disconnects are ultra-rare overall, and the testing is representative of normal usage, there will be enough people that frequently use the technology in ways far off on the tail of the distribution that for them, disconnects will be much less rare. And that might create a PR blowup or worse.

I think what is worrying me may be something called "heteroscedasticity".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity

But fully self driving cars only have two inputs: starting point and destination. Doesn't matter whether you are old, sleeping, 13 or a dog. Unless some roads are more susceptible to accidents than others, or manufacturers let people also fiddle with how much a car should risk accidents in order to get a little decrease in travel time, I don't see any way possible. And if manufacturers really do give that option, it's truly their fault.

You have to be very old for this to be true.

It turns out that 16-25 years old is worse than any group until something like 75-80 years old.

I feel like it's the opposite... When I drive the speed limit, other drivers around me become more aggressive. Even if they have to exit the highway 20 seconds later they fiercely fight for tiny speed differences of 10km/h, start flashing their headlights, etc.

If you are driving during rush hour where everyone is stressful, then idiots will flash headlights, do risky behaviour, etc, that's true. And yeah, driving slightly over the speed limit to be consistent with the traffic around you is generally a good idea. But if they are too much over the limit, it's their doing, not mine, and if the risky behaviour causes an accident in which I'm involved, it won't be my fault if I'm following the rules. Conversely, no judge will accept it as an argument if you speed because of the idiots and you cause an accident.

I personally just let the idiots be idiots. Especially when the limit has a cause, e.g. a construction site or something: they put a lower speed limit for the safety of the construction workers. I won't compromise their safety, not a bit.

But on (sub)urban streets driving the speed limit decreases the chance of causing serious injury to other road users, including pedestrians, even if it may lead to an increase in the total number of crashes between motorists.

(Note that while I work at Google, I don't have any particularly relevant inside knowledge. What I'm saying is consistent with their current pilot in Phoenix and public articles.)

By chance do you happen to live somewhere without icy roads?

But I too am hopeful that machines are better than human drivers in all scenarios.

Well, guess what, those guys are still on Reddit making snarky comments and the Dropbox guys have IPO'd.

But fair play for playing with the analogy. Funny.

Yes, people who can't live in pleasant places will not get some tech early. C'est la vie. We'll get there.

If Uber and Tesla continue with their current plans, they will have enough accidents that self-driving cars being in accidents will cease being headline news. They just become an actuarial math problem, just like regular car insurance is today.

(This is my opinion and not that of my employer.)

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-rep...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/12/we-finally-talked-to-an...

Maybe humans shouldn't be making left turns in traffic or passing trucks either. Those are probably, statistically, the most dangerous things you can do when driving. But we do them all the time, because we have no idea how dangerous they really are.

Currently, they can’t do any of that better than humans, and probably not for several years.

I strongly suspect that the quest for a low disengagement number is what got that woman in Arizona killed by Uber. These reports really should be sealed from the public. AV startups seem to be using their disengagement rate as a way raise money. They are aided by journalists hungry to make sense of a highly secretive field publishing these figures completely out of context.

The Uber self-driving program was trying to move too fast, before the software was ready. That and the operations failure made it inevitable that someone was going to be killed.

Yeah, the public has no right to know what vehicles on public roads are capable (or incapable of).

And we wouldn't want pesky innocent deaths to impede with Uber's ability to "bring self driving to market"...

This report covers disengagements following the California DMV definition, which means “a deactivation of the autonomous mode when a failure of the autonomous technology is detected or when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that the autonomous vehicle test driver disengage the autonomous mode and take immediate manual control of the vehicle.” Section 227.46 of Article 3.7 (Autonomous Vehicles) of Title 13, Division 1, Chapter 1, California Code of Regulations.

Waymo has developed a robust process to collect, analyze and evaluate disengages for this report. We set disengagement thresholds conservatively for our public road testing. The vast majority of disengagements are not related to safety. Our test drivers routinely transition into and out of autonomous mode many times throughout the day, and the self-driving vehicle’s computer hands over control to the driver in many situations that do not involve a failure of the autonomous technology and do not require an immediate takeover of control by the driver.

To help evaluate the safety significance of disengagements, Waymo employs a powerful simulator program. In Waymo’s simulation, our team can “replay” each incident and predict the behavior of our self-driving car if the driver had not taken control of it, as well as the behavior and positions of other road users in the vicinity (such as pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles). Our engineers use this data to refine and improve the software to ensure the self-driving car performs safely.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/42aff875-7ab1-4115...

They can ship a product that can drive under the conditions they're testing under. Which would be appropriate for autonomous taxi service in certain municipalities, but presumably not for the general market.

Granted, that's been their business plan for a while now.

My perhaps false recollection was that Waymo disengagements had flatlined 2017 to 2018.

[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2019/02/12/disengagem...

If they really are doing this well with non-freeway driving, then that just tells me they could have released freeway driving about 4 years ago.

I agree with your statement about Tesla’s marketing of self driving. My Grand Cherokee isn’t so far off their mark. It has lane assist, adaptive cruise control with stop, parallel and back in parking. I’d bet Jeep could do summon and more stuff on the highway.

What self driving product do they have? Elon's "Oh yeah, we will have full self driving coast to coast in [8 months]" is horseshit to the point of "How is he allowed to say this on an earnings call?"

Other competitors, widely recognized to be ahead of Tesla estimate 5, more likely 10 YEARS. Coast to coast? Your Tesla will navigate a Pittsburgh winter storm on poor roads in Level 5 autonomy... this year? No.

So then we're with "sophisticated driver assist". Actual products you can buy with sophisticated driver assist are sold by: Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Chrysler...

My Jaguar has: adaptive cruise, four way sensors, lane assist, including ability to prevent you from changing lanes if a blind spot obstruction is noted, adaptive front lighting and high beam assist, driver condition monitoring (detects multiple 'drift', lane departure events or sub-optimal braking), traffic sign recognition and adaptive speed limiting, rear traffic monitoring including the ability to avoid, if possible, full auto parking, and so on.

Those cars do not steer themselves. The difference between having to steer the car and not having to steer the car is extreme.

It totally changes the way you drive. Instead of looking down your lane and keeping the car centered, you scan all around you and keep situational awareness of the drivers around you while the car keeps itself in lane. It’s a totally different experience.

Assuming you keep your hands on the wheel as required what exactly is the difference? I only found it to be a distraction as it takes me considerably longer to reengage (in less than expected situations) as the human driver after a period where I just let go a little.

I don’t have any “reengagement lag” as you might say. When I want to start steering the car again I just start steering. There is a slight resistance felt in the wheel if you turn past the autopilot without flipping the right stick up to explicitly disengage AP first.

It’s significantly nicer to drive long stretches with this system, but I can’t imagine doing it without your hands on the wheel. When the sensors fail (weather or poor lane markings), you need to be able to take over immediately. Granting too much autonomy to the system is just too risky (and the point of the article).

Not trying to be rude, but that is nothing at all like driving with AutoPilot.

[1] - https://youtu.be/iKWBdySgssE

Tesla has effectively incorporated Lane Keep Assist/Automatic Cruise Control into a single product called Autopilot that has vastly better software than other similar products.

Simply put, if other companies had a product that would have allowed for billions of miles to be driven hands free feet free, they would have it, but they do not, not even close. Tesla does.

I'm not sure the last time (actually I am - it has not) my car treated a roundabout with a shallow center median as "entirely optional, follow the circle or go straight over", but I can find multiple videos of Teslas doing that.

The two cars I've driven that are modern (2017 and 2018 Audi and Jaguars) also didn't hit a big white pickup truck in broad daylight in parking mode, but I've seen Teslas doing that, too.

So, how are we defining "bunch of worse products"? "Less advanced, but better tested"? If that's the case, I think I'll take that.

Do you actually drive your car hands free and feet free for more than 30 seconds ever?

Fairly certain in many cases that's illegal. And apropos of anything else, doesn't Tesla itself require steering wheel contact/torque every 15 seconds?

Is it? This[1] implies that, contrary to what you say, most other manufacturers do offer equivalent features in equivalent luxury vehicles. Tesla might have gotten beaten many of them by a year or so, and might sell more Xs than Toyota sells high-trim Lexus's, but neither of those things really say anything about the quality of the driving technology. And from what I've seen, Tesla's isn't particularly spectacular.

[1]: https://www.cars.com/articles/which-cars-have-self-driving-f...

I have a self-driving automotive product you can buy. It doesn't work as advertised, either.

Calling a lamb's tail a leg doesn't make for a five-legged farm animal. This reminds me of the conversations about, say, phone authentication using facial identification. "Samsung had it before FaceID!" Yeah, I had one of those Samsung phones. It did not do what it said on the tin. So, yeah, Tesla has a product you can buy, but it is not a self-driving vehicle despite what they might tell you.

It's not full self driving but it definitely is driving it self and providing value.

Stop coming at me with Waymo is 10 years ahead of Tesla... Ok great, are they shipping & delivering any value to paying customers? Waiting.......

In 5 years time, do you really think Waymo will have paying customers and have gained regulatory approval? Hell no...

Tesla at least realizes they can't get passed the regulatory hurdle. Keep driver at the wheel, provide a value, automate and refine.

The best thing is that as much as people want to argue on the internet about "which is better", it is somewhat inevitable they'll both succeed in their own way. Waymo will eventually crack the nut for Level 5 autonomous driving with Lidar just like Tesla will crack the nut for their full self driving (defined as driving from the east to west coast without any involuntary disengagements) with machine vision. I actually (potentially incorrectly) suspect Tesla will win this war first as they simply have a multiple of any competition when it comes to amount of driving data. How many more hundreds of millions of miles has Tesla autopilot logged compared to Waymo? Reminder: Tesla is building ~5,000-6,000 cars per week and tends to sell them pretty well. Their data moat only continues to widen. Once they figure out the right models for really pulling it off, they'll make HUGE leaps with the data they have. Some nights, my Model 3 will upload 10G of data up to Tesla. Hopefully, it is from Shadow Pilot to train the fleet.

TL;DNR: There is nothing stopping both Tesla AND Waymo from solving full self driving using competing technology and different approaches. It is an exciting time to be alive!~

I call the same thing you call it, apparently.

And if you don't mind me asking, how would you quantify in real money the value added by the system?

I wouldn't quantify the value in real money. I would say the main benefit provides is that I have much less decision fatigue and am less stressed after my commute. I also don't care how fast I really get there anymore since I just optimize for less stress, and my trip is enjoyable.

The other main value I commonly see overlooked is safety from distracted people. If we can assume people are going to keep texting and driving ( they are ), would you want them to do it while actually driving or with this system engaged?

Then you're not engaged. It's scientifically proven that your brain is no longer alert if you are not constantly engaged. And you can't be magically less stressed by decisions while being fully engaged and alert in order to verify each of those decisions. It's like saying a calculator makes you life easier because you no longer have to calculate yourself to get the result, you only have to calculate yourself to verify the result.

You're either less stressed because your mind simply offloaded tome tasks to the car contrary to the law and common sense, or you're actually engaged and your brain is doing what any driver would normally do so the whole effect is placebo. Which is cool I guess but this last one can be had for a lot less.

Driver assists are there as a backup, not to rely on them to do what you no longer feel like doing because it's too stressful. And if you feel less stressed letting a pretty dumb AI (compared to a human driver) with poorer eyesight than yours to drive you around you must be a pretty laid back person anyway.

...Then what is the point of that system?

Tesla's 'self driving' is incredibly dangerous because it puts the driver in a set of conditions that make it very difficult to maintain attention on the road. And yet the driver must be able to take over from the 'self driving' system with subsecond warning if things go awry.

That's not value adding, that's a huge risk. I would not use that system even if someone offered to install it for free in my car.

Tesla's autopilot is a marketing twist on lane keeping adaptive cruise control - a technology available in almost every car at a similar price point. It is not a step towards actual autonomy.