/devils advocate

False positives are dangerous. Trying to detect ‘Anything’ may result in more deaths than hitting the tiny number of exceptions.

Alternatively, the system would be overly flakey and hard break all the time.

Slowing down is a lot safer than plowing into a stationary object at high speed. This is so obvious there must be something missing to the conversation.

Self driving cars are going to be driven a lot, so something that’s a 1/10,000 risk that happens every week to 1 million cars is going to happen every day.

Self driving cars need to have a threshold before hard breaking. Hard breaking is risky, it can cause serious accidents. Reducing that threshold thus increases some risks even if it lowers others.

So, now we need to balance a risk of say ~1/10,000,000 per car per year vs what? I don’t know what changing those thresholds would result in, but I do know it’s not free and there would be false positives.

Everything you wrote is plausible or true, but the fact remains slowing to a stop is the best choice unless the obstruction is tiny. That’s what a human would do. There might be a possibility of changing lanes but that is next level.

How often are bolders in the road?

As software engineers, we can understand the hidden costs in complexity and bugs when implementing features that don't need to be implemented. I could imagine that false positives for bolder avoidance causing more harm than false negatives.

Obviously it should be smart enough to detect any and every obstruction, but I'd rather the 99% use case get ironed out first.

> How often are bolders in the road?

as someone who has driven all over the west , all the time.

You have New Mexico and Arizona that believe that steep incline cliff faces on both sides of the highways are a fashion statement, states like California, Washington, and Oregon that like to build new properties on rapid-eroding mountainsides, and states like Nevada that simply don't patrol sparsely populated highways -- and are simply ignorant to the boulder some kids rolled into the street some weeks back.

All anecdotal, but i'm a fairly heavy driver and I see them commonly.

I agree that false positives are to be avoided -- but that doesn't really lessen the value in boulder-avoidance ; it just brings up yet another point to worry about with the system as a whole.

Because false positives would cause dangerous accidents as well.

And worse (heavy cynism ahead): they would make the car look stupid even when not causing an accident, whereas boldly plowing into whatever might or might not be an obstacle makes the car look strong and confident, right until it looks all bent and crumbled. Car sales are incredibly marketing driven and a self-driving implementation that routinely chickens out of ambiguities that look easily solvable to humans would be a worse marketing problem than twice the number of accident investigations Tesla is facing.

Because it's a Level 2 system, and it doesn't actually know how to drive a car.

Similar to how cruise control (Level 1) doesn't know how to drive a car. Yet people are willing to put up with the concept that it causes some accidents.

Doesn’t need to. It needs to slow to a stop when approaching a large stationary object, car or not.

That's a level 3 requirement, not level 2.

It’s a simple requirement, I don’t care about the number. In fact it is the only feature I want out of such systems.

Ah. Well, no one offers that feature currently. In fact, are you aware that a typical automatic emergency braking system will always hit the thing in front of you if you're going faster than 45mph? That is if it sees it at all.