No one in the public has enough data to say one way or another whether that is true and by presenting it as fact you are falling into the same trap that OP is warning about.
Agreed.
> Oh wow, it can stay in a lane and match speed! So can every car manufacturer. They’ve got a level 2+ system and cars won’t be safer until level 4.
I don't find this to be true at all. ProPilot is terrible compared to AutoPilot and many of the other manufacturers have the same limitations (or worse).
I second this - recently rented a fully-loaded Nissan Rouge and drove for around 700 highway miles - the lane centering feature was just awful compared to my Model 3's. It would often times give up on even slight curves, or fight me when I would try to regain control after it misjudged a curve. After a while I gave up on it and just used the automatic cruise control, which worked fairly well.
This is frightening. I strictly limit where I will let AutoPilot operate because it is not at all relaxing unless you're on the open road with light traffic. If this is the state of the art, FSD is decades away.
The fact that a majority of the public think it's the opposite way around, that skeptical opinions about self-driving cars must provide evidence, is the industry's succes- the triumph of marketing over reason.
Of course the industry has no such data. Research has shown that this data would take many decades to obtain:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html
Personally the only justification I've heard for self-driving cars being safer is "computers are faster than people". Yes- but at what?
There is plenty of opportunity for computers to be better than humans. It is a hard problem though.
Faster at making the right decision - and the wrong decision too.
If you want to murder people on the roadway, there are lots of ways to do this that are easier than fancy adversarial attacks (which only fool one sensor type, at best... and are then patched).
With AutoPilot, Without AutoPilot but With Active Safety Measures, Without AutoPilot or Active Safety Measures, and NHTSA Average Vehicle
19Q3 - 4.34 2.70 1.82 0.50
19Q2 - 3.27 2.19 1.41 0.50
19Q1 - 2.87 1.76 1.26 0.44
18Q4 - 2.91 1.58 1.25 0.44
18Q3 - 3.34 1.92 2.02 0.49Driving assistants would improve safety certainly, but removing the driver and letting the assistant drive will need real world like tests, for now maybe you could have an independent group monitoring a number of Teslas and checking each time a human intervened and give a score on how bad the AI was.
Level 4 for example could be a blood bath, where cars drive all the easy situations, and hand over emergency control to out of practice drivers barely paying attention at a moments notice.
I believe our driving skills were better when we had manual transmission, and were more involved in overall operation. Hard to determine if safer, b/c of advances in crumple zones, airbags, etc as manual declined.
Level 4 requires that the vehicle safely stop in situations it can't handle.
The extremely sad part is that we could reduce the number of deaths until true AI arrives using simple tech that could detect if the driver is drunk or tired, and controversially forcing the speed limits(the car knows that this road is max 90Km/h and that the driver has less then 1 year experience so it will not let you get over 70 (local laws apply) unless you activate emergency mode - this would trigger some bad consequences if it was no emergency)
However I do pay attention and keep my hands on the wheel, I think autopilot + human is much safer than either one, but since the latest updates I rarely have to take control if not going in roundabouts or junctions.
I also had one instance a few weeks ago where I tried to enter another lane manually and the car took control from me and put me back in my lane as there was someone in my blind spot without their headlights on so I didn't see it.
I had two crashes in my lifetime. Both occurred when driving backwards out of a parking lot. No fatalities, limited damage. Good luck finding such situations while driving on a highway...
(that's data from the highest crash rate country where you were able see so many crashes that you develop a feel)
I’m ok if we assume that things are unsafe before we have evidence they are safe, but that’s not the same as declaring they are unsafe without evidence.
In such cases, demanding statistical confirmation that it is a significant problem (as NASA did with the O-ring erosion problem) is not the right response. It reminds me of a case in the building of the 688 class submarines: a cracked weld, that had supposedly passed multiple inspections, was found in part of the torpedo-handling equipment. At that point, all welds, including pressure-hull welds, became suspect.
It can't even handle intersections.
Ignoring some stopped objects is only a temporary limitation.
That may or may not be a temporary limitation. It depends on whether vision processing becomes reliable enough where you can almost always distinguish an object in the road from an object in the background.
And I'm saying that even that is incorrect. Here is a Tesla failing to stop: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1134987596508143617 - The driver clearly noted that aiming for a less clear spot (dangling wires) triggered a stop.
Here is another example, in which greentheonly has used root to overlay what the car sees: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1135011184439169024 - It sees the truck but is treating some of the space under it as drivable space.
Another view, with more details on what the car considers drivable vs non-drivable: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1134490014321131521
Also, a clear case where it did stop: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1134489977801334784
The Tesla system has limitations around object identification, but absolutely does NOT just filter out non-moving objects.
Humans have weaknesses too. What do the data say on their relative performance? I’m not taking a position here, just asking for data.
Its about as easy as driving gets. This is why a level 2 "autopilot" can parade around the place as something that is both innovate and safe.
None of the data compares what happens at junctions, which is where the majority of crashes happen.
It cannot work in suburban sprawl, It can't cope with poor weather, it can only drive on highways.
I was fully engaged and ready to take over, but never needed to.
Until traffic on the other side of the median barrier hit a big deep puddle, absolutely covering my car with a thick sheet of water. Autopilot immediately started screaming at me to take control. I already had my hands on the wheel, but it still scared me because I couldn't see either! After the water washed a way in a couple seconds, I was able to re-enable AP and keep going.
“Cars driven under traditional human control are currently involved in approximately 1.18 fatalities for every 100,000,000 mi (160,000,000 km) driven.[3] According to many automotive safety experts, much more data is yet required before any such clear and demonstrably higher levels of safety can be convincingly provided”
Anecdotes:
"I might be too drunk to drive, but I'm sober enough for my Tesla to drive."
And every Tesla driver I see engaged in two-handed cell phone operation with no hands on the wheel.
Oh wow, it can stay in a lane and match speed! So can every car manufacturer. They’ve got a level 2+ system and cars won’t be safer until level 4.