And someone rear ended me the other day because they didn't notice cars were stopping. Yes, self-driving cars make mistakes, but humans make all sorts of mistakes, too.
The question is, do self driving cars have more accidents per mile (or more damage per mile/injuries per mile/ deaths per mile) than human driven cars?
"activating auto steer increased crash rate by 50%"
Tesla safety stats are ok when compared to the average car on the road. But that's because they are expensive, high quality cars driven by middle aged people. It's the safest car demographic on the road. When comparing auto drive teslas to equivalent luxury cars they look terrible. Though i think if you ignore the autodrive they're perfectly good cars.
They are absolutely not "less safe", because they are all human driven cars.
Why not say the rest of your argument with the fact that cruise control made cars "less safe than human driven cars" because people fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road.
Self-driving cars don't take risks when they make mistakes while humans are exposed to physical or legal consequences that are well understood by everyone on the road.
I know self driving cars feel different to us now, but they aren't really different in kind, just degree. I am sure people felt these concerns when cars were introduced in general.
It should matter if they have less, but in the real world it doesn't matter, because it's "scary" to be rear-ended by an unthinking machine, and business as usual to be rear-ended by a clumsy human, so people will always hold machines to a much higher standard.
Human makes a mistake, they could have been tired, distracted, got something in their eye, or anything else.
Machine makes a mistake, it becomes a question of why and will it make that same mistake every time?
This is very much a solvable problem.
If your standard is that self driving must be perfect then i'd argue you're being unreasonable.
If your standard is that self driving cars must be better than that is something that can easily be tested.
"Teslas" do not "run into the backs of car carriers".
I don't know where you are repeating that from, because you've clearly never driven one, but the core concept of autopilot is that the human should step in whenever a situation is confusing and/or dangerous. If the car does not recognize a situation it will always alert the driver to take over.
The parent poster was referencing this, which I found immediately using Google:
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1231834/tesla-mode...
Meanwhile, Teslas run into the backs of car carriers because they only recognise the car it's carrying and not the truck bed extending behind it. It might react faster, but it needs to identify the danger first and up until now, it's much worse at that in many situations.
Yes, you're right, once it's safer, it's safer. That makes your statements just as vacuous as theirs.