You cannot, that's the simple truth. You're supposed to focus on the road anyways and should be able to take over once any sort of autopilot or assist system starts working erroneously, yet in practice many people simply assume that those systems being there in the first place mean that you can simply stop focusing on the road altogether.
It feels like the claim of "fully self driving vehicle" is at odds with actual safety, or at least will remain so until the technology actually progresses far enough to be on average safer than human drivers, moral issues aside. Whether that will take 15, 50 or 500 years, i cannot say, however.
That said, currently such functionality could be good enough for the driver to take a sip from a drink, or fiddle around with a message on their phone, or even mess around on the navigation system or the radio - things that would get done regardless because people are irresponsible, but making which a little bit safer is feasible.
Maybe, as you say, it's feasible today or soon to better handle brief distractions but once you allow that it's probably dangerous to assume that people won't stretch out those distractions.
Which means people are either paying enough attention or these self driving systems are quite good. My suspicion is it’s a mix of both, where people tend to zone out in less hazardous driving conditions and start paying attention when things start looking dangerous. Unfortunately, that’s going to cause an equilibrium where people pay less attention as these systems get better.
Do we? Where does that come from? The data Tesla provides is hopelessly non-representative because it makes the assumption that the safety of any given road is independent of whether a driver chooses to switch on the system there.
Comma.ai makes the monitoring more strict when the system is less certain or when in denser traffic.
So I wonder if it's more about Telsa capitalizing on the hype of self driving cars (with the expensive self-driving add-on) in the short term and less about him misunderstanding the magnitude of difficulty.
Telsa is using the proceeds from that add-on to make them seem more profitable and fund the actual development. It's smart in some aspects, but very risky to consumers and Telsa.
I still wonder to what degree this was a collective delusion based on spectacular but narrow gains mostly related to supervised learning in machine vision, how much was fake it till you make it, and how much was pure investor/customer fleecing.
Obviously that's not exactly the same thing as taking over for a real car when the driver assistance features give up, but seems similarly challenging to take over the controls at the most precarious moment of travel, without being sort of "warmed up" as a driver.
Anyway, perhaps I'm in a minority here, but I feel as though my driving has gotten _significantly safer_ since getting a Tesla, particularly on longer road trips.
Instead of burning energy making sure my car stays in the lane I can spend nearly all my time observing drivers around me and paying closer attention farther down the road. My preventative and defensive driving has gone up a level.
> I just don't understand how you can have a "self driving car but you must but be ready to put your hands back on the steering wheel and your foot on the pedal(s)".
I've not hit animals and dodged random things rolling/blowing into the road at a moment's notice. This isn't letting autopilot drive, it's like a hybrid act where it does the rote driving and I constantly take over to quickly pass a semi on a windy day, not pass it on a curve, or get over some lanes to avoid tire remnants in the road up ahead. I'm able to watch the traffic in front and behind and find pockets on the highway with nobody around me and no clumping bound to occur (<3 those).
To your suspicion, it is a different mode of driving. Recently I did a roadtrip (about half the height of the USA) in a non-Tesla, and I found myself way more exhausted and less alert towards the end of it. Could be I'm out of habit but egh.
Anyway, so far I've been super lucky. I don't think it's possible to avoid all car crashes no matter how well you drive. But I _for sure_ have avoided avoidable ones and taken myself out of situations where they later occurred thanks to the extra mental cycles afforded to me by auto-pilot. My safety record in the Tesla is currently perfect and I'll try and keep it that way.
I don't think autopilot is perfect either but I do think it's a good tool and I'm a better driver for it. Autopilot has definitely helped me spend better focus on driving.
Also, your subjective impressions may be what they are simply because you have not yet encountered the unlucky set of conditions which would radically change your view, as was surely the case for all the drivers involved in these sorts of incidents.
I wouldn't want my, strangely enough upvoted a lot, comment, to be mistaken for Tesla hate. I like what they're doing. I just think the auto-pilot shouldn't give a false sense of security.
> I've not hit animals and dodged random things rolling/blowing into the road at a moment's notice.
> I don't think it's possible to avoid all car crashes no matter how well you drive.
Same here... And animals are my worst nightmare: there are videos on YouTube just terrifying.
For I do regularly watch crash videos to remind me of some of the dangers on the road.
You're talking about Autopilot which is just driver assistance technologies; lane keep assistance, adaptive cruise control, blind spot monitoring, etc. It's not to replace driver attention, it's just monitor sections of the road the the driver can't pay attention to full time. The driver is still remaining in control and attentive to the road.
The person you're responding to seems to be talking talking about the Full Self Driving feature who's initial marketing implied that the driver need not be mentally engaged at all or too impaired to drive normally. Which was later back pedal led to say that you need to pay attention.
However, I also once so far have experienced what happens when this system experiences a poorly-marked construction zone. Whilst most construction sites on the interstate system place temporary road lines for lane shifts, this one solely used cones. While I was paying attention and never left the flow of traffic, the car actually fought a little bit against me following the cones into another lane, because it didn't see the cones, it was following the lines.
It doesn't surprise me at all that if someone gets too comfortable trusting the car to do the work, even if they think they're paying attention, they could get driven off the roadway.
How do automated systems deal with flaggers? Visibility of the stop/slow sign isn't sufficient to make a determination on whether it's safe to proceed (not to mention "stop" changes meaning here, entirely, from a typical stop sign). Often, whether or not you can proceed comes down to hand gestures from the flagger proper.
Not that I expect any reasonable driver to be using something like autopilot through such a situation, but we've also seen plenty of evidence that there are unreasonable drivers currently using these systems, as well.
Of course, the problem is, if we haven't developed it today, the ADAS systems of today won't understand it in ten years when there's enough saturation to be practical to use it. Apart from Tesla, very few car manufacturers are reckless enough to send OTA updates that can impact driving behavior.
Lane-following ADAS systems of today, mind you, can work relatively fine in construction areas... provided lane lines are moved, as opposed to relying solely on traffic cones.
A mesh network of vehicles on the road would add the ability for vehicles to become aware of far more than a human driver can ever know. For example, if cars become aware of a problem a few km/miles ahead, they can all adjust speed way before encountering the constriction in order to optimize for traffic flow (or safety, etc.).
Of course, this does not adequately deal with pedestrians, bikes, pets, fallen trees, debris on the road, etc.
Not saying cars would exclusively use the mesh network as the sole method for navigation, they have to be highly capable without it. The mesh network would be an enhancement layer. On highways this would allow for optimization that would bring forth some potentially nice benefits. For example, I can envision reducing emissions through traffic flow optimization.
Remember that electric cars still produce emissions, just not necessarily directly while driving. The energy has to come from somewhere and, unless we build a massive number of nuclear plants, that somewhere will likely include a significant percentage of coal and natural gas power plants.
The timeline for this utopia is likely in the 20+ year range. I say this because of the simple reality of car and truck ownership. People who are buying cars today are not going to dispose of them in ten years. A car that is new today will likely enter into the used market in 8 to 10 years and be around another 5 to 10. The situation is different with commercial vehicles. Commercial trucks tend to have longer service lives by either design or maintenance. So, yeah, 20 to 30 years seems reasonable.
It just makes the trips easier on the brain, and thus, for me, safer overall: its easier to see the overall situation when you've got free mental capacity
Does it always get this correct, or does it sometimes read a 30mph sign on a side road and then slow the car on the motorway down to that speed?
Since I bought my car, Illinois (where I live) has raised the maximum limit on interstates by 10 MPH. My car doesn't know about it. If my car limited me to what it thought the limit was, I'd probably be driving 20 MPH slower than prevailing traffic, a decidedly unsafe situation.
It’s hard to imagine how speed limit systems would work without some sort of vision capabilities — a database of speed limits would never be up to date with roadworks and so on.
If you drive on a 60mph speed limit highway, no one is driving 60mph, everyone is going around 70mph. If you decide to use autopilot and it limits you to 60mph, you singlehandedly start disrupting the flow of traffic (that goes 70mph) and end up becoming an increased danger to yourself and others.
Not even mentioning cases when the speed limits change overnight or the map data is outdated or if a physical sign is unreadable.
For specific numbers (after subtracting reaction distance being the same for both):
55mph: car 165ft, 16-wheeler 225ft. 65mph: car 245ft, 16-wheeler 454ft.
As you can see, the gap between a car's stopping distance and a 16-wheeler's stopping distance increases with speed increasing, and non-linearly at that. Not even mentioning the destructive potential of a car vs. a 16-wheeler.
I would agree with your point if majority of the roads were occupied by 16-wheelers, but it isn't the case (at least in the metro area that I commute to work in).
Source for numbers used: https://trucksmart.udot.utah.gov/motorist-home/stopping-dist...
Note: I agree that it would be safer if everyone drove the exact speed limit, as opposed to everyone going 10mph above the speed limit. However, in a situation where everyone is driving 10mph above the speed limit, you are creating a more dangerous situation by driving 10mph slower instead of driving 10mph above like everyone else.
This is a situation that you simply shouldn’t put yourself in. There is no reason to ever drive right next to a large vehicle, on either side, except for very short periods when overtaking them on a straight road.
I think you're far more likely to see L4 on limited access highways in good weather. A robotaxi service in a major city seems much more problematic given all the random behavior by other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. and picking up/dropping off people in the fairly random ways that taxis/Ubers do. (And you'll rightly be shut down 6 months for an investigation the first time you run over someone even if they weren't crossing at a crosswalk.)
And for many people, including myself, automated highway driving would actually be a much bigger win than urban taxi rides which I rarely have a need for.
Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their technology regularly, and for that reason alone, should be assumed unsafe. A former employee expressed disappointment they weren't the first self-driving car company to kill someone, because that meant they were behind.
California only months ago opened up permits for paid robotaxi rides. So no, they couldn't have launched it in CA. If you've noticed, they actually are testing in SF with a permit.
> Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their technology regularly, and for that reason alone, should be assumed unsafe.
What lies? Their CA disengagement miles are for everyone to see, their safety report is open, they have had 0 fatalities in their years of operation. Seems like you just made this up.
Well, yeah, that's the logic of an established business. Disruptive startups flout laws rather than following them.
Later, they were talking about how sophisticated their technology was: It can detect the hand signals of someone directing traffic in the middle of an intersection. Funny that a few months later, a journalist got an admission out of a Waymo engineer that the car wouldn't even stop at a stoplight unless the stoplight was explicitly mapped (with centimeter-level precision) so the car knew to look for it and where to look for the signal.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/08/28/171520/hidden-ob...
The article is seven years old at this point, but it's also incredibly humbling in how much bull- Waymo puts out, especially compared to the impressions their marketing team puts out. (Urmson's son presumably has a driver's license by now.)
In at least one scenario, the former Waymo engineer upset he had failed to kill anyone yet ("I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death"), caused a hit-and-run accident with a Waymo car, and didn't report it to authorities, amongst other serious accidents: https://www.salon.com/2018/10/16/googles-self-driving-cars-i... Said star Waymo engineer eventually went to prison for stealing trade secrets and then got pardoned by Donald Trump. Google didn't fire him for trying to kill people, they only really got upset with him because he took their tech to Uber.
I'd say Waymo has a storied history of dishonesty and coverups, behind a technology that's more or less a remote control car that only runs in a narrow group of carefully premapped streets.
How is a marketing video relevant from 2015 relevant to their safety record? They weren't even operating a public robotaxi service back then.
> My understanding is that in 2021, it still can't navigate parking lots (which would preclude using it for drive-thrus).
Completely false. Here is one navigating a Costco parking lot (can't get any busier than that) [1]. If you watch any videos in that YouTube channel, it picks you up and drops you off right from the parking lot. Yes, you can't use it for drive-thrus, but it doesn't qualify as "lying about capabilities".
> Later, they were talking about how sophisticated their technology was: It can detect the hand signals of someone directing traffic in the middle of an intersection. Funny that a few months later, a journalist got an admission out of a Waymo engineer that the car wouldn't even stop at a stoplight unless the stoplight was explicitly mapped (with centimeter-level precision) so the car knew to look for it and where to look for the signal.
Here is one recognizing a handheld stop sign from a police officer while it stopped for an emergency vehicle [2].
Seeing as car crashes are the leading cause of deaths from people aged 1-54, it may be an improvement from the status quo
More than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on U.S. roadways. The U.S. traffic fatality rate is 12.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. An additional 4.4 million are injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Road crashes are the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people aged 1-54.
This isnt true according to the CDC. Cancer and heart disease lead for the 44-54 group, and while "accidental injury" does lead from 1-44, if you break down the data, in many cases vehicle based accidents are not not the largest single source. For example:
Drowning is the largest single cause in 1-4
Cancer is the largest single cause in 5-9
Suicide is the largest single cause 10-14
For example, couldn't emergency vehicles could send out a signal directly to autonomous vehicles or via a traffic managagemnt system to slow down or require the driver to take over when approaching. An elementary version of this is Waze which will notify you of road hazards or cars stopped on the side of the road.
To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just don't understand how you can have a "self driving car but you must but be ready to put your hands back on the steering wheel and your foot on the pedal(s)".
I have nothing against many "recent" safety features, like the steering wheel shaking a bit if the car detects you're getting out of your lane without having activated your blinker. Or the car beginning to brake if it detects an obstacle. Or the car giving you a warning if there's a risk when you change lane, etc.
But how can you react promptly if you're not ready? I just don't get this.
Unless it's a fully self-driving car, without even a steering wheel, a car should help you focus more, not less.