Re:Waymo's collision avoidance testing
by ryanwaggoner on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @05:31PM
(#33991622)
I think you’d use crashes, not fatalities.
Re:Waymo's collision avoidance testing
by cipheredStones on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @05:46PM
(#33991849)
> The modern Level 2 car is already today at below 1 fatality per billion vehicle miles travelled (VMT)
Does this statistic count fatalities to people outside the car? I ask because (in the US, at least) car safety ratings don't take those into consideration.
Re:Waymo's collision avoidance testing
by rootusrootus on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @05:52PM
(#33991921)
> in the US, at least) car safety ratings don't take those into consideration
Which ratings? The NHTSA does include non-occupant fatalities in their statistics. E.g. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-traffic-crash-data...
Re:Waymo's collision avoidance testing
by cipheredStones on Friday December 16, 2022 @04:40PM
(#34020827)
NHTSA safety ratings (https://www.nhtsa.gov/ratings) only count people in the car. It looks like they proposed a change to that this spring (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/five-star-safety-rating...), but I don't think they've implemented it yet. From that press release:
> For the first time ever, [the proposed rating program] includes technology recommendations not only for drivers and passengers but for road users outside the vehicle, like pedestrians.
News story on this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/3/22960262/nhtsa-ncap-five-s...
The modern Level 2 car is already today at below 1 fatality per billion vehicle miles travelled (VMT). The autonomous car then needs to be below 0.1 fatalities per billion VMT. Meaning that if you have 1 million vehicles of your make deployed, they each need to have driven 30-40 000 miles autonomously before you have enough statistics!
That means proving the safety of a Level 4/5 autonomous system is extremely expensive and slow, and requires significant public adoption before it's proven to be safe. The consequence is that, assuming proven safety is necessary before public adoption, it becomes impossible to prove safety.
Another point is that OTA upgrades for autonomy become entirely pointless, as you'll be polluting your statistics if you change the code more frequently than every ~3 years.