Driverless cars need to be able to operate at all hours, in all seasons, and in all climates and conditions.
If it is considered to be "not safe to operate at night" then the article's title of "Driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers" is working out of cherrypicked conditions in cherrypicked locales.
San Francisco and Phoenix (the places cited in the article) are not representative of the conditions for a significant part of the United States.
Would you rather take a human taxi from Minneapolis airport to Lake City at 6pm on December 1st or a driverless one?
You don't need to begin by solving the universe.
First, this is a fallacy: "products have no value unless they meet the performance of their competition in every possible use case" is simple not true and never has been.
And it's wrong anyway. FSD on my Model Y does great on unlit night time roads in the mountain west. So unless you're positing something special about the "Midwest" I don't see the issue here.
And in fact it's wrong in silly ways. That's not the hard part! Following the pavement is the easy bit, and the car does it more or less perfectly. Where it has trouble is in urban traffic. It's timid[1], it makes poor long-term lane planning choices (i.e. if there's a long line waiting for a left turn it will try to "go around" in the right lane and then get stuck), it will occasionally refuse to pass construction cones if it can't model out what's supposed to happen, it sometimes will slow down to "avoid" cars that are technically on collision courses but will "obviously" stop (e.g. cars on the opposite side of the road pulling into middle turn lanes -- the Tesla hates that).
There's clearly work to do. But it's not the work you think needs to happen, and in particular it's not in areas that impact "safety" in the way you're imagining.
Frankly at this point I'm more comfortable on the roads, especially on the highways, with FSD doing the microdriving for me than I am driving myself. The contention of this article matches my experience more or less perfectly.
[1] A recent regression is that it really doesn't like oncoming motorcycles and will slow down inexplicably for them where it's just fine with the cars in the same lane.
I'm waiting for a car that is able to handle https://www.kttc.com/2022/11/29/current-minnesota-iowa-road-... without having cell phone connectivity in night time conditions because that more closely resembles my evening commute for a season of the year.
Driverless cars may be good for commuting in cities... and highway miles, and fair weather trips (I'd be curious to see someone go driverless all the way to a ski resort in the winter when you need chains on the tires to go on I-80).
It may be good for all the driving needs for much of the population. But it's not categorically shown to be safer than human drivers (which is what the article is about) outside of the carefully crafted and restricted areas.
I can't take a driverless car to go see my parents for Christmas (rural road, midwest, no cell phone coverage for 25% of the route)... or for them to come visit me - and that's where the driverless car would have a great deal of value if it was safer than me driving there.
If you're going to be in the car, why? I mean, what if someone offered you a car that would drive you around except in comically cherry picked conditions of unplowed roads during active snowstorms? Drive yourself if there's snow on the ground[1].
This just seems like a specious and silly argument about vehicle autonomy to me.
[1] Or, in fact, don't. Because that shit's dangerous and you know it, no matter how much you protest that the upper midwest is cold. Stay off the roads in snowstorms and let the emergency crews clear the roads, it's their job.
I'll accept "driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers when driving in urban conditions in San Francisco or Phoenix."
No problem.
The unqualified statement however - I haven't seen anything saying (or even attempting to claim) that it is safer than humans when driving in Minneapolis at 5pm on December 1st, 2023.
I'm still waiting for the unqualified statement to be attempted to even see if it holds up.
When the automobile was first introduced it couldn't drive far from gas stations, it needed oil changes at garages that didn't exist yet and you couldn't drive to a far away town that didn't have a gas station. It got better.
I could tell that same story about laptops, or airplanes or boats or washing machines or even the electrical and water supply to your house.
All products get better over time, but even now there are hundreds of millions of people that live in places that simply don't need all the stuff you mentioned, so for them a self-driving vehicle is already extremely useful.
It's even possible the product will be "finished" and your use case will never be satisfied, because it isn't deemed important enough to include. For example, I recently drove a vehicle 1,050 miles on the world's most remote road [1]. 99.99999% of all vehicles sold in the entire world can't make that drive because they can't carry enough fuel. Just because I wanted to do it with a vehicle, that doesn't mean auto manufactures are going to suddenly add duel fuel tanks to all vehicles.
(FWIW, the Land Cruiser 70 series comes from the factory with dual 90 liter diesel tanks, and can drive the road end to end no problem directly form the factory. So ONE manufacturer decided it was worth satisfying that hyper specific use case, but obviously the others do not)
Yes, you have a use case that the product doesn't do yet.
Yes, it likely will in the future.
Yes, you will have to wait.
> it couldn't drive far from gas stations
You could buy gasoline at a pharmacist.
> it needed oil changes at garages that didn't exist yet
You were expected to to it yourself. This 1909 manual describes how for a Model T: https://archive.org/details/ford-price-list-model-t-1909/pag...
I suspect local bike mechanics and blacksmiths could also do this work.
Given your recent drive, you might like to read about the first drive across the US, in 1903 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson_Jackson .
All of the demonstrations I've seen so far have been restricted to well mapped city roads where there's no snow or climate originated navigational hazards worse than fog.
While getting it working for Seattle to San Diego, Phoenix, Texas and maybe New York City... I want to see it in December in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Denver.
The existing 80% solution of the major metro areas in favorable climates may be good, but the flip side of Pareto is that the remaining 20% of time takes up the next 80% of the allocated budget.