Source? (I’ll believe it for Cruise.)
> human drivers can't comprehend or anticipate a driverless car hitting the brakes for no apparent reason
Human drivers tailgate. If you have a safe cushion in front of you, an erratic stop won’t cause a collision.
During a freeway slowdown I try to dampen the brake-waves by going slow and not braking so much, but if I leave too much space in front of me (for coasting), another driver moves in and we're back to playing accordion.
If all cars could sync up and move together like train cars on the freeway there'd be less brake dust and more efficient travel, but then I'd rather take a train anyway.
Every time I have to use the brake - rather than downshifting - for anything other than holding the car in place, makes me feel like I've committed a failure in planning and/or situational awareness.
stop caring about this and just slowly back off a little more.
someone else will eventually leave your lane in front of you and make up for it.
National Law Review (look it up or see associated link below).
>>> Human drivers tailgate. If you have a safe cushion in front of you, an erratic stop won’t cause a rear-end collision. <<<
That's the theory --- and the misinterpretation.
It's true that almost all human driver's tailgate at some point --- but they do so while being involved in half the accidents that self driving cars are --- 4.1 accidents per million miles versus 9.1 for driverless.
https://carsurance.net/insights/self-driving-car-statistics/
Your Carsurance source cites the National Law Review, which cites the Carsurance source for that statistic [1]. It’s important to consider from when they polled data and how they’re segregating by manufacturer.
EDIT: Found the study [2]. It’s for 2012 to 2015. Given these are decade-old data, I’m actually surprised the gap is only 2x while fatality and injury rates were already lower.
[1] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/dangers-driverless-cars
[2] http://websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2015-34.pdf
This is why in my state, if you rear-end someone then you are automatically presumed to be at fault. "They slammed on the brakes unexpectedly" is not a defense. You should have left adequate braking distance so that wouldn't cause an accident.
You absolutely should be expecting the driver in front to slam on the brakes at full force without warning. There’s an infinite number of things that could cause any driver - human or autonomous - to do this. If you drive without this expectation then you’re a very dangerous driver and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near you on the road.
It doesn't change the fact though that human drivers don't slam the brakes out of the blue because their "AI" got confused about nothing in particular, and that it is dangerous.
There is a world of difference in those word choices. Saying “no reason” certainly gives you an excuse to write a sanctimonious comment like this, but it’s misrepresenting what was said.
There’s a significant number of people who feel personally attacked by a car merging in front of them, despite the fact that a merging vehicle has right of way (in all countries I’ve ever driven in). There’s a video that keeps popping up on my Instagram where a car changes lanes, and the car behind has plenty of time to react and slow down slightly, but they instead crash into the merging vehicle intentionally without touching the brakes at all. Most of the comments side with the driver who caused the incident, not the merging vehicle who did nothing wrong.
Anyway, my point is, there are a lot of people who refuse to give space to merging vehicles, which increases the chance of these accidents happening (fraud or not).
If you put your ego aside and immediately back off when a vehicle in front merges, you’ll be far more likely to avoid this type of accident. Alternatively, if you tailgate a merging vehicle out of “principle” you’re just inviting an accident.
The fact that so many cannot is a great example of how driverless vehicles will easily surpass human drivers in the not-too-distant-future.
This is simply false. Brake checking is explicitly a traffic offense in some states, and can get you cited under something like reckless driving in some other states. Your insurance company is not obligated to find the other driver at fault if you're cited for brake checking.
Your reply is totally relevant in the context of someone blaming driverless cars for stopping when it doesn’t know what to do.
They literally have signs on them that say "warning, stops suddenly" , not a joke, literally
But braking for safety is always allowed and the person behind you is supposed to leave room to allow that.
It’s a little difficult from the description to know what a human would have done in the second car. Can’t tell how much time there was to stop.
Also, when driving behind someone you should always be prepared to stop. It doesn’t matter why the car in front stops.
What surprises me is that people didn't lift the car off her. 3-4 adults should be able to lift even an EV a few inches.
Summary:https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/paper-review-comparative-saf...
Google generally seems to be much more safety oriented than Cruise. The Cruise experiment should just be stopped at this point.
> Accidents per million miles driven for Waymo self-driving cars are 0.59, compared to the general U.S. rate of 2.98.
https://blog.gitnux.com/self-driving-cars-safety-statistics/
Furthermore, we should expect a constant stream of news headlines about self-driving cars being involved in accidents, even when self-driving cars are safer than humans because they are newsworthy and interesting. No one writes "dog bites man" articles, they just cover "man bites dog" stories.
The humans five times worse in that data. That is a very large gap. Even after adjusting for driving conditions, with a gap that large, self-driving cars are likely safer.
Also, don't assume a comparison is made in bad faith, just because it has flaws.
So to be clear, this is not a "flaw". This is a catastrophic, wrong from the get go, not mentioned and no effort made to control for, failure.
Deliberately misrepresenting data, or in the most charitable case, by sheer mass incompetence, when it involves the safety of people is never ok.
that's exactly why they are not allowed in all sorts of conditions! Where did this all-or-nothing demand come from? If a self-driving car shows less accidents than humans in Phoenix, why would you apply numbers from e.g. Montana, how is that apples-to-apples? and if it's shown safe in Phoenix conditions, why not let it run in Phoenix, just like the current approach?
Second, then use only data about human drivers in perfect situations to compare. Their accident rates also go down.
Unless the authors similarly recategorized the driver data that is suspect.
For instance 1.24 is the number of injuries per million miles for drivers so that doesn't sound like 2.98 excludes minor ones.
The reality is the jury is still out on self driving car safety. Driving a few million miles and extrapolating isn't terribly useful especially when you only drive at low speeds.
There is a hypothetical potential to reduce fatalities but it is still very hypothetical.
Here's what it does do:
- Links to: "ZipDo, cited June 2023: Self Driving Cars Safety Statistics". which is NOT a study, it's just a carbon copy of this website
- Links to website landing pages, like "https://www..deloitte.com"
- States "Statistics researched: 18", but never tells us what those were.
- Finally it has the most inane clearly ChatGPT written commentary:
> This statistic is a testament to the safety of Waymo self-driving cars
> This statistic is a powerful testament to the safety benefits of Tesla Autopilot technology
> This statistic is a powerful reminder of the potential life-saving impact that self-driving cars could have on our roads.
> This statistic is a stark reminder of the public’s apprehension
> This statistic is a powerful indicator of the potential safety
> This statistic is a powerful indicator of the public’s confidence
> This statistic is a testament to the progress being made
> This statistic is a testament to the safety of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles
Why wouldn't you even read the website you linked?
Oh well, at least you can take a free "Personality Leadership Test" to see if you're a stable diffusion version of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Elon Musk.
And opposers always ignore or brush off the fact that humans have proved themselves to be terrible drivers. A human driver ran over this woman first yet you didn’t even recognise this anywhere in your argument against autonomous vehicles.
As terrible as humans are we do have a very important trait. Being able to handle unexpected information efficiently.
All the current AI models do have ways of slightly generalizing but only slightly. You still need to effectively train "when there are cones you need to switch lanes" and "when there are barriers you can drive on the line" kinds of things.
And while yes everyone mostly talks about low stakes examples that is mostly because the high stakes ones haven't been handled by AI yet.
E.g. a Tesla driving under a semi because it thought it was a billboard.
I look forward to any replacement to human drivers (although eliminating cars from Metro areas would be much more efficient I digress..) but autonomous vehicles need to be better before they can be that.
People don’t like what they can’t understand. Most of the accidents caused by autonomous vehicles are weird and probably would have been avoided by human drivers. However, this isn’t the whole picture, because those same vehicles also avoided a bunch of accidents that humans would have caused.
My interpretation of the data is that autonomous vehicles are already statistically safer than human drivers.
Problem is, humans are emotional beings who aren’t always capable of pure rationale. If you tell someone they’re statistically safer in a Tesla, but it might accelerate into a wall at 60mph, many people won’t take that risk.
There hasn't been a ton of data especially in areas where the risk is important.
You’re joking right?
The human driver didn’t handle the “unexpected information” of a human being on the road when the light was green.
The human driver didn’t handle the “unexpected information” of running over a human being and drove off instead.
Humans are awful at unexpected information. This is exactly the moment that emotions take over and emotions are what makes humans really bad at tasks like driving.
The only way we have gotten any semblance of safety is "slam on breaks if unrecognized" which happens quite frequently.
At least half the people out there are terrible at this. We have expression like "deer in the headlights" to describe how they behave.
A jay walker in Arizona got ran over because "people are only in crosswalks" (I don't remember the company offhand)
Autonomous driving isn't automatically safer. Companies keep focusing on the potential for improved safety without technically claiming they are that much safer.
The potential is great but that means nothing. What matters is what we make.
https://westseattleblog.com/2023/03/crash-blocks-westbound-w...
Friend of mine just witnessed a crash the other day where a driver at a high rate of speed lost it on a wet corner and the passenger got ejected.
Americans drove 3.2 million million miles (aka trillion).
Comparing things that have managed in total barely 1/100,000th of a years usage means anecdotes don't matter.
Because there is at minimum one unavoidable aspect here: we don't know what accidents an AI could prevent and way way more importantly we don't have enough data on what accidents an AI would cause at highway speeds.
Insufficient data is available for how effective AI is at preventing accidents.
The Arizona one I gave for instance, the company was found not liable since a person might have done the same but could they have slammed on the breaks turning a fatality into an injury? We will never know and can never no.
The best we can do is measure real world performance and pay close attention.
exactly. you posted anecdotes.
Rear end accidents are practically always the fault of the person who didn't stop in time. If someone rear ends a driverless car, even if it stopped because of some glitch, that driver is at fault. They shouldn't be driving around city streets with such speeds and limited following distance that they couldn't stop in time.
If you refuse to drive safely you have no place to be on the road. We shouldn't just accept people driving in massively unsafe fashion.
This is based on a rosy interpretation that deflects the blame for most of the accidents they are involved in.
Self driving cars are in accidents much more frequently than human drivers. However, most of these accidents are rear end collisions --- naturally blamed on the human driver.
But the reason human drivers rear end self driving cars is the fact that these cars are programmed to hit the brakes any time they can't comprehend the current situation --- which apparently happens quite a bit.
The reality is, human drivers can't comprehend or anticipate a driverless car hitting the brakes for no apparent reason.