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Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by CSMastermind on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @05:30PM (#38005925)
The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven).

Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.

This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.

And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.

Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.

Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.

Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.

Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by BobaFloutist on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @05:57PM (#38006243)
Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.

In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet.

But people haaaaate that idea.

Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by whelp_24 on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @07:15PM (#38007002)
I doubt it. Both of these methods are very intrusive.
Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by ENGNR on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @07:20PM (#38007043)
Mostly because I think it would glitch and get the speeds wrong

If it was 100% accurate and you couldn’t get a speeding ticket if it was active I’d be all for it

Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by Cyphase on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @07:57PM (#38007403)
> prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit

I initially read this as "20% of the speed of light", and though you were being sarcastic.

Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by Vecr on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @10:08PM (#38008318)
Yeah, because need to be able to use your vehicle to escape pursuers and also as a ramming weapon. I assume police would get an exception from this rule, but they don't actually have more of a legal right to use their vehicle as a weapon than anyone else, they are just less likely to be questioned on their judgement of the situation as an emergency by the DA. Probably also a second amendment violation, but the Supreme Court might be too originalist (and not textualist enough) to buy that argument, as cars did not exist in the decades surrounding the founding.
Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by Dylan16807 on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @11:03PM (#38008668)
Did you mean exceeding the speed limit by 20%?

Because what you actually said is true too, and hints at why "it would be safer" is not a good enough reason to implement something.

Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by vel0city on Wednesday October 25, 2023 @10:54AM (#38013474)
I'm fine with it notifying the driver it thinks you might be speeding, but I don't like the idea of actually limiting the speed of the car. I've used several cars which had a lot of cases where it didn't track the speed right. Driving near but not in a construction zone. Driving in an express lane which has a faster posted speed than the main highway. School zones. I've seen cars routinely get these things wrong. A few months ago I was on an 85 MPH highway and Google Maps suddenly thought I was on the 45 MPH feeder. Add 20%, that's 54 MPH max speed. So what, my car would have quickly enforced the 30 MPH drop and slam on the brakes to get it into compliance?

I'd greatly prefer just automatic enforcement of speeding laws rather than doing things to try and prevent people from speeding.

Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by BobaFloutist on Thursday October 26, 2023 @11:34AM (#38026975)
Honestly I would think something like transponders on every freeway would work better than GPS. Regardless, I think everyone in the thread could think of 10 technological ways of making this work. I think the biggest barriers are political, not logistical, and definitely not engineering.
Re:California suspends GM Cruise's autonomous vehicle deploy... by vel0city on Friday October 27, 2023 @11:29AM (#38039794)
So we spend a ton of money putting in transponders and readers in cars which still have various failure modes, or we just put cameras on the highways and intersections and say "car with tag 123123 went from gate 1 to gate 2 in x minutes, those are y miles apart, average speed had to be > speed limit, issue ticket to 123123".

The toll roads could trivially automatically enforce speed limits. They already precisely know when each car goes through each gantry, they know the distance between each gantry, so they know everyone's average speed.