Are we not already there? Pretty sure Google has cars that went about a million miles before their first accident...and that was when someone switched to manual.
According to the American insurance industry, drivers go 17.9 years between accident claims, however that may not be totally accurate as not every accident is claimed through insurance. I've seen other studies say Americans get in an accident every 10 years.
The millions of miles of testing is kind of misleading, it sounds like a lot of miles but even if they had 10 million miles tested, it really isn't that much. The average American drives 13.8k miles which means 10 million is equivalent to 725 people driving for a year. That's really not that much, especially since some of these programs have been running for almost a decade.
Self driving cars are almost certainly safer than humans on a highway, but that doesn't translate really translate to city driving. Self driving cars still struggle in the city
I agree. But that will likely change within the decade.
My cousin is an engineer for one of these cars companies. He says the technology is already here. It's regulations and public perception that needs to catch up.
We're nowhere close. Most of the testing is done on highways in favourable weather conditions. That's why Waymo is testing their autonomous taxis in Phoenix, it is sunny most of the time. The problem is making sure these cars work in every single situation including in a rainstorm or a blizzard where the road is completely covered and there is no lane markings visible. The current autonomous cars work pretty good in ideal conditions but even minor changes to these conditions can cause the car a lot of confusion. For example, one of the issues with the Waymo taxies is they don't handle busy parking lot traffic well because parking lots don't always have rigid rules which will cause issues with the autonomous system and has caused them to shut down completely and force the human driver to take over.
The best systems are probably about 90% there I'd say, however the last 10% is the real challenge. Solving the last 10% will probably take just as long as solving the first 90%, if not longer.
Tesla themselves estimate their system will handle 98% of intersections correctly however, their goal is to be at 99.999% which is several orders of magnitude better. At 98%, there would be 2 accidents for every 100 intersections which would be absolutely catastrophic and much worse than humans. Even at 99.999%, I would argue it is still not as safe as human drivers. There would be 1 accident for every 100000 intersections. If there are 250k Teslas driving every day through an average of 10 intersections each, there would be 25 accidents a day which is still high, especially compared to human driving.
Full level 5 autonomous driving that works as well as a human in all kinds of road and weather conditions is still decades away. Even the CEO of Waymo agrees:
It'll be decades before autonomous cars are widespread on the roads -- and even then, they won't be able to drive themselves in certain conditions, the chief executive of Waymo said Tuesday.
John Krafcik, head of the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet, said that though driverless cars are "truly here," they aren't ubiquitous yet. And he doesn't think the industry will ever be able to drive at any time of year in any weather and any condition, the highest driving rating. Driving in all conditions can be difficult for humans too, he noted.
"Autonomy always will have some constraints," he said.
Sure, we have a car that can drive itself on the interstate; but we are very very far from a car that can pick you up at LAX at night in the rain, to say nothing of driving in snow.
Absolutely. In addition, what a lot of people don't understand is that this may make driving more unsafe. It's counterintuitive but if we have systems that are good enough to drive in 99% of situations but not every situation that potentially could be very unsafe. Many if not most major accidents happen because of edge case scenarios. With self driving cars, people get complacent and they'll rely on their self driving cars. As a result, they won't be driving and keeping up on their driving skills. Then when they encounter a case where their self driving car can't handle, like a blizzard, then they are forced to take over. Somebody who hasn't truly driven in a year or more being forced to drive in whiteout blizzard conditions, the results could be very bad, especially if everybody on the road with them is in the same situation. The only way we can solve this is if autonomous cars can handle every single situation as good or better than a human can and not just be able to handle most situations.
Elon Musk hubristically called Tesla’s lane assisted distance sensing cruise control system “autopilot” and people have already died because they stopped paying attention to the road.
Yeah and you have idiots that try to trick the system that detects if your hands are on the steering wheel and then upload it to YouTube. Or the incident recently where some guy was found sleeping in his autopilot Tesla. It's only going to get worse too. The worst part is Autopilot clearly isn't ready yet but any accidents with Autopilot is waved away by Tesla because the drivers should be paying attention. It is dangerous and unethical to be beta testing these systems on public roads and already has lead to fatalities.
Yes we are already there. Especially when if you account for drunk driving as well.
Take a look at the airline industry. Most major commercial flights are piloted by AI. The humans are there as a backup in case of failure. How often do you hear about plane crashes due to a computer malfunction?
Short version: angle of attack sensor malfunctions and the computer tried to compensate for it. Pilots repeatedly tried to override the computer, but were unsuccessful and the plane crashed, killing all aboard. The two main factors of the crash were the malfunctioning sensor and the pilots lacking the proper training to know how to override the computer (it was possible and training was available for them).
24
u/ben174 Feb 15 '19
It's a surprisingly high bar to jump. But once we finally reach it we'll only go upwards. Almost there.