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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

(www.reuters.com)
410 points jjulius | 4 comments | 18 Oct 24 16:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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AlchemistCamp ◴[19 Oct 24 17:17 UTC] No.41889077[source]▶
The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it.

It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.

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akira2501 ◴[19 Oct 24 17:40 UTC] No.41889249[source]▶
> traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable.

It's completely acceptable. In fact the numbers are lower than they have been since we've started driving.

> Accidents caused by human drivers

Are there any other types of drivers?

> are one of the largest causes of injury and death

More than half the fatalities on the road are actually caused by the use of drugs and alcohol. The statistics are very clear on this. Impaired people cannot drive well. Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better.

> technology that could save lives

There is absolutely zero evidence this is true. Everyone is basing this off of a total misunderstanding of the source of fatalities and a willful misapprehension of the technology.

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1. blargey ◴[19 Oct 24 17:56 UTC] No.41889370[source]▶
> Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better.

That raises the question - how many impaired driver-miles are being baked into the collision statistics for "median human" driver-miles? Shouldn't we demand non-impaired driving as the standard for automation, rather than "averaged with drunk / phone-fiddling /senile" driving? We don't give people N-mile allowances for drunk driving based on the size of the drunk driver population, after all.

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2. akira2501 ◴[20 Oct 24 00:58 UTC] No.41892049[source]▶
Motorcycles account for a further 15% of all fatalities in a typical year. Weather is often a factor. Road design is sometimes a factor, remembering several rollover crashes that ended in a body of water and no one in the vehicle surviving. Likewise ejections during fatalities due to lack of seatbelt use is also noticeable.

Once you dig into the data you see that almost every crash, at this point in history, is really a mini-story detailing the confluence of several factors that turned a basic accident into something fatal.

Also, and I only saw this once, but if you literally have a heart attack behind the wheel, you are technically a roadway fatality. The driver was 99. He just died while sitting in slow moving traffic.

Which brings me to my final point which is the rear seats in automobiles are less safe than the front seats. This is true for almost every vehicle on the road. You see _a lot_ of accidents where two 40 to 50 year old passengers are up front and two 70 to 80 year old passengers are in back. The ones up front survive. One or both passengers in the back typically die.

3. kelnos ◴[20 Oct 24 10:24 UTC] No.41894391[source]▶
No, that makes no sense, because we can't ensure that human drivers aren't impaired. We test and compare against the reality, not the ideal we'd prefer.
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4. akira2501 ◴[20 Oct 24 17:26 UTC] No.41896967[source]▶
We can sample rate of impairment. We do this quite often actually. It turns out the rate depends on the time of day.