>I think the fundamental issue Musk has is that his cars can’t drive safer than even a below average driver.
No one in the public has enough data to say one way or another whether that is true and by presenting it as fact you are falling into the same trap that OP is warning about.
> I think the fundamental issue Musk has is that his cars can’t drive safer than even a below average driver.
Agreed.
> Oh wow, it can stay in a lane and match speed! So can every car manufacturer. They’ve got a level 2+ system and cars won’t be safer until level 4.
I don't find this to be true at all. ProPilot is terrible compared to AutoPilot and many of the other manufacturers have the same limitations (or worse).
I second this - recently rented a fully-loaded Nissan Rouge and drove for around 700 highway miles - the lane centering feature was just awful compared to my Model 3's. It would often times give up on even slight curves, or fight me when I would try to regain control after it misjudged a curve. After a while I gave up on it and just used the automatic cruise control, which worked fairly well.
This is frightening. I strictly limit where I will let AutoPilot operate because it is not at all relaxing unless you're on the open road with light traffic. If this is the state of the art, FSD is decades away.
The OP is simply stating the base case: cars without drivers shouldn't be safer than cars with drivers. The industry claims that their cars are safer without drivers because AI. The industry must provide the evidence for its very strong claim.
The fact that a majority of the public think it's the opposite way around, that skeptical opinions about self-driving cars must provide evidence, is the industry's succes- the triumph of marketing over reason.
Of course the industry has no such data. Research has shown that this data would take many decades to obtain:
Computers don't get board and start daydreaming (when I win the lottery where will the pool go in my mansion). Computers don't get distracted reading (ie facebook) while driving. Computers can have redundancy so the equivalent of a heart attack won't be endanger everybody (this assumes of course the redundancy works - computers have a lot of failure modes of their own)
There is plenty of opportunity for computers to be better than humans. It is a hard problem though.
At the risk of showing just how ignorant I am of current state-of-the-art AI, it feels like the biggest block with self-driving cars is how short their memory is and how little high-level logic is implemented. The computer doesn't feel like it's driving the car as an activity so much as simply responding to inputs as they come into sensor range, sometimes correlated, frequently not.
If you want to murder people on the roadway, there are lots of ways to do this that are easier than fancy adversarial attacks (which only fool one sensor type, at best... and are then patched).
The quarterly safety numbers that Tesla releases are difficult to draw conclusions from, because they do not represent a controlled experiment over the same road conditions. However here are the numbers for millions of miles per crash (higher is better).
With AutoPilot, Without AutoPilot but With Active Safety Measures, Without AutoPilot or Active Safety Measures, and NHTSA Average Vehicle
Those numbers are useless for concluding anything about what would happen if you remove the human completely, there are videos that show how the human intervened and saved the car from certain crash and I this situation should be counted as "Deaths" for the AI only column.
Driving assistants would improve safety certainly, but removing the driver and letting the assistant drive will need real world like tests, for now maybe you could have an independent group monitoring a number of Teslas and checking each time a human intervened and give a score on how bad the AI was.
Actually I’m not convinced assistants will improve safety.
Level 4 for example could be a blood bath, where cars drive all the easy situations, and hand over emergency control to out of practice drivers barely paying attention at a moments notice.
I believe our driving skills were better when we had manual transmission, and were more involved in overall operation. Hard to determine if safer, b/c of advances in crumple zones, airbags, etc as manual declined.
The extremely sad part is that we could reduce the number of deaths until true AI arrives using simple tech that could detect if the driver is drunk or tired, and controversially forcing the speed limits(the car knows that this road is max 90Km/h and that the driver has less then 1 year experience so it will not let you get over 70 (local laws apply) unless you activate emergency mode - this would trigger some bad consequences if it was no emergency)
Good to see improvement, but is this controlled for the fact that autopilot is mostly on highways? I'm not sure what the crash rate per mile is on the highway vs driving in a city.
I use autopilot even on small roads even if it's not designed for it. After V10 it also handles roads without a centre line just fine.
However I do pay attention and keep my hands on the wheel, I think autopilot + human is much safer than either one, but since the latest updates I rarely have to take control if not going in roundabouts or junctions.
I also had one instance a few weeks ago where I tried to enter another lane manually and the car took control from me and put me back in my lane as there was someone in my blind spot without their headlights on so I didn't see it.
That sounds promising. OTOH, my car tried to drive into a tractor-trailer a couple weeks ago. That was a momentarily interesting experience. It seemed to become confused by the onramp merge joining my travel lane (pretty normal for autopilot to screw this up), but then it "realized" the mistake and dove for the other lane. I haven't been as happy with v10 as I was with v9.
I would bet a body part on it being way lower, especially if we do not limit it to fatal crashes only (I read that statistic quoted above as "all reported crashes", not just those with fatalities).
I had two crashes in my lifetime. Both occurred when driving backwards out of a parking lot. No fatalities, limited damage. Good luck finding such situations while driving on a highway...
That's not how this works. If the cars are safer, there should be independent data that shows this. As it is, we get one-sentence "safety reports" from the manufacturer with a single data point. They're not safer by default because the manufacturer says so.
The claim was that Tesla’s system is not safer, and that only level 4 would increase safety. I asked if data supported those two independent claims.
I’m ok if we assume that things are unsafe before we have evidence they are safe, but that’s not the same as declaring they are unsafe without evidence.
The current situation is somewhere between the two: There have been some crashes (e.g. Boca Raton) that strongly suggest there is a dangerous systemic problem.
In such cases, demanding statistical confirmation that it is a significant problem (as NASA did with the O-ring erosion problem) is not the right response. It reminds me of a case in the building of the 688 class submarines: a cracked weld, that had supposedly passed multiple inspections, was found in part of the torpedo-handling equipment. At that point, all welds, including pressure-hull welds, became suspect.
That article describes a systematic design defect of Tesla’s system. (It’s a defect that all camera based systems have. They are designed to ignore stationary objects because they can’t adequately distinguish background objects from obstacles.) Car and Driver tested this last year, and the Tesla ran into the stationary dummy nearly every time. This is something humans have almost no problem dealing with.
It has been a problem, but it is definitely not an intrinsic defect of camera based solutions. The stopped truck example has been examined in depth with rooted Tesla's. The Tesla actually detects the truck, but fails to fully recognize the scenario and attempts to drive under it! See also, greentheonly's work on Twitter on researching this.
Ignoring some stopped objects is only a temporary limitation.
I said it was a systematic defect camera based systems share, not that it was intrinsic to camera based systems. Camera based systems have much less information about object positioning than LIDAR based systems. They filter out non-moving objects because the vision processing algorithms are not sophisticated enough to distinguish between the background and obstacles. If they stopped for stationary objects in the road, they’d routinely stop because they mistook the background for a stationary object.
That may or may not be a temporary limitation. It depends on whether vision processing becomes reliable enough where you can almost always distinguish an object in the road from an object in the background.
I'll echo that. Heavy rain, I could barely see the lines, but the car seemed to find them just fine and was driving straight and smooth.
Until traffic on the other side of the median barrier hit a big deep puddle, absolutely covering my car with a thick sheet of water. Autopilot immediately started screaming at me to take control. I already had my hands on the wheel, but it still scared me because I couldn't see either! After the water washed a way in a couple seconds, I was able to re-enable AP and keep going.
That link does not provide data either way. In fact it explicitly declares its inability to do so:
“Cars driven under traditional human control are currently involved in approximately 1.18 fatalities for every 100,000,000 mi (160,000,000 km) driven.[3] According to many automotive safety experts, much more data is yet required before any such clear and demonstrably higher levels of safety can be convincingly provided”
Oh wow, it can stay in a lane and match speed! So can every car manufacturer. They’ve got a level 2+ system and cars won’t be safer until level 4.