These are great points. I would add that part of societal buy-in might involve driving the cost of hiring cars down by automating them, though I realize at the moment Waymo can charge a premium because people prefer to not have a human driver. Over the long term autocars should be cheaper than either Uber or owning a car yourself.

>you also have to have societal buy-in.

Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.

> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad."

I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.

Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc.

It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.

Does that skew really matter? Nearly all of those conditions are avoided by autonomous vehicles.

My tesla has yet to ask for a road beer while in FSD.

> The majority of drivers are good

Well, 80% of us believes ourselves to be above average, so there's that.

> Life in USA is extremely car-centric

Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.

Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited.

But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.

Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.

>all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.

They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.

It does. About the same amount of money was spent in funding for Waymo as funding SFMTA over the period Waymo has existed.

We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies.

I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.

Public transit is too often a jobs program

AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.

> The most likely scenario at this point it:

> - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents

> - so either insurance will be cheaper for them

> - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up

If they were going to do that, they would have done it by now for those drivers opting into the insurance monitor device: they can literally tell that you're a driver that never took a risk, never got into a situation to brake hard, never drove recklessly, etc, and yet, the insurance cost with the device is only slightly less than the insurance cost without the device.

In any case, if this was strictly a financial decision, why would the human cost go up? The larger the percentage of SDVs there are on the road, the less likely a human driver gets into an accident, their risk goes down too, so their insurance should also go down.

I expected this to happen a few years ago, but I think I was over optimistic. Now, who knows? Maybe it will finally start to make a difference.

Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?

Driving yourself will become like horse riding, something you do on private property for sport rather than transport.

And the wage slaves lose even more freedom and autonomy.

Waymo is already self-insured so if they have an advantage it's already on their balance sheet. In California nobody is going to get a discount for having ADAS software because we encoded into the state law in the 1980s, part of a long magical thinking campaign by boomers, that insurance companies can't use that type of thing to set prices.

> so either insurance will be cheaper for them

lol

Who's saying they don't? One good thing doesn't negate another

There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers:

> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]

I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.

1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...

Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.

The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.

The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.

An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally.

The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.

I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip.

Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.

The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.

I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.

It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.

Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?

Which autonomous vehicle company has that as their motto?

"Move fast and break things" looks obviously bad for an autonomous vehicle ...

That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.

It's also easier to do shared housing but part of it is just that people like having their own personal dedicated space to exist in even if it's not the most efficient answer.

And trucking. But jobs.

And it'll negatively impact all but the upper classes. Automakers would rather everyone use their autopilot taxi services for the higher profit margins, so autopilot EVs will be prohibitively expensive to outright buy.

This will be a gradual process. But probably getting a drivers license will become a lot less common for people over time. There won't be any need once cars drive themselves.

Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers.

This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer.

As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.

I think the vast majority of voters will have something to say about that.

Also, the autonomous car companies will have their vehicles coordinating to make it difficult for humans to drive, such as holding a long convoy with close following distance in a single lane.

OpenPilot and comma.ai are very close to a bolt-on after-market solution; not FSD 14 quality but you can get a lot of autonomy and intelligence with a $1000 Android device and thirty minutes for installation.

Probably won't happen for many years, they need quite a lot of power to use the current AV tech.

The articles I've read on this have said it's murky because of obfuscation of reported data by self-driving companies.

The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."

My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.

I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?

I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.

Self driving can be safer even if it's less competent because it can just be programed to be more risk adverse, always keep safe stopping distances and slow down when the conditions are adverse. A human driver _might_ be more skilled in driving through a snow storm but the self driving car just slows down and ends up safer.

Most drivers take absurd risks that negate any possible skill advantage.

Agreed.

I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar).

I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider.

They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.

We've done(ish) the first 80%: long straight roads and grid cities in south USA getting 350 days of sun per year.

The last 20% will be tough. There are 1.3b vehicules in the world, most of the aren't in the US, most places will need a complete infrastructure revamp before autonomous cars can even dream to drive there

There's no legislated standard in the US, nor pre-sale verification that a vehicle has met most of the other automotive standards. That's just not how the US regulatory environment works.

There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.

Real world data results are so much more important than an obstacle course to overfit for.

While I would like to see that just for the data, from a regulatory standpoint all we really need are the manufacturers being liable in a crash if their cars were driving. The insurance savings of their cars being safer will create the incentive they need.

If it’s anything like my San Francisco DMV driving test, they did a loop around Fell and Oak St (both one way streets with no opposing traffic).

I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.

You're old enough that isn't a worry for you. If your grandkids have cars as a hobby they might have to use a track rather than public roads.

Growing proof that comment sections from tech forums have been overrun with unhelpful negativity unrelated to the actual posts they're commenting on.

Yeah, and it should not be understated how bad only having autonomous cars would be for privacy and security conscious folk.

A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.

If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.

You cannot deny the evidence though, driverless cars are safer per-mile than human drivers on average. 1/100 deaths in the United States are due to car accidents, even shaving off 10% of those would save ~4000 people per year.

But.. what if it's true? It's like not wearing a seat belt, or smoking, or drinking while driving. If AV are widely available it becomes similarly opt-in high risk behavior.

I hadn't thought about it like this, but I think I want the grassroots version of the PR campaign. Society was finally able to rein in smoking when we collectively realized how dangerous secondhand smoke is. People who smoked indoors and exposed loved ones to an early death weren't bad people, but creating societal pressure to feel bad about doing that has saved a lot of lives.

You are more likely to kill someone driving your huge SUV than you are taking a Waymo. Driving your own car certainly doesn't make you a bad person, but I hope self-driving cars will be ubiquitous and safe in the future. When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now.

If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.

And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.

Your us vs them mentality regarding cars is really strange. You've previously said you think bicyclists are the "worst people".

Reminds me of that scene from I Robot where Will Smith was not supposed to drive his car himself.

Many boomers hated antilock brakes, but insurers gave discounts for having them on your car anyway. I think it’s likely going to be a similar thing with self driving.

Even today, I don’t like the intrusiveness of the insurance monitors you can install on your car today and I am willing to forgo that discount to keep my privacy.

Thanks for clearly stating the danger - your point is reasonable

<posted from phone while driving through red light>

There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.

Tesla did something sneaky just few days ago. They added crash avoidance even when FSD is not enabled, but purchased. So in future if they add pay-per-mile option (great for road trips) you'll likely still keep paying for monthly since it offers additional protection even if you prefer driving yourself (which is lol).

Thats too much of an honest assessment. An age old playbook. I'd like the tech do actually do things that are hard for me, like taking control of the car in a high stress situation. Sub-milisecond reactions to correct for a mistake. Something, anything more useful than a fancier cruise control.

The knee-jerk conspiratorial reactions to new technology is depressing to see on HN. Do better.

GPS not nearly that reliable. There's a reason drones are moving towards computer vision rather than purely relying on GPS. The physical signs won't glitch out and show 100m offset because a tall building was reflecting GPS signals.

Maybe in a 100% automated system we would replace the icons with QR codes or something but physical markers will likely be here to stay.

> The cars know where they are

not if they're in a tunnel or a highrise canyon, or there is weather-related interference, or the maps have not been updated to reflect reality, or there is a detour for construction, etc.