While many social media users are blaming the pedestrian for reportedly crossing against the light, the incident highlights the challenge autonomous driving faces in complex situations.
In December, Waymo safety data—based on 7.1 million miles of driverless operations—showed that human drivers are four to seven times more likely to cause injuries than Waymo cars.
From your first article.
Cruise, which is a subsidiary of General Motors, says that its safety record “over five million miles” is better in comparison to human drivers.
From your second.
Your third article doesn’t provide any numbers, but it’s not about fully autonomous vehicles anyway.
In short, if you’re going to claim that their track record is actually worse than humans, you need to provide some actual evidence.
Edit:Here’s a recent New Scientist article claiming that driverless cars “generally demonstrate better safety than human drivers in most scenarios” even though they perform worse in turns, for example.
If you just look a pure numbers, sure, you can make it sound good. When you go look at the types of accidents, it’s pretty damning. Waymo and Cruise both have a history of hitting parked cars and emergency vehicles. Tesla Autopilot is notorious for accelerating at the back of parked emergency vehicles.
The issue is not the overall track record on safety but how AV accidents almost always involve doing something incredibly stupid that any competent, healthy person would not.
I’m not personally against self driving cars once they’re actually as competent as a human in determining their surroundings, but we’re not there yet.
The issue is not the overall track record on safety but how AV accidents almost always involve doing something incredibly stupid that any competent, healthy person would not.
As long as the overall number of injuries/deaths is lower for autonomous vehicles (and as you’ve acknowledged, that does seem to be what the data shows), I don’t care how “stupid” autonomous vehicles’ accidents are. Not to mention that their safety records will only improve as they get more time on the roads.
From your first article.
From your second.
Your third article doesn’t provide any numbers, but it’s not about fully autonomous vehicles anyway.
In short, if you’re going to claim that their track record is actually worse than humans, you need to provide some actual evidence.
Edit: Here’s a recent New Scientist article claiming that driverless cars “generally demonstrate better safety than human drivers in most scenarios” even though they perform worse in turns, for example.
If you just look a pure numbers, sure, you can make it sound good. When you go look at the types of accidents, it’s pretty damning. Waymo and Cruise both have a history of hitting parked cars and emergency vehicles. Tesla Autopilot is notorious for accelerating at the back of parked emergency vehicles.
The issue is not the overall track record on safety but how AV accidents almost always involve doing something incredibly stupid that any competent, healthy person would not.
I’m not personally against self driving cars once they’re actually as competent as a human in determining their surroundings, but we’re not there yet.
As long as the overall number of injuries/deaths is lower for autonomous vehicles (and as you’ve acknowledged, that does seem to be what the data shows), I don’t care how “stupid” autonomous vehicles’ accidents are. Not to mention that their safety records will only improve as they get more time on the roads.