This was always going to happen. It was never realistic to expect perfect safety from the beginning, so why weren’t they ready to handle it?
That was also my concern from the beginning for Tesla’s ambitious goal. Even if we assumed they delivered as promised, met the deadline and features for full self driving. Let’s even assume they improved safety by a full order of magnitude, 1/10 the accidents, 1/10 the deaths. That would be a huge contribution to society and ought to be a resounding success. But there still be accidents, still be deaths, Tesla would still be liable. How could a public company survive this success?
We’re making decent progress on the technical part of self-driving, but the legal and popular parts are more intractable, exactly as in this situation. I’d really like to see a safety comparison between Cruise so far, and equivalent human driving
Tons of ways to structure that legally. Lobby for laws that protect makers of self driving cars, for one. Or have the occupants be ultimately responsible.
I’ve encountered so many edge cases over my many years of driving that I seriously doubt fully autonomous cars will truly be a thing for many decades to come. Computers / AI needs to get to the point where it can intuit what to do when a situation arises that it hasn’t been explicitly trained to handle.
Road specs and markings will also need to evolve to support the technology. There will eventually be roads that are approved, and others that are not, and an evolution will have to occur where roads are brought up to spec so they can join the system. It sounds silly until you realize we’ve already done all this with the road markings and lighting and grading specs and lane width specs and signage standardization and and and and everything that goes into today’s roads. Right now all the focus is on making the cars adapt to a world not designed for them but in the long run it will be a convergence of cars and road systems that will happen.
Just let 'em all go in a dead city, but give them features to use as facial expressions.
GM bought Elon’s crap and it screwed them.
Time for another taxpayer bailout!!!
Elon Musk is rich enough to survive without a rent-free room in your head, dude
Driverless cars ultimately will have nothing to do with Elon Musk
While self driving cars seem like a good way for enterprise to bypass the cost of paying a driver, the driver’s other function isn’t just to drive the car, but to be liable for its operation.
I wonder if it’s gonna take an insurance company to push for driverless before we see any driverless cars for sale. And if insurance companies don’t want to be liable then we may never see them.
The decision came over a month after an incident in which a hit-and-run victim became pinned under a Cruise vehicle and then was dragged 20 feet to the side of the road. As a result, California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permit to operate driverless cars in the state.
Why haven’t they banned all cars over the many more incidents caused by human drivers? Including incidents where pedestrians are killed deliberately, as with the cases where idiots drove straight into protest crowds?
If we’re ever going to get past the lethality of human drivers, we need to at least judge the technology by the same standards.
We’re at 80% with human drivers and they want to throw out driverless tech because it’s 92% and not 100%.
Why haven’t they banned all cars
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
That’s what they’re doing about driverless cars though. Instead of looking at the data overall they banned all cars from a company as a result of a single event.
I’m not saying driverless cars are there or they aren’t. But let’s not pretend this is a cool headed data driven decision. This is political.
I think we should actually ban the production of metals. Between the deaths from guns and cars, metal is a hazardous technology that needs to be proven safer before we unleash it upon our populace, much though the steel billionaires would love to profit from it while people die.
This investment is taking longer than the myopic financial outlooks that traded companies possess. But the idea of autonomous cars is not flawed.
You might think humans could at least think as long term as “it has to benefit my children in order for me to care” but the entire commercial world runs on “it has to make me as much money as possible within 3 months for me to care” and it’s just embarrassing.
Job #1 for self driving vehicles should be don’t hit anything. Self driving should be able to have better senses, 100% attention, and better reflexes than human drivers. Until the vehicles can operate without hitting things they should never be allowed on public roads.
Until the vehicles can operate without hitting things at a better rate than human drivers they should never be allowed on public roads.
Humans are atrocious drivers, once that mark is reached it’s a massive improvement with only upward trajectory from there
They too often are, but it somehow seems more accepted for a careless human to hurt someone than a machine to hurt someone.
You just articulated the “100% or nothing” standard, which totally ignores how unsafe human drivers are. Let’s say humans score an 80% on safety today (after all hundreds of thousands are killed on the roads annually). You’re saying that a technology that’s only 92% safe should not be permitted. Nope. We need that last 8% to be there and we’ll withhold the 12% improvement from the public until it is - even though that has a cost of thousands of lives.
This is a way to get nowhere and kill as many people as possible.
I didn’t say 100% but they are not ready to be on public roads when they hit parked fire trucks. Huge objects on the road.
They fucked up by not sharing the full accident video with public officials.
Anyone who thinks that these things could or would be anything other than a colossal waste of time and resources should watch Adam Something’s recent video on them. Such a pointless way to solve inner-city transport
Okay, I watched it.
Summary of video:
- self driving cars are seen as a quick fix
- we don’t have full self driving capabilities yet - Elon overstated his cars actual abilities
- adding lanes has never fixed traffic - demand just fills the new capacity. Therefore self driving cars will make traffic worse.
- cars are generally terrible and inefficient, hurray for trains
- US cities were built for cars and not public transit: we should build denser cities instead of all this.
1 and 2 are beside the point and can be discarded.
3 is the core argument and is circular, essentially saying that anything that increases capacity will make traffic worse. If this seems fundamentally flawed, it’s because it is. It assumes infinite demand. You could easily apply this same logic to trains: add more frequent trains and riders will just flock to enjoy the new capacity until they are crowded again. The reality is that there is a right amount of capacity, and the question is what kinds of cars can best utilize the lane capacity we have.
4 and 5 are good points but mainly argue that we should not ONLY focus on self driving cars as a complete transportation panacea, which is true. But no one is doing that. Therefore this is a straw man argument.
The silent presumption of this entire video is that the sole, entire hope of self driving cars is to reduce urban traffic congestion. This is patently false. They also aim to improve on the abysmal safety record of human drivers, and improve fuel efficiency by taking people’s lead foot off the gas pedal, and finally to make access to a car more economical for those who don’t own one or can’t drive because of disability or age.
So basically, it’s what you’d expect from a YouTube video: some random guy leaning way too hard on a couple of limp arguments to make a sensational video that will get clicks because it has extreme claims in the title. Throw in some Elon hate and cherry picked videos of self-driving errors and the narrative is complete.
It’s hilarious how many massive sectors of the economy bet billions on computers that could function like human brains, when that technology is clearly impossible right now. We might not even get close for the foreseeable future.
I’m curious whether the people working on these projects genuinely believed they could deliver, or if the whole thing was billion dollar snake oil the entire time.
As long as they get a paycheck no outcome is an outcome.
