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Ed Self-Driving Cars: Pros, Cons, and Predictions
- Thread starter Cain
- Start date
Rolfe
Adult human female
I understand that isn't the case, that that light bar is just the DRLs and the actual headlights are somewhere else.
dirtywick
Philosopher
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oh where are they mounted? i don't really see anything else on the truck
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
I think that's likely true and likely to be a factor in various mandates going forward, but also one of the faults with using overall statistics to judge what you should or should not do. Overall statistics are great for some things, like allocating funds and determining insurance premiums, but not so great for deciding what's best for an individual. I think Steven J Gould went into this to some degree in his essay on cancer prognoses, trying to figure his chances with what he had. The statistical fact that autonomous cars are safer than human driven ones is cold comfort if you do most of your driving in the edge conditions where they aren't.
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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Thanks Bruto. I read that essay years ago and because of you I read it again. I have always been a lover of facts over spin. And I am fully aware that while statistics are facts they must be treated with a skeptical eye. Unfortunately, that skepticism often finds that the use of statistics is often abused. Which makes them difficult to decipher.
Rolfe
Adult human female
I think they said lower down.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Skepticism is one thing, denial is another.
Let's put aside any 'skepticism' you may have and assume the numbers are accurate enough for our purposes. The idea that policy shouldn't be applied according to statistics because there are 'edge' cases is silly. We don't allow non-licensed people to drive even though some of them might be perfectly fine, because we know the vast majority aren't. We still have seat belts and airbags even though in some cases they may increase rather than reduce injury.
But it's a typical denier tactic. Well sorry fella, but your edge case isn't going to stop us from making things better. In the future self driving cars will be safer in almost every circumstance. People will still be allowed to drive without it of course, because they prefer it and/or for those 'edge' cases where manual operation is needed. But the cars will become more and more autonomous to the point where most people won't be bothered 'driving' them most of the time.
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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I agree with all of that. Not sure why you are sorry.
I was saying I have read studies that suggest autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers. Not that they are. I was also saying it was challenging to understand what those studies actually tells us. What I get from those studies, right or wrong on my part is that they generally are. But not in every circumstance. And as the Bard says, "aye, there's the rub."
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Any comparisons you see today are already out of date. FSD V13 - released a few days ago - is much better than 12, which was much better than 11 etc. By the time Cybercabs are rolling off the production line it will be so good that all prior studies are worthless.
Part of the reason for this is increased data collection for training, and part is increased compute power. And of course the engineers are constantly identifying and solving problems as they come up, so any complaints or 'issues' you hear about now will probably soon be history.
Tesla's FSD has also proved itself to be more flexible than other systems. Tesla recently added it to the Cybertruck, and there is evidence of it being tested on the Semi too. Eventually Tesla may license it to other car makers, who will be able to integrate FSD into their models without much effert. The more vehicles that have it, the more feedback and the better it gets.
"..by the time Cybercabs are rolling off the production line..." When do you think that will be?
HansMustermann
Penultimate Amazing
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@Roger Ramjets
I'm just studying the evidence that was presented here. When new evidence becomes available, I will of course look at that evidence.
I'm just studying the evidence that was presented here. When new evidence becomes available, I will of course look at that evidence.
Jack by the hedge
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When autonomous cars drive more safely than humans there will be no reason not to let them, and reason to ask whether we should still let humans do it.
But it won't be so clear cut. If they're better than average then <shrug> so is everyone if they're not drunk or playing with their phone. And they won't all be the same. Different models will have different strengths and weaknesses. I wonder how we'll type approve each startup brand to decide it's adequately safe on our own country's roads. A car trained in one country is like a foreign tourist in another. Will there be an aftermarket tuner business selling assertiveness upgrades to make your car get through traffic faster than the standard model? If that's banned, will it go on illegally anyway?
The more I think about it, the messier it feels like it's going to get.
But it won't be so clear cut. If they're better than average then <shrug> so is everyone if they're not drunk or playing with their phone. And they won't all be the same. Different models will have different strengths and weaknesses. I wonder how we'll type approve each startup brand to decide it's adequately safe on our own country's roads. A car trained in one country is like a foreign tourist in another. Will there be an aftermarket tuner business selling assertiveness upgrades to make your car get through traffic faster than the standard model? If that's banned, will it go on illegally anyway?
The more I think about it, the messier it feels like it's going to get.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
If current trends continue I'd expect a subscription model. You won't actually own your car (you'll own the maintenance but not the control) and will have to subscribe to wherever you take it or be always connected to a source which will detect where you are and charge you for the localized learning. Just a guess, but I'm guessing that whatever happens will cost more and require greater connectivity, and will somehow just happen also to end up generating targeted spam.
mumblethrax
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I don't see any reason to believe v13 is better than v12 in terms of safety. Most of the hype is around better parking performance, somewhat smoother driving, and (maybe?) fewer driver interventions. That's precisely the kind of question we need data to answer, and Tesla doesn't provide it.
v13 is being rolled out to cars running v12 on HW4, and Autopilot doesn't rely on cloud compute in operation, so I'm not sure where you think the increased compute power is coming from. Improved performance doesn't correlate directly to increased safety in any case. One of the problems involved in getting from ADAS to full automation is that you're going to have a period where it's good enough that it seems like you don't need to pay attention, and so people will stop paying attention (and Tesla does very little to ensure that drivers are paying attention, despite the fact that this is a relatively trivial problem to solve). In one recent fatality involving a Tesla with FSD engaged, a motorcyclist was killed when the car rear-ended him. The driver noticed when he heard the sound of the motorcyclist being killed, because he wasn't paying attention, and was using his phone instead. Distracted driving is a problem with unassisted driving too, of course, but most manufacturers don't do their best to imply that the car can drive itself. This should probably be considered a marketing defect.
And "constantly identifying and solving the problems" understates the severity of the problem. The number of edge cases is basically uncountable, and they're trying to brute force a solution to the problem, which is that these systems are incapable of common sense reasoning when presented with novel circumstances.
Just like how Apple licenses their OS to other manufacturers.
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HansMustermann
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Which, as you also seem to say, is not that clear cut a question. The data presented in this thread suggests that, yes, they may or may not be better under ideal conditions.
Unfortunately, conditions can get less than ideal by as little as someone wearing a t-shirt with a stop sign printed on it. Seriously, there is plenty of video evidence that you can get some ADV taxis to brake by as little as wearing that and turning towards them.
Or, as a weeb, I'd like to introduce you to Japan's "itasha" (literally "painful" or "cringeworthy" + "car") culture, basically meaning having lots of images of anime, manga or video game characters painted on your car. And even more serious companies have their own itasha wraps and characters, such as an IIRC tire company having their own character Miu, a pun on the µ symbol for the friction coefficient. If you think that's a trivial problem, not just car cameras, but also facial recognition cameras have problem with "cloak of invisibility" apparel featuring lots of faces on it. You can literally become invisible to most of that software by wearing an ahegao hoodie. (Apparel painted with lots of hentai women's orgasm faces. Maybe don't google it at work.) Or at least get them to lock on a lot of faces that aren't real.
You COULD maybe distinguish between a car painted with people and actual people with LIDAR and ultrasound, but again, that doesn't exactly describe a Tesla, does it?
...and then there's the truly one of a kind situations, that I'd assume most cars were not trained on. A few years ago, I was in a taxi that almost got t-boned on my side by one of those two ton SUVs, going way over the speed limit too, at an intersection. I had already made my "I go to Odin" peace when I saw it coming, but the taxi driver's quick reflexes and a MAD swerve into the grass lane in the middle, denied my getting picked by a Valkyrie. Honestly on that trip the biggest scare was the driver being pretty much marinated in adrenaline after that. Do I think an AI car is trained exactly on that scenario? Nope. I'd probably have met the allfather in one of those.
The Great Zaganza
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you are doing the cheap thing - but I EXPLICITY compared Nuclear with Renewables, so that was just straight up disingenuous . .
At this point, nuclear power is pretty much irrelevant:
Almost All of the New Generating Capacity Added in 2024 is Politically Correct “Clean Energy”
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that during the first six months of 2024, developers and power plant operators increased…
www.instituteforenergyresearch.org
Sure, when all the problems are solved, especially with long-term storage, we should use nuclear power, including using up the waste of other reactors, but it is not the salvation people think it is or could be - it is just way too expensive and inflexible - and the providers have a history of being irresponsible and a drain on public funds.
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acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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You said the market has spoken. But the market even by the source you cited has been corrupted by politics. That said, the need for an ever increasing demand for energy has not ended the demand for coal and other fossil fuels. And renewables like wind and solar fail to address the need for baseline energy sources. They are intermittent.you are doing the cheap thing - but I EXPLICITY compared Nuclear with Renewables, so that was just straight up disingenuous . .
At this point, nuclear power is pretty much irrelevant:
Almost All of the New Generating Capacity Added in 2024 is Politically Correct “Clean Energy”
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that during the first six months of 2024, developers and power plant operators increased…
Sure, when all the problems are solved, especially with long-term storage, we should use nuclear power, including using up the waste of other reactors, but it is not the salvation people think it is or could be - it is just way too expensive and inflexible - and the providers have a history of being irresponsible and a drain on public funds.
But your argument was that nuclear power was unsafe. Which is a flat out untruth. That is a bald face deception that has gone on for 60 years.
That said, I do agree the further development and deployment of solar, wind and energy storage might destroy any economic argument for nuclear energy to be included in the mix.
HansMustermann
Penultimate Amazing
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May I point out again that this is a completely irrelevant side-track, that's not even a valid analogy? I mean, the argument from analogy is the weakest anyway, but it relies on transferring a relevant common attribute from context X to context Y. As in, it actually is relevant to the argument at hand, such as why it makes it safe.
An argument that:
P1: Hawks have wings.
P2: Hawks fly.
P3: Penguins have wings.
Therefore:
C: Penguins fly.
Is obviously showing the weakness of the argument, but it at least relies on the supposed relevance that wings help with flight. If your argument was that crows are black, penguins are black, therefore penguins fly, that's an irrelevant attribute for flight that makes it not even be a valid analogy.
If all you've got is literally just "but they opposed/laughed at X too", then see Carl Sagan's quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." You literally don't have an analogy and you're just wasting everyone else's time with irrelevent handwaving.
An argument that:
P1: Hawks have wings.
P2: Hawks fly.
P3: Penguins have wings.
Therefore:
C: Penguins fly.
Is obviously showing the weakness of the argument, but it at least relies on the supposed relevance that wings help with flight. If your argument was that crows are black, penguins are black, therefore penguins fly, that's an irrelevant attribute for flight that makes it not even be a valid analogy.
If all you've got is literally just "but they opposed/laughed at X too", then see Carl Sagan's quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." You literally don't have an analogy and you're just wasting everyone else's time with irrelevent handwaving.
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Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Actually it is relevant. Nuclear is unsafe. So is coal, gasoline, electricity, fire and water. Cars are unsafe, airplanes are unsafe, trains and ships are unsafe. Guns are unsafe, knives are unsafe, scissors are unsafe. Every year ~12,000 people in the US die from falling down stairs. We are surrounded by unsafe technologies which we continue to use despite the danger.
But there's lot we can do to make them safer. Nuclear is made safer with strict protocols, highly trained operators, regular inspections, multiple redundancies and massive containment buildings. Despite all that the government has to provide insurance because no private company can take on the risk. If we didn't do all those things to make nuclear safe then... imagine a Chernobyl every few months.
Nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents
Now compare that to the number of serious car accidents. Nuclear has the potential to kill millions in a single incident, but it doesn't because billions have been spent on making it safe. Same goes for commercial airplanes, which have the potential to kill hundreds at a time (and sometimes do). But cars are (individually) less lethal, so we don't do so much to make them safer.
There's a lot more we could do to make cars safer. Unfortunately many of the most effective measures have not been implemented due to cost and/or impinging on drivers' 'freedoms'. If cars were nuclear power plants, 90% of them would be off the road for various violations. The accident rate would drop to almost zero, but the backlash would be political suicide. Enter autonomous driving...
Previously we didn't have the technology to do it, but now we do - and with the aid of advanced AI and powerful computer chips it's improving exponentially. Most cars produced today have some level of autonomy built in, but to make them truly safe we need full autonomy to remove the human element that causes the vast majority of accidents. It also makes driving more enjoyable and less stressful, as well as saving money in insurance premiums, repairs and medical bills.
There's just one problem - the same one we've always had with cars - 'freedom'. People want to do what they want when they want, without any 'safety' features getting in the way. This is why mandatory seatbelts failed in the US, and why airbags were introduced. However eventually most of the public accepted seatbelts, as it turned out they weren't a significant restriction on their 'freedoms'. Today we have the same problem with autonomous driving. People fear change, and don't trust a machine to do their thinking for them. It will take a while for people be comfortable with it, just like it took a while for them to be comfortable wearing setbelts. Meanwhile we have to put up with 'skeptics' inventing arguments against self-driving cars to hide their fear of new technolgy.
mumblethrax
Species traitor
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Can I ask you to stop imputing motivations like this? People are not 'inventing' arguments, they're articulating them.
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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You think it was a failure? What precisely would constitute a success? Seatbelts save lives regardless whether or not your vehicle has an airbag.
Seatbelts have been in cars since the mid 1950s. Three point seatbelts have been required on new vehicles since 1973. Still, as late as 1983, fewer than 15% of Americans said they used seat belts consistently. This is when mandatory use of seat belt laws began being passed. New York became the first state in 1984. Today every state with the exception of New Hampshire has made seatbelt use mandatory. Today, 91.6% of Americans wear seatbelts consistently.
I guess we have different definitions of success and failure.
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mumblethrax
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Yeah, I'm left scratching my head at the idea that mandatory seatbelt laws are a failure in the US. Even if that were true, mandatory seatbelt alarm regulation (which can be enforced against manufacturers, and which most owners are unlikely to tamper with) would have more or less mooted it.
Just 'can'?
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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I hated mentioning it. But no way have mandatory seat-belt laws been a failure.
I do agree with his primary point, which is that nothing is entirely un-safe. Even if I thought it was a nit pick. Some level of risk is a component of every endeavor. So safe or dangerous would always be relative.
Gord_in_Toronto
Penultimate Amazing
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Isn't that an old joke by Bob Hope? "When the 1942 Fords stop rolling off the assembly line we'll start making deliveries?"
mumblethrax
Species traitor
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Can, and are (with respect to front seats...coming soon to back seats).
Orphia Nay
Penguilicious Spodmaster., Tagger
Self-driving cars don't drive into dozens of people in a market.
mumblethrax
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That's overly pessimistic. With enough time and development, I believe they can.
That has to be real concern, how secure is the software the cars use?
*Privacy Not Included: A Buyer’s Guide for Connected Products
All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label – making cars the worst category of products that we have ever reviewed
foundation.mozilla.org
Lots of basic privacy concerns with cars even before self-drive.
mumblethrax
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Not terribly. The protocol used in the CAN bus is inherently insecure, and can control basically everything in modern computers-on-wheels. Remote control of Teslas has been demonstrated multiple times.
HansMustermann
Penultimate Amazing
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But that's still back to Sagan's quote, right? You're just doing the equivalent of the enumeration of people they laughed at, except here it's technologies instead of people.
But here's the thing: here too the "But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown" part does apply. And I'll provide it for you.
There are also technologies which actually WERE dangerous and most western countries decided not to use any more. Chemical weapons. Biological weapons. Landmines. Nuclear powered aeroplanes. Uranium glass. Radium in watches or gun sights. High-test peroxide in torpedoes. Asbestos. Leaded gasoline. X-ray machines to fit shoes. Lawn darts.
There's also stuff we decided where or by whom can be used. Automatic weapons are the trivial example.
Or to return to the topic of automation, there are tons of things we could fully automate for the ideal case, but we still like a human there to make the judgment. Nuclear power is a trivial example. A computer can and does mostly run a nuclear plant. But when things go wrong for some unforeseen reason, we still like to have some qualified people there who can improvise. In effect, part of the REASON WHY we don't have a Chernobyl every few months is that we have some people there.
Will that change in the future? Quite possibly. WHEN that happens, sure, we can go around and fully automate them. Or cars for that matter. But as long as that didn't happen, well, we don't.
So basically it's still back to Sagan's quote, right?
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Jack by the hedge
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I thought the point about seatbelts was that it was the initial failure to persuade people in the US to use them which drove airbag development as an alternative rather than a supplement (and not that people were still not persuaded all these decades later).
The first rental car I drove in the US had these weird seatbelts where the upper anchor point ran in a track above the door and would motor forward to let you get out without unbuckling. (I can't remember how the lap belt worked) We were told it was an attempt to persuade more people to use belts because so many just didn't. This was over a decade since (front) seatbelts became mandatory in the UK and most people just went along with it.
The first rental car I drove in the US had these weird seatbelts where the upper anchor point ran in a track above the door and would motor forward to let you get out without unbuckling. (I can't remember how the lap belt worked) We were told it was an attempt to persuade more people to use belts because so many just didn't. This was over a decade since (front) seatbelts became mandatory in the UK and most people just went along with it.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
I've been a loyal seatbelt user since before they were mandated, because my dad, a statistician, actually did, on his way to a doctorate, a study on seat belts back in about 1959, which was so convincingly obvious that he had seat belts fitted to our cars in 1960, and he bought a Saab in 1961 in part because it came with shoulder belts. For quite a while that was just lap belts, but at least it was something, and I learned to drive with belts on, and just won't go without them. No person rides in a car of mine without belts on.
But that said, the implementation of automatic seat belts in the US was appallingly bad and stupid, and even habitual wearers of them were inclined to defeat them, because most such implementations, aside from making life hell for mechanics, required a sequence of operation that was inimical to the way we often drive, especially if you live in a region where you have to warm the car up and scrape the windshield, etc.
jeremyp
Illuminator
A video from somebody who stumbled across Waymo's last 5%
Man trapped inside driverless car as it spins in circles
Mike Johns was on his way to the airport when the Waymo robotaxi began circling a parking lot non-stop
www.bbc.co.uk
I recently saw a video on Facebook which appeared to be of a Tesla automatically avoiding a pedestrian falling into the road, but as result crashing into an oncoming vehicle, then rolling back to hit the pedestrian who was now on the ground behind it, at low speed.
I don't know that a person would have made an different decision, but from the point of view of driver safety, hitting the pedestrian would have been lower risk.
ETA: This video - https://www.autoevolution.com/news/...t-of-it-crashes-into-oncoming-car-241294.html
I don't know that a person would have made an different decision, but from the point of view of driver safety, hitting the pedestrian would have been lower risk.
ETA: This video - https://www.autoevolution.com/news/...t-of-it-crashes-into-oncoming-car-241294.html
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Rolfe
Adult human female
News to me that FSD is available in Romania.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Seat belt laws did fail. In 1967 the Department of Transportation issued Standard 208 which required that all vehicles have seat belts. In 1975 this was revised to require passive restraints, ie. air bags, to protect people who didn't wear their seat belts. The seat belt laws were ineffective because they didn't require people to use them.
But then auto manufacturers got upset at having to install expensive airbags just because people refused to wear their seat belts, so they lobbied against them and got the law rescinded. Then insurance companies got upset and sued the government for changing the law without a good reason. The government reached a compromise whereby if 2/3rd of states passed laws mandating set belt use by 1989 then auto makers wouldn't have to install airbags.
But having a law on the books doesn't mean it will be followed. Today 15 states only apply 'secondary' enforcement, where a person can't be cited for seat belt violation unless they have committed some other offense, and one state has no set belt use laws at all.
How seat belt use has changed since the 1990s
The actual seat belt usage achieved was ~60% in 1995, rising to 70% in 2000 and leveling off at ~90% by 2015. It's only taken 48 years to get there. Meanwhile cars today have multiple airbags, partly because some people still refuse to wear their seat belts.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
I would crash my car before hitting a pedestrian. Even though I have trained myself not to swerve into the incoming lane if a car pulls out, I probably still would if it was a person falling down on the road. Cars are designed to crumple when hit to protect the occupants, people aren't.
The video says:-
I'm surprised that the Audi driver was injured. You can see that the airbag deployed, so either it didn't catch sideways movement or the bag itself injured him. Either way this was a far better outcome than running over the pedestrian.
Buit hey, never let a chance to bash Tesla go by, right?
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Pretty much all technologies are dangerous. Motor cars especially so. It's mind boggling that we allow practically anyone to drive a car on roads with no barriers and many hazards to contend with - and no assistance apart from rear view mirrors and a sun visor. We do it because we want to drive our cars, and accidents don't happen that often (only 13 accidents every 60 seconds in the US). Unfortuantely this means that roads aren't designed with autonomous driving in mind, as we assume a human will be able to handle any situation no matter how tricky or confusing (which often doesn't happen in practice - and then the blame games start).
Sagan's quote is meaningless in this context. He wasn't talking about technology. Autonomous driving isn't based on a wacky unscientific principle. It works, and making it better is just an engineering problem (a much easier one than eg. fusion power or quantum computing). A more relevant quote would be Lord Kelvin saying in 1895 that "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible", when all we were waiting on was a more powerful lighter weight engine. It was a particularly stupid statement to make when Clément Ader had already achieved it in 1890 with a steam-powered aircraft (the Wright brothers get credit for the first controlled heavier-than-air flight in 1903).
I watched a video of a Tesla with FSD 13.2 self-driving around New York for 2 hours including during 'rush hour' traffic, and it was flawless. It had to contend with situations such as someone loading their pickup truck from the road side, and narrow streets with parked cars making it one lane only so it had to pull over and wait for oncoming traffic. On the screen you could see the car tracking all the other vehicles and pedestrians in the area - better than a human! If it's this good now, the next major version will definitely be better than any human driver.
By the time Tesla rolls out their Cybercab there should no worries, though they will proably trial it for months or years before full scale production - by which time there won't be any argument about whether FSD is good enough.