I mean, I guess “impeccable safety record” is in the eye of the beholder?
Just the fact that it crosses that double wide white line, that means under no circumstance do not cross this line! Only to end behind a perfectly visible veritable wall of bollards! All this in high daylight too!
The strongest danger of Tesla FSD I think, is that in most situations it drives very confidently, and very well. So people begin to trust it.
But then suddenly it does something insanely stupid like this, or cross a red light without hesitation, or completely ignore a stop sign.
This is when you die. Not the 90% of the time it drives fine.Remember that the bar for self driving cars isn’t perfect driving, it’s better-than-human driving, and humans are generally pretty bad at driving, so that bar isn’t as high as you probably hope it is.
I’m not suggesting they’ve reached that bar, only that “sometimes a mistake happens that results in death” is also a problem with human driving, but we know that self driving cars don’t get drunk or distracted by their phones, so they’ve already got a leg up on the competition.
But take that to the next step. Let’s say it reaches the point where it drives better than humans. The problem is it’s not perfect, and has different weaknesses than humans. Even after self-driving is statistically safer, there will be accidents where a human could have done better. Would we accept it under those circumstances? Because those are the circumstances
Even after self-driving is statistically safer, there will be accidents where a human could have done better.
I think “could have” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it’s making the question seem more complicated than it is. You can’t make decisions based on hindsight from specific examples. If, hypothetically, self driving cars are statistically safer, then they’re safer, regardless of any specific anecdote that suggests otherwise.
Maybe I’m not grasping what you’re saying?
By “statistically safer” I mean as an overall metric. However there will still be specific scenarios where self-driving is less safe, or even just people believe they could have done better. People will naturally focus on those specific scenarios and reject self-driving even when it is overall safer
Can you give me a hypothetical example? I’m not understanding the scenario you’re referring to.
As a fake example, let’s say Tesla full self-driving is overall safer than humans, however it doesn’t recognize traffic poles and will try to drive through them. People would probably reject FSD as not yet ready despite the evidence that it was safer than humans
I appreciate the clarification, but I doubt there will be a way for both scenarios to exist simultaneously; that is to say, I think any sufficiently common “exception” would result in self driving cars not being statistically safer than human drivers.
It would have to be something sufficiently obscure, like, I dunno, going down a eastern-facing switchback road in the fog at sunrise. (Maybe too obscure.)
That being said, I remember reading an article or maybe watching a video about the challenges for making a self driving car feel safer for people. Stuff like turn speed on main roads vs in residential neighborhoods. The forces being felt are exactly the same, and the safety is exactly the same, but (apparently) people feel like one is acceptable but the other is dangerous.
If your ultimate question was along these lines, then yes, I agree there is more than just statistics that will be necessary before people are comfortable with mass adoption of self driving cars. And not for nothing but that tool Musk isn’t helping anything by putting out “self driving” cars before they’re actually ready.
