Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.

Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.

Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.

If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability. People will use it when they are drunk if it means not going to jail and it's readily available.

Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas.

(https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...)

The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad. Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.

I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.

I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.

The safest car is the one that is parked. I’m not anti-car but in terms of safety we should focus more on getting people using bus/rail/bike/walk especially for daily needs. It’s more cost effective too. Autonomous cars are cool and will be great for reducing crashes, but it’s an additive solution, not a subtractive one.

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

- even if only one happens, the relative cost of insurance will change in favor of autonomous

- driving your own car becomes a kind of "prestige" thing where only really wealthy people do it (similar to owning your own plane etc)

I have said for a while now that self driving cars do not need to be perfect. They will have accidents, of a different type than humans have, and sometimes they will be ones that most humans would avoid.

What they do need to be is better than humans overall, and then it would make sense for them to be allowed onto the road. When they get far safer than humans, phasing out of human driving will make sense.

They reached that point a while ago, now we just need legislation and public opinion to catch up.

I would imagine that world running on fully autonomous cars would certainly be less error-prone than a world running on human-driven cars where each human has different intelligence, reflexes, emotions, moods e.t.c. A purely algorithmic system of autonomous cars is certainly safer, just needs to be fully adopted. The only drawback I suppose is the fear of these systems being hacked, something that is not so easy with biological humans.

Of course they do, an 8 bit PC rigged up to an old Nintendo Duck Hunt sensor would drive more safely than some of the morons in my neighborhood. I've ceased to be annoyed at them, and instead just shrug at the idiocy.

>> In March, Waymo’s independent study showed 92 percent fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes, a 13-fold reduction versus human drivers in comparable city environments.

I can't progress beyond this point in the article. How is Waymo's study "independent"? I don't understand.

ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers.

Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.

It could, but maybe not if your motto is, "Move Fast and Break Things."

Article is short on data instead referencing a bunch of aggregated IIHS studies.

Of course. This seems so obvious.

More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue. No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.

Fyi. Long robotaxis.

So can 100% public transport, non-autonomous. But there is less lobbying money for award winning journalists.

Slightly besides the point, but I love seeing people in massive modern SUVs, clearly completely overwhelmed by them, barely able to tell where it starts and ends, probably distracted by the screen.

Its especially funny in parking here lots in Europe, where they barely fit. If you drive such an SUV, I have a suggestion: Let the computer do the parking, you can't park and you can't drive well either. Just let the clanker figure it out, it'll save everyone time.

I have a feeling that once everything goes EV and autopilot, they will start phasing out regular cars or will make it more difficult to obtain the license.

Doesn't

``less cars, more X, where X is bikes and trains''

save more lives than autonomous cars?

Also: We have 580k direct deaths a year due to a top pollutant society cross-funds for those who buy them? This is insane.

After ten-thousand years, nearly six billion humans died in car-related accidents, i.e. one population of earth when I was young? How is a personal level risk of one in ten thousand each year acceptable? Ban at least human-driven cars, not (only) AI/AGSI!

As for driving in full automation: seems impossible outside clear-weathered rectangular cities, for now. But perhaps that does not stay this way for years, and in some places, we can could either adopt this tech, pragmatically, or build liveable, walkable/bikable cities instead in the more long term.

Isn't it... quite a well known thing?

Calling something that kills people but just does it less as "saving lives" is batshit crazy. Looks like people in the US got so brainwashed by the toxic car culture that not killing feels the same as saving lives. It's like calling it a saving when my girlfriend decides NOT to buy something. This whole article is a joke, right? Right???

From a policy standpoint…I wonder about creating a rule that anyone who got a DUI could get an amended license where they could legally operate only autonomous vehicles. First DUI is a permanent AV-only license.

Since 7 million people have DUI’s, that one policy change would completely reshape the industry.

It is correct to compare to average drivers because that is ultimately what they are going to replace. AVs are coming for the whole market, and if they are significantly safer than the average driver the average driver shouldn’t drive. I intend to stop driving when possible.

One thing I'd like to see modeled is how many excess deaths they cause in, for example, London.

Driving in London is already very safe because the street design prevents people going very fast. American roads are, by comparison, unsafe. That probably means AVs in those countries had a lot of low-hanging fruit, so they could have a significant impact by staying within the speed limit, for example. Without such low hanging fruit, will there be so much benefit in London?

London has excellent and very safe public transit, far safer than even professional drivers. If AVs are cheap and convenient enough to pull people off transit, that might expose enough people to higher risk that makes them overall kill more people than if they'd stayed on the tube.

Likewise, more driving (even EVs) generates more asphalt and brake pad dust, which cause respiratory illnesses. If they cause a drop in transit ridership compared to no AVs, how does that affect the excess deaths in the city?

My gut says that, in London and other cities with safer streets, they're going to have more difficulty getting such headline-grabbing numbers. Combine that with the potential to take people off safe transit and put them on the road and the balance might slightly tip against them.

Hopefully the people that find autonomous cars great are the bad drivers of today. They will transition into that and leave the better drivers of today to drive in peace.

Can someone remind me why we need autonomous cars? What's wrong with paying someone to drive?

Autonomous cars is an inefficient solution anyway, I don't see how it benefits the rider.

Yeah but just one automatic update away from becoming a horror show.

I’ll risk sounding crass to state the quiet part out loud:

Majority of car accidents outside of the occasional genuine freak accident are self-inflicted. Call it FAFO or Darwinism, whichever you prefer.

I’m saying that having done that myself once in the early days of holding a drivers licence and feeling heroic with my speed and a corner. I was lucky to walk away with minor bruises, mostly to my ego. And wallet.

That day I learned how a car behaves when it loses traction.

15 years later accident free, minus one person bumping the rear left side because they’d thought it would be a good idea to cross over into my lane over a solid line.

Having watched how autonomous driving is “developing” over the same span of time - I’m not convinced, the last decade was spent more on “trust me bro” targeting lawmakers than genuinely trying to have a breakthrough in the technology and we’ve hit a wall (no pun intended).

The correct answer to this problem is better driver education, and a higher bar for entry.

Lest we let the idiots take over and we as a society accept a lower standard.

It'd be really nice to have bolt-on after-market automation. I'm not sure if the car companies will want to accommodate this, but I'd really love to make my old Honda self-driving.

I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.

Was surprised that article mentions Waymo, Rivian, Zoox, but not Tesla.

Yeah, so would investment in reliable, nice public transportation. I know it doesn’t solve the last-mile-problem.

Either way, fewer drivers means fewer deaths.

Looks like we're over the biggest engineering hurdles. I used to tell people we'd see self-driving cars take off in the 2030s, (with them generally starting to appear mid 2020s) and now this looks like the case.

I wonder to what extent this effect comes from the fact that robotaxis don't get drunk.

I seem to recall a paper showing that human crash frequencies surge up to 6x between midnight and 4am on weekends, despite that traffic accounting for only a miniscule percentage of vehicle miles traveled.

Considering two groups, FSD and non-FSD, what are the shares of full-sized SUVs in them?

Pretty sure whatever the FSD vehicle you can think of, none is a full-sized SUVs, and those are the most lethal kind of vehicle.

Is there a standard that these cars have to meet?

Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.

This article is malarkey.

Title includes "autonomous cars" - url includes "self-driving" - I smell what you are selling.

Meanwhile, the article never gives a share, but as far as I can tell, nearly all the lives are saved by basic ADAS: auto-braking, which is really cool and should be the focus.

If you want to click-bait, fine, but then at least tell the truth after the user clicks.

I'll be sad when I'm forced to give up driving my old cars.

IMO the benchmark to pass will be to show it has better safety than the average sober, non-speeding, non-phone-using, seatbelt-wearing driver.

IDK how that could even feasibly be shown but that's when people will actually start going all-in on it. Otherwise I will simply meet those criteria myself for free.

You know what actually saves lives? Fewer cars.

idk if this was even part of the conversation tbh

The question was if they could remain secure

Also I saw people suggest rc cars as an alternative to autonomous vehicles which... is another consideration entirely as well

Autonomous vehicles don’t drink and drive. That alone will save millions worldwide yearly.

Taxis also save lives. The lives of those who drive drunk.

In the modern USA, "saving lives" is anti-correlated with policy, so let's see how this plays out.

People kill and hurt others in cars for many reasons but the main ones are:

-being dangerous on purpose (speeding, ignoring signs, tailgating etc.)

-being inattentive (phones, screens in general, being tired, being sleepy)

-road raging in many forms

As evidenced by comments in this thread and elsewhere people also have terrible judgement about reality on the roads - blaming cyclists, justifying speeding etc.

Self-driving cars remove all those from the equation. It would be shocking if they didn't save lives. We put too high a bar on them. It's a life saving tech and we should put them on the road yesterday and go from there.

It has been, from the start and even before FSD had any basis in reality and was just sci-fi stories, obvious that FSD would eventually get here. The only question has been when. We clearly aren't there yet but it is pretty obvious we aren't as far away as the naysayers make out.

I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake.

You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.

It doesn't really matter whether autonomous cars crash less than human drivers. A computer can never be punished, so a computer must never be allowed to kill any humans.

obviously true, and it has a lot of other benefits, such as being able to take a nap while driving.

Growing proof that PR for autonomous car companies has aligned on a strategy of painting you as a bad person if you want to drive your own car, and therefore you should pay them money to continue being a good person.

Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives in cherry picked temperate and clear environments that don't get things like snow. The article mentions this point and acknowledges it is a serious problem and then just leaves it at that as if it doesn't completely demolish the entire argument they're making. They don't try to refute it or anything.

>How Does Limited Fair-Weather Data Compare to Traditional Crash Statistics?

>A key question is whether Waymo’s robotaxis, currently limited to fair-weather operation in a handful of cities in the U.S., are directly comparable to humans driving a wider variety of roads in much more variable conditions.

That's literally all they say about the subject before moving on to talking about incomplete sampling of true crash rates.

The article sensibly asks if the (intentionally or not) cherry-picked stats about automated driving (fair weather only, limited to specific areas that aren't especially difficult) is valid then cites a study that really massages those stats in a dubious way (e.g. only counts as a crash if the airbag triggered, no mention of weather). Hmmm...

Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?

Growing proof that driving attentively, sober, not playing with your phone, and not speeding saves lives. Actually, we've known that for a long time.

The System loves leaning on the Cult of Safety to justify taking away people's autonomy and freedom of movement

Didn't save Elaine Herzberg.

A vision of a possible future where capitalism might go with the rise of self-driving cars: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0

This is real and good news. Autonomous driving systems have gotten very good and safe (well, Waymo and Tesla FSD).

Taking vehicle out of the hands of humans WILL save hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.

Yet most comments here want to complain that we should be building public transit instead. Glass is always half full on this topic for some reason.

what about when an autonomous car kills someone, and the car company remotely deletes important onboard logs to avoid culpability?

The lack of transparency and misinformation coming from the industry players and the NHTSA cast serious doubts on any "science" around autonomous car safety being possible.

If it was really known the full extent of the cover up it would probably be termed a conspiracy between the autonomous car companies, the state DMVs and the federal authorities.

It will take many years and many more unnecessary deaths before we know the truth. THEN give me science based on real and complete data.

I love this conversation as the death spasm of driver culture. On the one hand, a lot of hard data. On the other hand, myths.

Honestly, mount a front and back dash camera, and allow people to submit tickets for speeding and tailgating themselves.

I’m not kidding excessive speed and not keeping a safe distance equates for some 50% of all deadly traffic incidents. It’s because a small and vocal minority drives like absolute fucking assholes and they will rally lawmakers not to introduce speed limits and to loosen grip on enforcement. The ADAC (German motor association) is a perfect example. When they announced after decades that they support a 130km max speed limit members jumped by the doves.

The only vastly meaningful improvement I can see in FSD is faster reaction times when it comes to assholes. Coincidentally those are the people who insist on driving petrol and will never upgrade to FSD because they like to drive like assholes.

IMHO it’s time for strict enforcement. Let’s ban them from the road finally. Set fines in percent from income. Allow self reporting via dash cams. Add stricter penalties for recurring offences, if you’re caught speeding 5 times in 2 days your licence is suspended.

That’ll have a much bigger impact than FSD. Maybe we can rally our representatives making them all giddy with all the extra cash they can earn from these offenders?

I feel like we never get real data on autonomous cars as we never do with data centers. It’s hard to tell if bad stories are anecdotal or rooted in truth. I hear the vast majority of accidents would be things that no human could avoid either - but then I’d also be anecdotal.

Tesla has tons of data to the same. Elon ftw.

You have to remember that this is data from the US, where the road death rate is just about level with Somalia, something like 30% of road deaths involve drunk drivers, and something like 50% of fatalities overall are because the casualty wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

Driver training is non-existent, vehicle safety inspections are frankly comical.

I have been driven in a car by an American colleague, supposedly trained to a high standard (former public safety) and frankly I think you could train a pigeon to peck buttons to control the car better.

We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.

I was reading about autonomous cars being better then people 6 years ago ... along with cries about the cars are treated unfairly.

Cool, now show the public transit safety numbers.

Epstein class pays a "journalist" to lie, so that one day, you will have no choice but to purchase their drivable iphones.

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