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  giantg2
  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.
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  mostly_harmless
  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.
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  cbondurant
  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.
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  alexpotato
  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)
• anon
  undefined
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  a3w
  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.
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  dlisboa
  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.
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  MelonArmiger
  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.
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  Junk_Collector
  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.
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  32ahgf
  So can 100% public transport, non-autonomous. But there is less lobbying money for award winning journalists.
• amelius
  Yeah but just one automatic update away from becoming a horror show.
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  fierycatnet
  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.
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  raincole
  Isn't it... quite a well known thing?
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  auntienomen
  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.
• hereme888
  Tesla has tons of data to the same. Elon ftw.
• lbrito
  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.
• anon
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• gwbas1c
  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.
• ErroneousBosh
  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.
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  danieldevries
  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.
• EarthBlues
  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.
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  motoboi
  Autonomous vehicles don’t drink and drive. That alone will save millions worldwide yearly.
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  dghlsakjg
  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.
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  jmward01
  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.
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  WalterBright
  I'll be sad when I'm forced to give up driving my old cars.
• ks2048
  In the modern USA, "saving lives" is anti-correlated with policy, so let's see how this plays out.
• goda90
  A vision of a possible future where capitalism might go with the rise of self-driving cars: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0
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  n0us
  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.
• BoingBoomTschak
  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?
• SoftTalker
  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.
• kevin_thibedeau
  Didn't save Elaine Herzberg.
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  JoeAltmaier
  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.
• watwut
  I was reading about autonomous cars being better then people 6 years ago ... along with cries about the cars are treated unfairly.
• dontsubmit
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  josefritzishere
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• DNSDNSDNS
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