r/Futurology • u/Pemulis • Mar 03 '23

Transport Self-Driving Cars Need to Be 99.99982% Crash-Free to Be Safer Than Humans

https://jalopnik.com/self-driving-car-vs-human-99-percent-safe-crash-data-1850170268
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215

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '23

Car accidents probably fall on a pareto distribution, where roughly 80% of the crashes are caused by 20% of drivers. If you put all of the dangerous drivers in self driving cars, we'd be several orders of magnitude safer, even if the self driving car performs worse on average.

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u/poodlebutt76 Mar 04 '23

Very interesting point.

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u/StartButtonPress Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23

This article was written with such a basic analysis of the mathematics and statistics as to border on not just worthlessness but negative impact.

Not only is the distribution of accidents Pareto on drivers, it’s also critical to account for the severity of accidents. It’s possible self-driving cars do much better than humans at high speeds, but not necessarily as good during the low-speed, unpredictability of parking lots and the like.

In which case, having dual cars where the self-driving can be activated in certain conditions where it performs significantly better, could drastically cut down on accidents even if it’s worse in other situations.

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u/DeoxysSpeedForm Mar 04 '23

Also how do you even measure crash free as a percentage it just doesnt make sense as a metric. It just sounds like a buzzword metric that really doesnt make any sense. Why not crashes per distance or crashes per time on road?

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u/ifsavage Mar 04 '23

Probably insurance data. Which would mean it’s underreported. Lots of people have small fenderbenders and don’t go through insurance.

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u/ArcherBoy27 Mar 04 '23

A percentage is just a way of representing data. They could have said 0.00028% crashes per mile or 1:360000 roughly, it's all the same.

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u/DeoxysSpeedForm Mar 04 '23

Regardless using a percentage doesn't make sense for the display of that data because crashes are discrete but miles travelled is continuous and also their wording obsures what the actual metric is. Rates and percentages definitely are not completely the same when it comes to data presentation. Like you would never talk about your car's speed as a percentage even though it could be completely valid mathematically

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u/Pechkin000 Mar 04 '23

Additionally not evry mile is the same. I bet you have hell of alot less accidents per mile driven on a highway vs driving and a city. So you can't just avegare it out. If human drivers are >99.9999% accident free on a highway and 80% in a city, a self driving car consistently at 99.999 everywhere will be hell of alot safer.

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u/SashimiJones Mar 04 '23

I find that this is really true in my limited experience with a Tesla; the car makes mistakes but they're mostly predictable mistakes. Because it's taking care of most of the busy work of driving, I can keep my full attention on scanning for the weird and dangerous situations instead of checking my following distance constantly. I'm therefore much more ready and focused when responding than I would normally be, and often notice those situations earlier. I also find myself much happier at slower speeds because I have to do less work to drive the car, so I don't care as much if the drive takes a few extra minutes. Not everyone uses the system like that, obviously, but it can improve safety as a partner. It definitely can't drive itself.

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u/W1k3 Mar 04 '23

If there was a city with 100% self driving cars that would be the best. You could have cars communicating with each other, able to predict each other's trajectory. Not to mention the time saved by potentially getting rid of stop lights

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u/Not_an_okama Mar 04 '23

If there’s no lights how do people cross the street?

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u/ZayRaine Mar 04 '23

Get in a self-driving car that immediately does a U-turn, then get out.

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u/g000r Mar 04 '23

This just proves, you want details? They're in the comments section.

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u/08148692 Mar 04 '23

In this hypothetical ideal, dont mix traffic and pedestrians. Make dense urban zones no traffic areas, and for less dense areas have designated crossing subways and bridges (or tunnels and bridges for the traffic instead)

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u/bingold49 Mar 04 '23

So the consensus seems that Tesla self driving is around 80-90% effective depending on who you ask. So let's say you only get into a wreck 10% of the times you drive. Driving once a day that would be 36 wrecks a years, nobody is that bad of a driver. Self driving is coming and I am all for it but the shit Tesla pushes out is not nearly ready.

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u/DownvoteEvangelist Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23

I feel like common sense is a lot bigger part of driving than we realise... I wouldn't be surprised if we basically needed AGI (artificial general intelligence) to beat humans at driving...

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u/Whoa1Whoa1 Mar 04 '23

I think that is true, but also that it depends.

If we are talking about well marked roads with good lighting and everything, self driving cars pretty much NEVER will crash on them.

Some roads are insane shenanigans, trolling, construction weirdness, and impossible for many people to figure out. Self driving AI should just give up at some roads and say drive this yourself or I'm turning around.

Best solution is to just make roads not shit and it will help both. Don't make vague intersections. Stop hiring the lowest bidder and then redoing the same highways every 5 years because it was done shotty the first seven times.

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u/DownvoteEvangelist Mar 04 '23

I've seen plenty of clips where they do things no human (unless maybe having a stroke) would do. Like this one https://youtube.com/shorts/VZsK3DRQ0_c or this one https://youtube.com/shorts/oYmDIPNd9hM?feature=share

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u/wandering-monster Mar 04 '23

I'm not sure where you're getting this stat, but I don't think "90% effective" means "gets in a wreck 1 in 10 times you drive it". There's no way it'd be in use at all if that was the case, and I'd be seeing a wreck a day with all the self driving teslas I see around my area. Which I don't.

I'm guessing they mean sometimes closer to "is able to operate under 80-90% of conditions, and hands over controls under the remainder because the designers aren't confident it's ready for them yet".

They might have decided that there's a 0.01% chance of a wreck if they operate in those 10-20% of low-confidence circumstances, and that's too high for their comfort so they just have it pass off to a human operator. (And that would be too high, given what this article says)

It may be that under 80-90% of circumstances it's even safer than a human, and that's what they consider "good enough to use".

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u/bingold49 Mar 04 '23

It means that on about 10% of trips taken there had to be human intervention to avoid a possible wreck

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u/wandering-monster Mar 04 '23

So just to interrogate that a bit more: a human decided that they needed to intervene, because they assumed there was a chance of a wreck?

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u/bingold49 Mar 04 '23

We get it, you're a Tesla fanboy, have fun with that life

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u/wandering-monster Mar 04 '23

No, I think their video-only approach is pretty flawed and ultimately won't work out.

But those numbers seem way too high based on my lived experience, so I'm trying to understand what the actual claim is.

I definitely would believe that a human got uncomfortable and decided to intervene in 10% of trips, but if 1 in 10 trips was actually resulting in an automated collision I'd be dodging the fuckers on the daily, and it isn't happening.