Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.

Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.

The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.

edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument

After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...

The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!

We likely do. First and foremost, services already exist to have people driven to places, like uber, taxis and public transport. Other possibilities to help them do what they need to do include: neighbors, family, door dash, the mail, nurses, moving to assisted living, etc.

It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.

The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety.

At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.

Then people would likely not have a issue with public transit.

I welcome the car overlords like Waymo or related companies. I believe this is absolutely a step in the right direction and bringing up the public transit is sort of a “perfect is the enemy of good enough” situation.

Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here (https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-...) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mountains.

It's certainly doable, if you wanted to have last mile public transport.

Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable.

There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times).

I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?

That's like a 15 minute walk. And with sufficient infrastructure investments this can be 5 minutes.

Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space.

We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.

> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.

You're almost certainly an American, and you probably have no idea what public transit is like in countries that have been investing in it for decades instead of focusing 95% of their resources on infrastructure for cars.

If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.

Or would you still need a giant spot of land to park these things outside of peak hour?

Amtrak is public transportation. Airlines are pretty close to public transportation. Local government doesn't need to be involved.

I think this isn't true for the US any more, maybe it hasn't been true for decades?

WorldBank seems to have the ubranisation rate at around 80% for the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...

There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.

It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.

[1]: https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit

Self driving taxis have to be parked (or cruise around continuously), I guess, and that parking better be close cause ain't no one waiting for a self driving car parked 30 minutes away to get moving.

Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.

In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.

My understanding is that it is a legal and safety liability for them to drive. The driver is employed by and the car is owned by a company that the wealthy person founded and pays so if the driver hits & kills someone, the company gets sued for a bunch of money then the liability can be discharged in bankruptcy / isolated to the company's coffers rather than the wealthy person's.

It's the same gambit as their security. I am sure more than just Gates and Musk do it but I know that both of them own personal security companies who only provide security to themselves. It's all just shells of liability shielding.

Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.

Most of America lives in urban areas. Rural communities, where they exist, have no need to change. Running busses out there doesn’t make sense. What also doesn’t make sense is, for example, in Ohio the Ohio Department of Highways (ODOT) spending a billion dollars to “ease congestion” in downtown Columbus, Ohio so that folks can live further away and drive to work or whatever. It’s a tax subsidy that I don’t think we should pay, and it’s not a good use of money objectively either.

Second we don’t have to make this trade off you are imagining. I live in a European style (as close as you can probably get in America) neighborhood with shops and restaurants within walking distance. I also have a large garage (with only one car) and live in a single family home, and live alongside duplexes, triplexes, big houses, small houses, shops, and more. Today I can use my car as you’d expect. But what’s missing is the ability to not use my car to go to the grocery store and get a steak or something.

With respect to safety you can just avoid the problem by switching products. Walk, bike, rail and you don’t have to get in a car crash.

The trade-offs that folks think must exist simply do not exist. The trade-offs are do we spend an absorbent amount of money, have more people die, face insurance premiums that increase with no recourse, have to be upset at gas prices, &c.

Or do we just not do that?

I walk 10k steps a day on a normal day, only drive when necessary to go out of my normal routes. This has an added benefit of keeping me, an aging programmer, in shape (as well as other relevant activities).

Nothing dramatic about it at all.

They lose hours, lives, and a boatload of money every day in the current state. Removing the reliance on cars will improve those things.

Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political

If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...

The cause was found to be drivers with 2WD losing a little traction early in their drove and subsequently slowing down, while drivers with 4WD just kept driving like normal until they were suddenly off the road.

Another statistic is that intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers cause more than half of all fatalities. So making a solution with machine learning and cameras that could retrofit into any existing car and just deny starting the car for such drivers, and having insurance companies cut premiums for having such gadgets installed, would be much more effective than any form of self driving or similar.

https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011....

Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.

I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.

Yep. ADAS should be mandatory like seat belts and airbags. A regulatory body should be able to come up with a minimum standard for it.

Even when it doesn't slam on the brakes, if you were concentrating on the road, those jarring beeps can just as easily break your focus on driving as they can break your focus on a distraction. I think it's better to avoid distraction by keeping cruise control off, and you can compensate for having human-level reaction time by following at a safe distance and staying in an appropriate gear or setting an appropriate level of regenerative braking to avoid mindlessly getting too close to the car in front of you.

I think that too often, driver assist features are being added to cars to compensate for the other features (like adaptive cruise control) that encourage drivers to mentally disengage from the task of driving. There's also the fact (well, opinion) that driving a car without electronic assists and nannies is fun and engaging (especially on back roads with the windows down and the radio up). Riding in an autonomous vehicle is just as dull as riding on public transportation, all while being less efficient, less social, and worse for the environment.

It would be interesting if we could somehow test how the reduction in crashes with the introduction of driver assists would compare with if we had just banned cruise control, introduced minimum visibility and minimum suspension stiffness standards, and mandated manual transmissions.

I disagree that the safety concerns have to be on an individual basis, no other driving regulation works on that basis. They are based on the statistical likelihood of an overall reduction in damages or risk. You as an individual might be safe driving 10-20mph over the limit, but the limit is there to cover a variety of road conditions and road users.

The self driving system just has to fulfil those criteria, being that overall having it is safer for the average road user than not. It, also, is not the fast-growth tech companies that decide that.

These things are set so that, on average, everyone is safer. If allowing self driving cars raises the safety of everyone on average, it makes sense.

Personally, I would be in favour of everyone having to either use a self driving car or gain an advanced driving certificate so they could drive manually. One that only 10-20% of people could pass, this would include an in depth theoretical section as well as a 2-3 hour driving test.

> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.

> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...

You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.

Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.

FSD driving in decently heavy rain (this is mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKePEavEhv

Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.

I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.

An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.

Just think a little about what having a computer control the car would really mean, rather than thinking of them like robot people.

This is more about it deleting the human not paying attention + reaction time to next bumper.

Currently it looks like

1. Light goes red

2. Car1 reaction time and then moves

3. Car2 swipes off TikTok app + reaction time off car1's brake lights

4. Car3 swipes off Instagram + reaction time off car2's brake lights

5. Car4 Yelling at kids in back seat until they hear Car5's horn + reaction time

Versus autocars

1. Light goes green

2. Cars 1-N all release their brake faster than human reaction time and begin moving ever so slowly. Their acceleration rates are respectively less for the reasons you said. More cars make it through the light meaning less likely to accumulate and create multilight jams.

Autonomous cars driving around empty is a good argument for them being on a public rideshare network. They are more likely to pickup a passenger along the way to their actual destination. Even if the route is non-direct, any trip that gets them closer to home is not wasted travel because that person(s) wanted to travel regardless. Similarly when they go to pick you up.

IMO The bigger culprit here is the artificial need for people to work in an office, and for them to start at the same time. Work from home and higher agency over time would mean people do novel things like 1) Not commute at all or, like I do, 2) Take a couple meetings from home and commute when it's quiet.

The nuance you describe at the end is the better interpretation: fatalities per mile driven is a useless metric since it's such a rare occurance and incredibly circumstantial that it cannot be used as a meaningful comparison metric for safety.

Why? Well let us try to imagine a world where Waymo has the statistically average fatal crash rate, yet is never at fault. In this world, every fatal crash occurs at the Waymos. You just have a bunch of crazy drivers roving the streets causing fatal crashes against (or involving) unsuspecting, not-at-fault victim Waymos.

If that is the world, then are these crazy drivers only crashing into Waymos? Probably not, these crazy drivers would almost certainly be crashing into a statistically average distribution of unsuspecting, not-at-fault victims.

So this imagined world is consistent with the overwhelming majority of human drivers engaging in 0 fatal accidents at fault with a small, crazy roving subset being at fault for all fatal accidents. So, in that world, a Waymo that is only ask good as the statically average driver would actually be infinitely worse than the overwhelming majority of human drivers. If you only replaced the 10th percentile driver (90% of drivers are better), you would actually be increasing the fatality rate. Only by displacing that crazy subset would you actually be decreasing the fatality rate.

Are we in that world? The Waymo numbers on fatal accident involvement with no fault actually kind of point in that direction (though the mileage numbers are still too low to make a strong conclusion). Seemingly massive crash and injury reduction due to massive reduction of at-fault crashes, but the fatality reduction does not seem proportional. Another possibility is that the Waymo driving distribution is biased toward being in situation that result in more no-fault fatal crashes.

But, that is all just conjecture and thought experiments. Unless we have better data, we unfortunately should be restricting ourselves to apples to apples comparisons which, in this case, do not conditionalize on fault.

Though, to nitpick on the original post, I think that the 2 fatal crashes in 170 million miles (~85 million miles per fatal crash which is similar to the USA human average of ~83 million miles per fatality), is probably not the correct analysis. The average fatal crash is probably 2 vehicles and 1 fatality. So, the 85 million miles per fatal crash versus 83 million miles per fatality is probably fine in the crash vs fatality direction. But I am pretty certain you would actually need to double the 170 million to account for the "statistically average mileage of the other cars".

Otherwise, if we have exactly two cars in the world each with 100 million miles and they engage in one fatal crash with one fatality, then we would conclude that car 1 has 1 fatality per 100 million miles and car 2 also has 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Naively averaging them, we could conclude that the overall fatality rate is 1 per 100 million miles. Therefore, over the 200 million miles the two of them drove, there were 2 fatalitys. Obviously incorrect, so we almost certainly need to weight them by their relative proportion when aggregating them.

There will eventually be a serious or fatal crash and the investigation will shed light on what's happening inside. That will be the real test.

Cruise collapsed the moment they were involved in a single serious crash. It collapsed because we suddenly found out how the company was actually run.

I wonder if they ever caught that guy?

I havent read the doc and I am not arguing either way, just saying that you can cause an accident in other ways than by ploughing into someone.

All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".

I don't know how aggressive this filtering is, but it is a way to save money on the insurance costs associated with the gap insurance in rideshare. This filter alone would probably put rideshare drivers above average, but that's speculation on my part.

I don't know where you've been getting your aggressive, distracted, impatient, overconfident drivers. Most of my ride sharing has been airport to/from home or hotel, so maybe there is some selection bias there. It all seems routine as anything.

Personally, I can't get past the car being in good condition as something which is often overlooked.

maybe we could look for insurance rates?

Getting to be well beyond the range of “armchair HN statistician”.

Sounds like something the government should do as part of public policy deliberations.

In my dreams.

If you tried to enforce self driving cars, you'd still need some level of surveillance too.

Could you justify this? e.g. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2024.2325386 (N=1890):

"What first comes to mind when you hear the term self-driving vehicles?" (coded free-text) 17% positive, 34% neutral, 49% negative

"How would you feel about riding in a self-driving vehicle instead of the existing ways you travel?" 28% comfortable, 15% neutral, 53% uncomfortable

"How would you feel about using the roads alongside self-driving vehicles?" 29% comfortable, 20% neutral, 49% uncomfortable

Keep in mind the lesson of seat belts. Which is that the highest-risk drivers are also the least likely to wear a seatbelt.

Selective recruitment is a danger in this armchair analysis, too. I don’t think 18 year olds aren’t giving up the thrill of tearing down side streets at 60mph to use a self-driving car - they probably can’t even afford one. To be honest, I am just guessing at the profile of the biggest offenders but insurance rates seem to back me up.

Also not sure if Waymo data includes pedestrian deaths? (NSC seems not to)

The data on https://waymo.com/safety/ reflects these apples to apples comparison.

They’ve also, when possible, done comparisons of the Waymo driver to an ideally attentive human driver. https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/

The biggest challenge is in sourcing the data. A lot of these datasets don't exist or have to be developed.

(The article itself, mixes and matches stats which is a common thing in general media).

It would be a lot easier for drivers to have the following thought process: "I drank tonight, I can't drive home" rather than "I drank two beers over the period of 3 hours, am I good? Yeah, probably, let's gooo."

> I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.

If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.

My understanding is that in US states a DUI (Wisconsin) is nothing but a fine, and drinking while driving isn't taken seriously at all.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2023/f...

I used to be an avid cyclist and used a lot of public transport in the past.

I no longer cycle nearly as much because I was fed up of having to carry a bunch of kit on my back (lock, repair kits, allen keys, water proofs), having to deal with the wind, wet and cold and often you will have minor accidents if you commute enough, you just have to have someone's dog runs out in front of your in the cycle path, someone steps out between two vehicles without looking and you end up hitting the deck.

Public transport IMO sucks unless you live near an urban area. Cycling more than say 15 miles is untenable for commuting. I saw this as someone that spent an entire summer riding centuries (100 mile routes).

After I got my license it given me a lot of freedom. Now I cycle when I want to, not because I have to an enjoy it much more as a result. I enjoy being able to have the choice to either drive, cycle or walk. I also use by vehicle for offroad driving, day trips, camping etc. It gives me a lot of freedom to explore places.

Having a motorised form of transport that you own and lets you get where you want quickly, comfortably and safely is a major improvement to many and thus why many people are willing to forego the expense.

The comparisons I've seen are with the general population, not professional drivers. How might that comparison look, since this is a paid service?

They are, of course, not as good as more enlightened city planning, but they’d be an improvement to the status quo I expect, especially the way the quality has made some serious strides lately.

I get a sense that traditional automakers are done chasing Tesla on the technology and that’s unfortunate. Those traditional automakers figured out that their buyers don’t care that much about it, and the ones that do care already left for Tesla. Plus, the self-driving that really works best relies heavily on serious AI technology.