Slate article on regulating Teslas

If we accept the extremely cynical view that the prime motivation will be financial then the obvious answer is to take the vehicular collision.

The corporation will not be found liable for such a crash and their financial risk will be zero.

Deliberately crash into a mother and child (I'm assuming there's a child in the buggy) and they'd be on the hook for huge damages.

Driverless cars won't be flawless and they will harm people but they offer us the chance to achieve zero road deaths as they improve. We will never achieve that with human drivers.

If it's a head on collision the driver may well die.

Would you rather be dead or in court for dangerous driving?

Would you buy a car that goes for the head on collision option? If you have been overtaken on a blind bend while riding the bike, you will know that the driver never goes for the head on collision.

It's probably not a real world problem, and there is no right or wrong answer.

This is a variation on the trolley car problem from moral psychology.

Self preservation is a strong instinct for humans and corporations alike.

For the corporation the blameless head on collision is far lower risk than the deliberate collision with pedestrians.

If the car is aware the collision is inevitable and has time to react then it also has time to brake heavily, tighten seatbelts and pre-deploy airbags etc lowering risk to the driver considerably. À la Demolition man IIRC.

Cycloid wrote:

If it's a head on collision the driver may well die.

Well perhaps not, as presumably code could be written to ensure the autonomous car drives at a speed that allows it stop in the space it can see to be clear. So Impact speed could be lower in the blind corner test. Of course if both cars were autonomous, there would be no collision as a car would not decide to go round a blind bend on th wrong side of the road.

In either case the responsibility would be with the driver on the wrong side, while te responsibilty for wiping out pedstrians would be entirely with the manufacturer

Cycloid wrote:

As we move towards fully autonomous cars becoming the norm on our roads this begs the question "what does a car do when a collision is inevitable?"

The obvious answer is to slow down as much as possible in a straight line.

A collision is inevitable, so it's the head on collision

Cycloid wrote:

A collision is inevitable, so it's the head on collision

The idea is to reduce the energy of the impact and ideally you don't want to be introducing rotational forces into the collision as that could end up with the vehicles hitting pedestrians etc. Also, the front of the car is often the most heavily protected with crumple zones and passenger airbags.

It's possible to contrive situations where slowing down as much as possible in a straight line isn't the best choice, but 99% of the time it's the best thing to do. Ideally with computer reacting as quickly as possible, the vehicle should be able to come to a complete stop which certainly makes the liability easier to determine.

Much as I think that the hype over driverless cars is ridiculous, there could eventually be some benefits.  For a computer POWER is not the answer.  The decision is one hell of a lot faster. There is no need to move the foot from the accelerator to the brake to even start the braking process.

Braking should start sooner, and (maybe, hopefully) they driverless vehicle will not be breaking the speed limit so that the initial speed and energy will be lower.

I think they could be a major part of achieving Vision Zero, but first we have to get rid of the ridiculous Tesla idea of having partly autonomous vehicles but relying on a human driver to step in and take control. People are utterly unable to concentrate on a boring task where they have to do nothing for long periods, so when the car suddenly turns control over to them, they've been doing something else other than watching the road.

I agree that humans perform poorly in such situations.

The question that needs to be asked is whether overall the 'Tesla' system you've described is safer than a 100% human system?

Crash statistics seems to indicate that it is.

100% human control leads to thousands of unnecessary deaths and injuries every year.

Any system, however flawed, that improves that statistic, should be welcomed.

Do the Teslas have a better crash record than other vehicles? I haven't seen a comparison, but their tendency to crash into stationary vehicles doesn't sound great as usually human drivers avoid those kinds of crashes (I'm ignoring all the examples on the Car Crashing into Buildings thread on here).

Edit: I've just had a brief search for comparisons and as there's little data yet it seems inconclusive. I believe Tesla published a comparison of Tesla autonomous vehicles vs all other vehicles and it came out safer, but a more targetted comparison of autonomous Tesla vehicles vs other passenger cars would reach the opposite conclusion.

I have a graph!

It's from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/08/23/silicon-valleys-driver...

Which, as you've probably guessed from the link, is a telegraph hatchet job on driverless cars so certainly not likely to overstate their effectiveness.

Excellent!

I've just been reading a bit of this analysis: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1119936_tesla-fatal-crash-rate-with-autopilot-still-no-better-than-with-human-drivers

It dives a bit more into how they're getting their figures as Tesla are obviously cherry picking statistics to make themselves look better.

Quote:

While these updated numbers for Autopilot are encouraging, it’s clear that Tesla’s claims of its vastly superior safety—at least in terms of fatal accidents—are still vapor. It’s way too soon to come to any firm conclusions about Autopilot safety.

Musk has compared Autopilot’s fatality rate to government figures for the overall U.S. traffic fatality rate. Surely someone as smart as Musk realizes that comparing Tesla’s Autopilot numbers to the NHTSA figure is not just apples-to-oranges. It’s apples-to-aardvarks.

NHTSA’s Fatality Rate per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled, the figure repeatedly cited by Musk as the Autopilot benchmark for comparison, includes bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, and buses. Musk is essentially equating a Tesla Autopilot crash to a pedestrian getting run over by a bus.

Interesting!

Kudos to the authors for attempting to derive some statistics and for acknowledging their, unavoidable, unreliability.

The best benchmark, IMHO, is to Teslas without Autopilot engaged. It does seem, based on that benchmark, that Autopilot improves safety but with the important caveat that these are Tesla's own figures.

If the figures in your link are accurate they do give some cause for hope though, there seems to have been a rapid improvement in safety and we seem to have already approximated to the human driver fatality rate. If the figures are accurate and the rapid progress continues we should see fewer people dieing on our roads very soon.

Secret_squirrel wrote:

Hmmm unfortunately it's a US-centric article with statements that aren't necessarily true in the rest of the world.

I'm not so sure that's true.

IME people in big, fast, expensive cars drive are more likely to drive like arrogant c**ts, especially on small country lanes. Riding the same roads daily, I get far more impatient overtakes and the all too frequent head-on 'get outta my way' incidents with drivers of SUVs and upmarket brands than people in smaller cars.

The USA car manufacturers actively resist including pedestrian safety in vehicles because it's not legislated in the USA and lobby against changing the regulations. To sell vehicles in Europe they need to comply with prevailing regulations which are more stringent on pedestrian protection.

even so, the trend to SUV is causing problems in pedestrian collisions because the increased frontal height changes point of impact and makes it far less likely the pedestrian will go over the vehicle. There's increases in chest injuries and more severe head injuries. We have been tracking those injury stats in Australia, where our vehicle regulations are more closely tied to European regulations that the USA.

That's the guy who lied about having investors they didn't have to manipulate the stocks. I wouldn't trust a word he says even if it sounds  truthful. Saying "it's not so great" isn't an admission that it's not fit for public roads.