> In a statement on Wednesday, the GM unit said that it did the recall even though it determined that a similar crash with a risk of serious injury could happen again every 10m to 100m miles without the update.
This kind of misses the point though (probably intentionally). Sure the odds of this exact same type of crash happening again are quite low. But the question is how many of these "one in 10 million mile" crashes are there? Fixing just this type of crash doesn't solve the broader problem.
As long as driverless cars perform any behaviors in crash situations where the general public would say “no conscious human in their right mind would do that,” driverless cars won’t be accepted by society even if their overall statistics look better than human operated vehicles.
The other thing about human drivers is that they can be punished for negligent actions on an individual level.
The problem is we have all heard similar stories of humans doing similar things.
Even more so in elderly, it is common for humans to make contact with a car and the driver not be aware.
If I read this right this was such a bizarre accident. Another car driven by a human initiated the accident by hitting a pedestrian and launching their body in front or near the cruise car.
Just a while back we saw the same thing happen with zero automation cars at an intersection. A pedestrian fell close to the front of a car making a left hand turn. The light turned green and the person was dragged across the intersection.
If anything. Depending on the software update, cruise cars might be 1000s times safer knowing that we have programmed the car to look for this specifically.
This is just a perfect representation of the limitations of driverless cars. What happens if you crash? Well, it depends doesn't it. Sometimes you want to pull over and get out the way to limit the danger of anything else happening. Sometimes you've got to stop in place because you'll cause more damage/danger by moving. How do you know? You make a judgement call, you might even get out of your vehicle to check it before moving.
What did Cruise do? Well they just said screw it, detect a crash? Pull over. Great, you've just dragged a pedestrian down the road. Now they're putting out a press release saying the new plan is to just stop and not move. Ok, how long before a cruise car detects a crash in the middle of a highway and stops in the middle of highway speed traffic. There isn't a right answer of what to do here, it's a judgement call and I think we probably need better answers than just "I'll just swap out the if statement here".
Self-driving cars are the single biggest farce in modern times. It is an effectively intractable problem with our current technology and infrastructure. And in addition, it is a solution to a question or problem that doesn't exist. Driverless cars don't solve any problem and only create problems. Yet, taxpayers have been swindled out of money and their lives in pursuit of this.
Pedestrians and cars ,self driving and human driven, often have conflicts. This is why driving in the city is so stressful compared to driving on the highway.
Maybe it would be better for Cruise , Waymo etc. to focus on highway-only self driving cars. I would like to board a self-driving car near a highway on-ramp and I would like it to drive me to my friends and family in another city; I would exit the car near an highway exit. For everything else, I could use cabs or Uber etc or public transport.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] threadThis kind of misses the point though (probably intentionally). Sure the odds of this exact same type of crash happening again are quite low. But the question is how many of these "one in 10 million mile" crashes are there? Fixing just this type of crash doesn't solve the broader problem.
The other thing about human drivers is that they can be punished for negligent actions on an individual level.
Even more so in elderly, it is common for humans to make contact with a car and the driver not be aware.
If I read this right this was such a bizarre accident. Another car driven by a human initiated the accident by hitting a pedestrian and launching their body in front or near the cruise car.
Just a while back we saw the same thing happen with zero automation cars at an intersection. A pedestrian fell close to the front of a car making a left hand turn. The light turned green and the person was dragged across the intersection.
If anything. Depending on the software update, cruise cars might be 1000s times safer knowing that we have programmed the car to look for this specifically.
What did Cruise do? Well they just said screw it, detect a crash? Pull over. Great, you've just dragged a pedestrian down the road. Now they're putting out a press release saying the new plan is to just stop and not move. Ok, how long before a cruise car detects a crash in the middle of a highway and stops in the middle of highway speed traffic. There isn't a right answer of what to do here, it's a judgement call and I think we probably need better answers than just "I'll just swap out the if statement here".
Waymo is in my city and tbh I'd rather be near one of those than a human driver, from my experiences so far.
Maybe it would be better for Cruise , Waymo etc. to focus on highway-only self driving cars. I would like to board a self-driving car near a highway on-ramp and I would like it to drive me to my friends and family in another city; I would exit the car near an highway exit. For everything else, I could use cabs or Uber etc or public transport.