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The Humans Crashing Into Driverless Cars are Exposing a Key Flaw (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 sends in a story from Bloomberg pointing out that the rigid adherence to traffic laws and overcautious programming have caused self-driving cars to rack up a crash rate twice that of an average human driver. "This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up — all minor scrape-ups for now — the arguments among programmers at places like Google and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?" While the autonomous vehicles aren't at fault in these crashes, their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.
Or... it's simply a learning curve. For both AI and human drivers.
Besides, all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders. It may be worth living with double the rate of those if the serious crashes that injure people are perhaps halved.
From TFA: "They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes".
If this is in fact the dominant accident mode, I would suggest that this is not such a big deal and will, over the long term, be self-correcting as the insurance rates for idiot non-automated drivers shoot up because they can't get it through their thick skulls not to tailgate other vehicles.
Besides, all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders. It may be worth living with double the rate of those if the serious crashes that injure people are perhaps halved.
Bingo. The relevant question is "What is the crash rate involving injury?"
Not quite. The relevant question is "What is the crash rate involving injury for a desired level of traffic throughput.
If all we wanted to do is reduce injury, we could enforce 10 mph speed limit with automatic speed traps and draconian fines and completely eliminate any kind of traffic-related injury.
Agreed. Human drivers tend to have this sense of entitlement and exceptionalism so that they believe that they can break the law but anyone else who does it is a dangerous idiot. Automated cars are a new type of vehicle that these drivers have to negotiate. Expect a learning curve with a spike in accidents while drivers get used to it. I remember the same thing happening in Barcelona when they re-introduced trams. There was a sudden, dramatic spike in accidents, some of them fatal, while drivers learned what they could and couldn't "get away with." The answer is to give time for lawless drivers to learn about automated cars and adjust their law-breaking appropriately so that they don't get involved in as many accidents. And while we're at it, how about automated cars recording everything that happens around them that can be presented as evidence in court?