People Are Losing Faith In Self-Driving Cars Following Recent Fatal Crashes (mashable.com)

oldgraybeard shares a report from Mashable: A new survey (PDF) released Tuesday by the American Automobile Association found that 73 percent of American drivers are scared to ride in an autonomous vehicle. That figure is up 10 percent from the end of last year. The millennial demographic has been the most affected, according to the survey of more than 1,000 drivers. From that age group, 64 percent said they're too afraid to ride in an autonomous vehicle, up from 49 percent -- making it the biggest increase of any age group surveyed. "There are news articles about the trust levels in self-driving cars going down," writes oldgraybeard. "As a technical person, I have always thought the road to driverless cars would be longer than most were talking about. What are your thoughts? As an individual with eye problems, I do like the idea. But technology is not as good as some think."

The Mashable article also references a separate study from market research company Morning Consult "showing increased fear about self-driving vehicles following the deadly March crashes in the Bay Area and Arizona." Another survey from car shopping site CarGurus set to be released Wednesday found that car owners aren't quite ready to trade their conventional vehicles for self-driving ones. "Some 84 percent of the 1,873 U.S. car owners surveyed in April said they were unlikely to own a self-driving car in the next five years," reports Mashable. "79 percent of respondents said they were not excited about the new technology."

Comments

Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

How many crashes happen every day because of humans? Yes I know it is sad, no one wants bad things to happen. But in the long run this is going to save far more lives than take.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but maybe we should be more careful with deployment than Tesla and Uber. See Waymo (or I am sure there are others) for example, I don't know of any fatal incident there. Also studies comparing accidents of driver-less/normal cars would be useful.

Re:Amazing

[pedz]

I would like to know where autonomous cars can drive. Can they handle construction zones? Can they even recognize stop lights? Can they drive down a country dirt road?

The only examples I've seen of them driving down straight freeways. I've not seen them negotiate any traffic situations at all.

So... before you compare accident rates, those questions need to be answered.

I'm still very skeptical that they can handle anything but the most trivial of driving situations. Perhaps I'm wrong. If anyone knows for sure and can point to maybe a YouTube or something, I'd like to see.

Re:Amazing

[arth1]

Agreed. But even with those incidents my underdstanding was the death rate per mile is much lower than with human drivers. Am I wrong on that?

Actually, yes, you are. The number of miles driven autonomously for the same reasons as regular driving is still too low to draw any statistically significant conclusions either way. We need to get at least an order of magnitude more data in before we can even speak of significant tendencies.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that no commercially available so-called self-driving options can do much more than lane-following, adaptive cruise control (including coming to a complete stop) and possibly obstacle-aware lane changing.

Speaking of Tesla, at least, it can only "self-drive" on roads with lane markings i.e. no dirt roads. There is no recognition of stop lights, stop signs or other indications of actions needed to be taken by the driver. It will update speed limits as you're driving so you're aware of them but that's about it. I'm not including here anything not related to driving e.g. self-parking, summoning etc.

Honestly anyone who doesn't think of self-driving as a future promise at this time needs to have their heads examined. Just looking at the problem space, one would realize that we've only dipped our toes into this pool.

Re:Amazing

[K. S. Kyosuke]

For some of these problems, there could be a simple solution. For example, install machine-readable traffic signage.

Re:Amazing

[Joce640k]

Huh?

a) Has anybody planned a car where the autopilot doesn't have an on/off switch?
b) Drivers don't get to look out of the window at the landscapes, they're too busy driving.
c) Teslas have a Ludicrous mode which is a big selling point - they're more of a drivers car than anything else you're used to.

Re:Amazing

[bondsbw]

Tesla is partially at fault for this bad press. They call their system "autopilot", which to the general public means "this thing drives all by itself". But that's explicitly not what it does. It drives without human intervention only in specific conditions.

I expect aircraft pilots to know the difference, but not the general public.

Re:Amazing

[BasilBrush]

This is a silly meme. There's no evidence whatsoever that people driving Teslas don't know that autopilot is an assistive technology, not one that drives itself without monitoring.

Sure, some people have done stupid things to override the failsafe that checks for hands on the steering wheel. And some have even then got into the passenger seat or even the back of the car.

But they've done this in spite of knowing what the autopilot system does, not because they are ignorant of it.

Re:Amazing

[tinkerton]

There may be some validity in this but not that much. It's also quite natural for the media to create boom-bust cycles of trust and distrust, fed by the occasional instance of people who delegate too much responsibility to the autopilot and crash .

I don't have any experience with Tesla but it does look like a challenge to allow the car to drive by itself, reducing yourself to the role of supervisor, and then not letting your attention wander off occasionally.

Re:Amazing

[fluffernutter]

Why would a safety driver take control if a crash was not to happen? Sure maybe the car turned down the wrong way on a one way road and it happened to be empty at the time, but that should still be considered a crash because of its potential to actually cause one.

The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Anonymous Coward]

1000's are killed daily by other humans and they keep driving. A few are potentially killed by self driving cars and that makes them bad....

People are such morons!

Self driving cars will save 1000's of people daily!!

Re:The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Joce640k]

We can safely ignore this headline.

In surveys people think Facebook is evil but I don't see many of them cancelling their accounts.

Surveys also prove that people want more leafy green salads in McDonalds but nobody ever eats them if they appear.

Nope. The day people figure out they can use Facebook all the way to MacDonalds and back will be a good day to look for a second hand car.

Re:The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Joce640k]

Get back to us when there are a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads, you shill.

Huh?

The whole point is that there aren't a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads but they're making all the headlines.

2000 gasoline gars explode? Nothing to see here.

A story involving a Tesla? Front page news!

Re:The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Joce640k]

How about this -- 65% of all fires in waste facilities are from lithium batteries.

Those places where they pass lithium batteries though big grinding machines followed by even bigger trash compactors?

Yes, that statistic might be true.

Just more FUD

[fredgiblet]

Show me the statistics, not the emotion-laden stories. I'll bet money that self-driving cars are safer now and will be even safer in the future. Id love to have one, just can't afford it.

Re:Just more FUD

[ledow]

The statistics are that there are an insignificant number of self-driving cars on the road.

Even if you include things like the Tesla which are NOT SELF-DRIVING.

Sadly, you won't have the statistics to compare accurately until, say, 5% of people has one of those things. Currently... what? SALES of electric cars are 1% of all new car sales. So there is an insignificant percentage of those, even, currently on the road.

If you took all Teslas, every single model of them ever sold, adds up to about 300,000 cars. Worldwide. There are approximately 1bn vehicles in the world. That's 0.03%.

If you go for "certified self-driving cars in private hands", the figure is so near zero that's is not even recordable. Everything is either a "prototype" from a big corporation or deliberately advertised as NOT a self-driving car.

So... sorry... self-driving cars do not have any statistically-significant data from which to draw any conclusion whatsoever. Even Tesla's don't.

As an IT guy, I fail to see why a computer would be any better than a human at such a human task. If we were talking isolated, self-driving-only roads, no human drivers, changing the roads to prevent such signage and road-marking confusions etc. Sure. We call that a railway, though. It's very different.

We couldn't even make a burger-flipping robot that works around humans. Robots/computers are good for one thing. The same task, over and over again, which needs as little interpretation as possible, and no human interference. Anything else is a mess.

And guess what a self-driving on an ordinary road is.

Re:Just more FUD

[Gonoff]

The way to reduce automobile accidents is to rid the road of drunk drivers and texting drivers. When you subtract those two causes, humans are pretty good drivers.
Maybe in 10 or 20 years your dream of self-driving cars will come true. They're just not good enough yet.

Do you go out much? Careless, aggressive, inattentive and plain bad drivers are really big problems. I have driven in the USA, Europe Africa and the middle east. In the west, we have better roads and that does encourage poor driving. Or perhaps it is the fact that we have ambulances and nice police officers to pick up the pieces (or whole bodies if needed).

Drunks and other idiots deserve whatever they get. I am more in danger from people who tailgate, overtake on the wrong side, cut in front of people and so on. Get them off the road and we will all be safer.

Good

[mccalli]

There is way too much starry-eyed magical thinking about tech in general at the moment. AI this and machine learning that...you would think people's day to day interactions with their phone assistants would get people to quickly understand things are still fledgling, but apparently not.

I'm in favour of developing the technology. And very, very much in favour of not overhyping it to destruction.

Let's get this straight:

[argStyopa]

...people are losing faith in an overhyped, not-ready-for-prime-time technology in the development stages for a task that takes a colossal synthesis of perception, reflexes, maturity, and training (none of which we have systems capable of duplicating yet individually) for which the infrastructure (physical, legal, social) hasn't even begun to be developed, much less matured to the point of implementation?

It's almost like repeatedly INSISTING that "it's almost here" is ACTUALLY an insufficient substitute for real time in development?

Hm.

People aren't logical

[sjbe]

How many crashes happen every day because of humans? Yes I know it is sad, no one wants bad things to happen. But in the long run this is going to save far more lives than take.

Several problems with that argument. 1) you are assuming people are rational when they aren't. 2) People don't care much about the long run. They especially don't care when they are afraid of something (see nuclear power). 3) Your claim that it will save lives is at this point pure conjecture albeit based on reasonable logic. We don't actually have any proof that self driving tech does or will save lives. 4) Certain high profile companies are pushing the technology out there in some arguably irresponsible ways. 5) People tend to trust people more than they trust machines even when that makes no logical sense.