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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

Correct the first PDF link please

[chrism238]

The link is to a local file, not net-accessible....

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.

Has been suspect

[RobinH]

I do industrial automation for a living, since about 2000. There's a certain class of automation problem where getting to a 90% solution is easy, getting to 95% takes a lot of work, and getting to 97% is extremely hard. That is, 90% of the parts coming down the assembly line are easy to categorize correctly, the next 5% you can do with a lot of effort, and so on. Unfortunately that last 2 or 3% are damn near impossible due to problems with how good our sensors are, or how good our algorithms are, or how good our mechanical sorting solutions are.

These problems are notorious for causing run-on projects that slurp up money but never end. That's because your initial effort appears to produce amazing results - 90% with almost no effort. How hard can the remaining 10% be? My first encounter with one of these problems was a barcode-reading system at an industrial facility reading barcoded tags with a camera instead of a barcode reader. The problem was that the barcodes were becoming more worn and faded over time, and management believed that if we used a camera instead of a barcode reader we'd be able to enhance the image, etc., and get a good read because clearly a human looking at the picture can clearly see the bars and the human-readable text below it. This project went on for months, and then years, always creeping closer to 100%, but never making that leap to 100%, having thrown several different engineers at the problem and bringing in outside machine vision specialists.

In most cases these problems come from over-estimating the capability of your sensors. A sensor with a little dirt on it suddenly gives the wrong result, or temperature fluctuations mess up the calibration, or the dreaded, "sensor seems to be giving valid values, but they're just wrong for no reason." Even if your sensor values are reliable, in many cases you'll end up with a measurement that doesn't fall clearly into the known-A or known-B range.

That's where "AI" is supposed to save us, but my limited experience with AI shows it falls into the same class of engineering problem: you can quickly build an AI that correctly categorizes 90% of your input correctly, and then with effort you can improve it and improve it some more, but you'll never reach that always-correct answer.

This is where engineering projects fail, because you can always find a manager or an optimistic engineer who can hand-wave away the ambiguity and say, "humans aren't perfect either" and "we can just keep making the AI better and better." That's convenient when you don't put a physical number on it. How good can you make the AI with the available sensors? We know the sensors are in some ways better than human perception, but in other ways they're worse. In what quantitative ways are they worse, and how are you compensating for that?

If I were going to tackle some problem like this, I'd start with a standardized sensor suite and data format. You can't have everyone developing AI based on proprietary sensor data because it's too opaque. You also need to standardize the system output format (accelerator percent, braking percent, steering value, etc.) Plus you need to standardize the parameters of the vehicle. Once you've got that you need to start collecting and publishing this data in this standard format - hundreds of thousands or millions of test case scenarios available for every researcher to use, and in each case you need to have an expert specify what the correct set of outputs should be (or correct range at least) for each scenario. Then you can develop your AI or algorithms and you can then run these through a test suite so your AI has to pass all of these scenarios before it can be certified. As we have crashes then we add to the list of scenarios, and if you make changes to the AI, it has to pass that new scenario and still pass all the old ones.

I get the sense this is what the companies doing research are trying to do, but how do we validate their product? If their databases are proprietary, and their sensor format and data isn't in a standard format, and we can't run the tests ourselves, then how can we trust their systems? Of course we can't.

Re:The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Joce640k]

Are these reporters pointing out that 17 gasoline cars burst into flames every hour in the USA? That non-Tesla cars are responsible for 6% of all fire-related deaths?

Nope? That's what I imagined.

https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Ed...

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.

Re: The choice is still clear. Self driving

[Rei]

Yes, because as we all know, airplane autopilots are totally designed to replace a pilot, and that's why we don't have pilots anymore.

Meanwhile, it's not Tesla that's calling its cars "self-driving".

Re: The choice is still clear. Self driving

[dhjdhj]

As someone who drives a Tesla with âoeautopilotâ features, I believe full self-drive is a long way off. For a start, from time to time, the Tesla does veer over the middle divider line, or worse, over the line at the edge of the road. On a long drive on a road with some curves, I expect this to happen once or twice. So even that stuff is not reliable. Heck if youâ(TM)re coming down a hill, the sensors donâ(TM)t even see the car in front of you sometimes because of the angles....going around a corner where there are âoesuddenlyâ stopped cars because of a traffic light is another issue....car only notices at the last moment! But the bigger is issue is anticipation. If Iâ(TM)m driving on a street and there are kids playing with a football on the sidewalk, I know it makes sense to slow down, move a little further out into the road, just in case one of the kids runs out to get the ball. Or I see a truck stopped and I know thereâ(TM)s a possibility the driver might open the door, etc. All these self-drive systems are reactive and I donâ(TM)t think thatâ(TM)s good enough for safe driving, even compared to people.

The system of cars on roads is completely broken

[lordlod]

We climb in a little metal box, hurtle towards another metal box at a closing speed of 200km/hr. Then, to make it safe, we paint a white line on the road and promise to both stay on one side of it. To make life exciting we then add wildlife, children playing, wet weather, tired alcoholics who have just broken up with their wives...

The system is absurd, it is mind blowing that it works as well as it does, but all the band aids like crumple zones, seatbelts and AI steering can't avoid the fact that the system we have evolved is inherently dangerous. Nobody would ever deliberately design a system like our roads and cars.

As an illustration, where I live people working on the side of the road must have a substantial crash barrier to protect them from the oncoming traffic and provide a safe working environment. That same worker can then get on a motorbike and ride home, protected only by a painted line, and nobody thinks anything of it.

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 right question

[mjwx]

The right question to ask is : would you prefer to ride in a self-driven car, or with a drunken driver ? and with a very tired driver ?

I mean why stop there.

The right question to as is: Would you like to ride in a self driving car in a summers day on a controlled road with no traffic or in an death-race style commute with a drunken, tired Donald Trump at the wheel whilst he listens to the BBC world service and pops Prozacs every 24 seconds.

If you're going load a question, bloody well load it properly