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Humans To Blame For Most Self-Driving Car Crashes In California, Study Finds (axios.com)
cartechboy writes: Turns out computers are better drivers than humans after all. Axios compiled a study that found the vast majority of crashes in California involving self-driving cars were not caused by the autonomous vehicles themselves. Of the 54 incidents involving 55 companies holding self-driving permits in California, only one crash could be blamed on a self-driving car in autonomous mode. Six crashes were when the self-driving cars were in conventional driving modes, while the majority of the accidents were to be blamed on other drivers or pedestrians. Maybe self-driving cars aren't such a bad thing after all, it's humans that are the problem.
Nope. If the piece of software steering the car hits a human or human operated car the software is to blame and needs improvement.
It can only be attributable to human error.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/quotes/qt0396920
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Pedestrians and human-driven vehicles, are, you know, part of the real world. If your self-driving car can't properly deal with them, then yes, it is the problem.
Human drivers know that other road users make mistakes. As long as the majority of drivers is still human, the real question here is not whether a self-driving car accident has to be blamed on another driver or a pedestrian, but whether a human driver could and would have avoided the accident in question.
Given perfect weather and the absence of traffic, animals or pedestrians, lane tracking software is still hard. Not all roads are well marked
I'm a futurist and a big fan of the idea of autonomous vehicles
I'm also a programmer who has been writing code since the 70s
The current tech seems to be 90+% percent working. The last few percentage points and edge cases are where the deeper problem lies
I will not put my life into the hands of a half-finished computer program that can only handle situations that are programmed into it.
I can drive just fine, thank you. And I, unlike a mere program, can improvise if there is a unexpected situation.
If you want a car controlled by a program where you can sleep, eat, browse the internet or play games, great. I hope it doesn't kill you.
only one crash could be blamed on a self-driving car in autonomous mode
When every major self-driving car company has vehicles that defer control to a human in as little as milliseconds before a crash, the only wonder is why did that mechanism have an instance of failure?
A good driver is not just supposed to prevent at fault accident but should also do its best to prevent accident when the other party is at fault. If you replace all good drivers with self driving system, you are going to have lot more accidents than you have today if the self driving system is simply claims to have no at fault accident. Remember there is no reward for preventing accidents and so there is no tracking of it and we don't know how many of them are prevented daily.
Once I was on a divided road (divided by 2 feet concrete wall) driving on right lane. A car took left turn and entered in wrong way to the left of me thinking that it was a 1 lane undivided road and 2 feet divider was a barrier to some private property. It was not at all a danger to me and I would have just ignored it and let it have accident but I honked hard, stopped car, opened the window and alerted driver. He backed up and moved to the other side of divider. A self driving car would have just ignore this car. I can easily narrate dozen such incident and few more incidents where I was at fault.
We need self driving car which is not just not getting involved in at fault accident but also its at no fault accident rate is lower than average.
What strikes me is the raw number of accidents are higher in autonomous mode. Maybe the vehicles spend the majority of their time in autonomous mode. The data need to be normalized in accidents per mile driven.
But what strikes me is the default in a two-vehicle incident seems to be to blame it on the human driver, i.e. the autonomous vehicle could not accurately predict the human driver's intentions and there was a collision. Maybe the human didn't use the turn signals, or started a turn and then decided in the last instance to go the other way. There are plenty of bad drivers out there and a good driver knows how to drive defensively. Blaming the accident on the human driver because he didn't drive the way the AI predicted he should is the wrong answer.
Statistics prove otherwise.
In 20 years it will be illegal for humans to drive cars in public spaces. You heard it here first.
Most Waymo collisions are due to unnecessary panic stops by autonomous cars. About once a week another CA DMV record appears with the usual rear end collision because Waymo slammed on the brakes for no reason when following drivers had no reason to suspect that might happen. While it's true that following drivers are responsible for avoiding such a collision these incidence are unnecessary and would not happen given human drivers that don't panic stop for no reason.
Just ask Uber.
IMO, the only way self-driving cars will be safe is if all cars are self-driving. they need to be able to talk with each other in order to be safe. Humans are so illogical, no way to to have an algorithm to predict what they are going to do at any given moment.
Humans are to blame for allowing such technology to go on the public roads before it is ready.
Seriously, This is such a stupid argument, you can say a computer is a better driver depending on what metrics are being considered.
But one important aspect of driving well, is the ability to adjust to road conditions, no matter how weird or strange they might be. If a pedestrian or an elephant were to jump in front of a car, you can say that isn't the computer's fault, but its a detriment to the credibility of saying they are "better" drivers, because the programming didn't accommodate for that fact, and who's to say a person might not have stopped?
So, while the title might be accurate (I don't know personally), that most accidents involving self driving cars are are with a human at fault,
coming to the conclusion that this means automation is better than humans,
or not considering that there are far more human drivers/pedestrians than autonomous vehicles are on the road, and that it might be a major contributing factor
it just seems silly to me.
In other news, Houses found to be more flammable in urban areas, because in the last year there have been 90% more houses on fire in cities than in rural areas...
Humans programmed the car and humans driving near it had an accident with the vehicle. Either you blame the bad driver or the bad programmer, but a human is to blame. Even if it was some sort of self learning system that self reprogrammed, the initial seed was from a human. But, I guess this is probably not what they meant.
"Get the team together and figure out how to blame the user."
--every software shop ever
you don't have to pay to fix your car. I've been in several accidents were I wasn't at fault and never once gotten away clean. Insurance will only pay to fix on a new car but they don't pay the lost resale value that an on record accident causes. You can hire a lawyer but they take so much you break even or lose. And if your car is totaled they pay the dealer invoice price, e.g. what the dealer would pay if you took it for a trade in. That's usually 3/4 what the car is worth. And yes, you're rates are going up, no matter what they say.
If you're severely injured you might come out ahead, but then you've traded real injury for a some money. Otherwise the way insurance structure means you're not getting away free and clear. The same is going to be true for Self Driving cars, which have to carry insurance too. I imagine we'll see something like how UPS eliminated left turns to save gas. We'll see programming designed to avoid nut cases like I learned to do over the years, aka "Defensive Driving".
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If there wasn't anyone else on the road.
This article is based on a false premise that the behavior of autonomous vehicles are not human works.
"Humans to Blame For **ALL** Self-Driving Car Crashes Everywhere" FTFY
Just like saying guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's a slight of phrase that tries to hide the humans behind the manufacture and distribution of firearms behind an abstraction of an inanimate (or not so inanimate) physical object, be it a gun or an autonomous vehicle, to present a false image that only one human is involved.
Driving on the road with other human drivers is not a mathematical equation or a set of rules, it's a social engagement. Of course, it's much easier to hide behind the car and point fingers at others than solve the real problem.
Maybe self-driving cars aren't such a bad thing after all, it's humans that are the problem.
Are you sure that California isn't the problem?
Because robot cars are unpredictable. A 16 year old just driving away with a new license is more predictable than they are. Humans are not accustomed to driving with robots.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We humans are out of control! Somebody has to do something about it! Like now!
That's why dafuck we're developing self-driving cars! I remember being in a classroom in the mid/late 60s when we were discussing those new-fangled Government Regulations requiring seat belts be installed on all passenger cars sold in America (not passed until 1968) . Our teacher pointed out that "you can make cars as safe as you want, but until they do something about that loose nut behind the wheel, there's going to be lots of deaths in cars." A week later, a good friend died in a car crash. Fast forward to the 80s and I wrote up a lengthy, unread by anyone document on a system for driverless transportation, merging in existing road tech, etc. Bottom line: they cannot get here soon enough! Even if a few dozen of us die in the transition to perfection, compared to the horrific slaughter currently extant, it's a damned fine tradeoff over time.
Humans are always to blame when technology fails.
To live in a robotic world where everything I have so enjoyed over my lifetime is run by a machine.
I want to feel the acceleration of a car when I want to feel it. I want to take a curve at the limits of the machine.
I want to be free of my robotic overlords.
Fortunately I'm just old enough that those who foolishly believe robotic cars, robotic airplanes, robotic sex, robotic ass wipers, and all other things robotic will make their life miraculously wonderful will not be able to dictate their living hell upon me.
I'll be dead and gone laughing down on those who willingly welded shut the final links on their chains of slavery.
Caution: Contents under pressure
If robot car makers want to test in public roads, they should bear the burden of proving that any accident would also have occurred if a human was at the wheel. This means, if a robot car slams on the brakes because it is a robot, they should take ten humans and put them in the same situation and see how many slam on the brakes just as suddenly. If no one slams on the brakes, then the autonomous car company should be responsible. In the end it will be good for everyone, because robot cars are never going to be successful if they can't integrate with humans anyway.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Humans *are* to blame for all self driving car crashes in California (and everywhere else). Humans are creating the software and hardware to enable self driving cars. Humans are building the cars (or building the machines to build the cars). Humans are driving the manually operated cars that are colliding with the human designed and engineered automated cars. No matter how good or bad the technology is, humans are to blame.
Perhaps the headline should have been Human drivers are to blame for most accidents...
criminal case only or it's an NDA / EULA says no
So humans are responsible for all the crashes.
NDA / EULA says no
That doesn't compute. Our hypothetical plantiff — the following driver that hit the Waymo car — never signed anything.
Signed,
SkyNet.
Have gnu, will travel.
... even if you technically are not to blame. Stopping suddenly for example and causing people to pile into you... technically is typically the fault of the person that rear ended you. But "you" did cause it. If you had not driven in a way that was surprising and unpredictable to other drivers then it wouldn't have happened.
Now the law will say that you should maintain enough distance that even if people do that there shouldn't be an accident.
But if the streets are crowded... high traffic... high congestion... that is often not viable.
Now what they'll then say is "go slower"... the problem is that if everyone does that the traffic becomes even worse.
What people learn in busy cities is that there is a "way" to operate on the road that has more to do with Chinese bicycles than it does with California road laws. The idea is that everyone follows a code of conduct on the road... "vibe"... a pattern... and if everyone does it... then we have TRUST... and that trust means that we can drive faster and with less space between cars than the law would like. But it is generally very safe so long as people are aware of and hold the pattern.
When a given individual on the road doesn't follow the pattern... this system becomes unsafe. I notice this all the time on the streets of the busy city in which I live.
You just get a sense that things are "off" on the road... people are not moving predictably. Maybe it is me... maybe it is them... doesn't matter. I get off the road immediately. I literally park and go for a walk or something. And often I find that there are shattered car parts all over the street when I get back. Why? Because the accident I could sense coming... because people weren't following the pattern caused an accident.
So... was the AI responsible for the accident? Yes. Legally? Perhaps not. But legality has very little to do with how actually driving on an actual street works. Driving computers have been dealing with this for awhile.
It is a very annoying situation when the police give people tickets for this... according to DMV rules... the way people drive on the streets is generally illegal. It is however how we've basically always driven and continue to drive. If you wanted to... you could probably haul half the drivers in for violating the law.
You'd have a riot on your hands and the politicians would probably be forced to actually have the law reflect how we actually drive. But they could do it... for a minute.
Long and short... Cali driving laws are more of a rough guideline and less of the letter of conduct.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Even if it wasn't the self driving car's fault, how many would have been avoided if humans were watching other drivers? All the self driving car can do it react when danger is detected, human can detect that danger sooner then the computer.
So no, I will never own a self driving car, I will take my 0% chance at accident then a 1%.
The odds of two self driving cars having an accident are near zero currently. I'd put money on the picture looking very different at 90% autonomous.
And yes, I also agree with the 'doing stupid unexpected things statement'
If a vehicle indicates intention to change lanes then vehicles in that Lane need to give way to it immediately and move back several Car Lenths . this would be a benefit both for self-driving vehicles and everyone else as well. tailgating also needs to be totally eliminated and enforced.
just not adept enough at staying clear of these perfect machines as they go about their business.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Far too many trolls here will not care about facts. They will simply continue to scream that Tesla and other car companies are killing ppl, while disregarding this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Hey, Hal, fix it so there's no more crashes involving humans and robot-driven vehicles."
"No worries, Dave."
*kills all humans
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Once it becomes widely known that the vast majority of accidents are caused by human error, then insurers will push up the cost of "human" insurance.
We will then enter a period of claims containing "punitive" damages: "well, why wasn't the car computer controlled?" and insurance rates for people will climb even more. And as rates of vehicle accidents become lower, due to there being more AVs on the roads, the publc's tolerance for accidents as being "acts of god" will diminish.
It will get to the point where people are forced to give up driving themselves. Not only will the cost of insurance be prohibitive, but counter-claims made by people will be up against the mountain of sensor data supporting the AV-owner's view that their vehicle was acting lawfully, while the human driver was not.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Where as in regular car accidents, other primates are to be blamed finds the study.
In my country, most urban roads are total-3 cars wide, or 'almost' 4, with parking and random deliveries (legal or illegal) on both sides. To make any progress, you play 'chicken' with oncoming traffic of varying widths, in the middle, and hope for politeness with a cheery wave. Autonomous impossible! What really would reduce long-distance traffic would be an autonomous system for distributing freight, driverless for each container. Can I copyright my new words 'railroad' and 'railhead' and 'marshalling yard'? Seems to be an easier autonomous problem to solve first, and we've had a hundred years to try.
The fact that so many people are jumping on the Whose Fault is it Anyway? bandwaggon is a bit scary to me. A well driven vehicle avoids their own accidents as well as those of others. Defensive driving helps to avoid accidents caused by others by expecting them to happen all the time. Every time you see the potential for a collision you take steps to either avoid it or minimize the potential effects. Every time I'm driving past pedestrians near the curb I'm expecting every one of those idiots to randomly step out in front of me all the time and I'm hovering over the brake while giving them the widest safest margin of space without coming too close to the next lane. When I can't give them a wide margin I slow the hell down. Anyone who drives near a school in the UK at around 8:45am will know this technique, it's kill the Don't Kill The Dumb Kids driving style.
The focus should be on how to make that happen with an autonomous car, not on the legalities of who is to blame for an accident. If autonomous cars aren't driving in this manner then they really ought not be allowed on the road yet because there's going to be accidents.
There is, of course, a long history of this. In the US, they launched an intensive PR campaign to blame pedestrians for the dangers of motor vehicles. They even invented a word to describe what previously would be considered to be just using the road: "Jaywalking". In the process, we (and particular the US) gave our cities over to cars, making them the unpleasant, polluted, noisy places that many of them are.
Slow cars down. Make them safer. Make alternatives like cycling and walking pleasant, easy and safe.
Self-Driving Cars are a distraction.
With two self-driving cars, who's really at fault?
Somehow, it'll all get shifted to humans after all, and you know why.
Captcha: hostage
If you can't trust humanity, your'll be surprised just how bad coders are. And if you think they're predictable, you have another thing coming still.
Except code can be fixed via a mass updated fairly easily. So if there's bad code it can be fixed on all cars fairly easily and then the problem goes away.
Try doing a mass update on human drivers. (Short of the techniques used by Stalin and Mao.)
Machines are right, humans are wrong and responsible for their own deaths and injuries. I submit that these crashes occur because these machines do not act according to the real human rules of the road. Nobody actually studies the "social and psychological environment of driving," in my opinion. People do a very complex dance when driving that goes by complex human perceptions, rules, and expectations. It is a daily conspiracy to break the law with the purpose of getting to one's destination as quickly and safely as possible. Machines are not humans and never will be. Therefore the large autonomous car companies must diminish humans and their enormous abilities and make the standard the simplistic machine understandings and abilities. And these machines must be getting back-ended because they are missing some human understanding or accepted and expected behavior. It is NEVER the human's fault.
E Proelio Veritas.
Self driving car companies either want to reduce all accidents or they don't. They either want to integrate with human driving or they don't. Humans occasionally do stupid things in traffic, we can all agree on this. If self driving cars are going to reduce accidents, they are going to have to compensate for the stupid things that humans do, just like we all do every time we go out on the road. I believe the worst outcome is coming true, self driving car companies are not feeling any responsibility to the others on the road. They would rather ignore any accident that is "the human's fault". They would rather behave unpredictably and even though a rational person sees from a statistical level, the more unpredictability they add into the system the more accidents there will be, they seem happy as long as the accidents are "not their fault". Well this is just not an industry that is demonstrating a willingness to be safer overall. So stop saying this is about making driving safer, it's not. It's about making the most money in the soonest time possible and we need to demand better for public roads.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Up to this point in the history of automobiles liability has been distributed to the drivers. I am interested to see what happens when you can make the case that one guy who wrote a bad subroutine is responsible for 1000 accidents.
No, technology that is incapable of integrating with human behavior, which is impossible to predict, by the way, is. I'm sorry, but math is not a panacea and the earth is not an autistic vision of linear perfection. At some point emgineers are just going to have to admit that they fucked up with this pipe dream nobody asked for.
Insurance will only pay to fix on a new car but they don't pay the lost resale value that an on record accident causes. You can hire a lawyer but they take so much you break even or lose. And if your car is totaled they pay the dealer invoice price, e.g. what the dealer would pay if you took it for a trade in. That's usually 3/4 what the car is worth.
Must suck to live in a "democracy" and being unable to make laws that are sane.
E.g. in an accident that I have no fault, my insurance rate does not go up. Why would it? And of course the counter parties insurance pays my care fully. The resales value might be an issue, though.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Of course it is.
Humans To Blame For Most Self-Driving Car Crashes In California
Only in this case, it's the incompetent humans who work for Uber, Alphabet etc.
I'm doing my best. You could make it easier by not lying so much.
People interacting with vehicles is almost 99% based on people controlling vehicles. If we assume that driver less vehicles do not behave the same as people driven vehicles, then one might think that people, using intelligence (meat intelligence, as opposed to artificia; intelligence) have learned (meat learning...) how to behave in such an environment. With almost zero experience in a world with driverless vehicles, people have not learned how to interact with such vehicles.
Okay, that could need editing.
Example: a driverless vehicle may determine the need to stop the vehicle faster and more accurately than a person could. But all the other drivers and pedestrians nearby would not expect said vehicle to stop so impossibly quickly, bingo, said vehicle causes an accident when the driver behind then rear ends said vehicle.