Just to be clear, I do think the obvious solution to terrible things like this is vastly expanded public transit so that people don’t have to rely on cars to get everywhere, not overhyped technology and driving aids that are still only marginally better than a human driver. I just thought the article was interesting.
What a load of fear mongering. Instead of having people take accountability for their actions we should require “safety features” that have a direct correlation to increased distracted driving. Maybe if somebody is killed we should make regulations around driving drunk? Oh yea pretty sure that exists. Problem is we have a bunch of steering wheel holders, hardly anybody is a driver anymore. Would lane assist and auto braking have prevented this? Possibly. But would lane assist not keep him barrel assing down the road doing up through the next intersection where somebody may decide to cross the road? This is not a fix. We have ALWAYS had the “technology” to avoid traffic deaths, problem is most people are selfish self centered pricks with but a ball of lint between their ears.
The technology isn’t great, but rather than implement it, you want us to expect humans to be great.
“Let’s invent metal boxes with wheels that follow lines on the ground automatically to get you places.”
“Oh, you mean like trains.”
“Ew, no. They’re nothing like trains, these are ‘self driving cars’. They’re fool proof!”
tesla hits someone in a dense fog because it doesn’t have lidar
Queue surprised pikachu.
Wait. Those things rely on visual sensors only?? That moronic! I mean, more so that I originally though. Please tell me that they have them, but this particular one was malfunctioning.
Edit: holy crap. How are these vehicles allowed to operate on public roads??
Musk has sai d multiple times that humans can drive with vision alone, so cars shouldn’t need LIDAR.
He ignores that humans also regularly experience optical illusions that contribute to poor driving and collisions, and that LIDAR is far less susceptible to such abberations.
Very early on, Tesla used
lidarradar in addition to optical sensors. However, they only use optical sensors today and have for a while. Like many of the poor decisions at that company, the change to optical-only was made at Musk’s demand.Edit: misremembered, it was radar not lidar as pointed out below
IIRC, they uses to have radar, not lidar.
Correct they’ve never used lidar. However I will say that no manufacturer has actually solved the self-driving issue yet so nobody can definitively say what is and isn’t required.
LiDAR is affected greatly by dense fog btw.
Unless you replace every road with train tracks, trains can’t replace cars.
Trains are great for moving people but only from one designated area to another. With most commuters, they might be all headed to the same city but completely different parts of the city that aren’t easy to access. Their homes might all be in the same city but a 45 minute bus ride to the 40 minute train ride to the 20 minute bus ride, which isn’t helpful for what might have been a 45 minute commute by car to begin with.
Imagine if all the space between the primary radial arms of trains was filled in with street cars and pedestrian/micromobility centric spaces. Like the problem you are saying cars solve just doesn’t exist in the first place and people can still get around very easily. Even more rural folks can simply drive to the edge of this style of urban design if they need access to something. The reason bus rides are 45 minutes is because of the number of cars they have to put up with. The density of people that can be moved with shockingly good area coverage if cars are not a factor is incredible.
It’s still bad.
My old commute was a 25-30 minute drive. For a while though, I had to do it by public transport.
I’d be walking for less than 10 minutes because both my house and my work were close to the train station. The rest of it was on 4 different trains, but all within one metropolitan area. The changes were no more than 5 minutes each, pretty good really. However, the number of stops and the number of changes killed any progress. The end result was that it took 1h45m to 2h.
Changing a 8hr + 2x30m day into an 8hr + 2x2h day is a significant change in lifestyle. Losing 3hr day means you don’t enjoy your evenings, you don’t socialise, and life is only work. It’s miserable.
On a different job I worked at I could get there with just 1 train. That was about 35 minute drive or 55 minutes by train once you included the walk (again about 10-15 minutes total). Even with that you’re asking yourself “Why am I not driving?”.
This sounds great but isn’t really feasible in cities that are already built unfortunately.
Look at the history of transportation in whatever city you’re imagining. Cars took over, but I guarantee that city had the transportation infrastructure you think isn’t feasible. The automobile industry has you brainwashed into thinking cars are the only option, but one just has to look at the history of transportation in any given city to know that that isn’t true.
What does this even mean? Are you claiming all cities had railroad and public transportation hubs prior to cars being invented? I’m brainwashed because I don’t believe you can just seize private property and demolish tons of homes and businesses to build more efficient infrastructure in every moderate to large city in the country? Prior to cars existing, most cities were tiny and people didn’t commute 50 miles for work every day.
Can you point to the cities elsewhere where this transformation has occurred or where this already existed outside of maybe a handful of examples on the entire planet?
There is an obvious answer here that both the author and the people in this thread are ignoring.
Driving as a transportation method is a high risk/cost high flexibility/comfort solution.
Pretty much everyone who has accepted driving as their transportation method understands that it’s not the safest way, so a lot of drivers are always willing to take a little bit more risk to save money or something like that.
A better question is, why are we so okay with accepting such high risks for transportation. The human mind is terrible at risk assessment so I think it’s just a culture thing that car accidents are a part of life.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Americans are real good at ignoring issues that don’t affect them personally.
Oh I won’t wreck my car, I’m a “good driver”!
I can’t catch Covid because it’s not real!
School shootings are just false flags the government uses to pass gun control laws!
Donald Trump only wants to remove the dangerous immigrants, not the ones I hire for my business!
We need more people part of the FuckCars, Walk, Bike, & Public Transit online cultures
Need more outreach to get things happening even more. Also my comment on this post would solve a lot of things by not having to redo outreaching to people
Even better, the equivalent irl cultures. Most cities have groups advocating for better bike and pedestrian infrastructure and better public transit.
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The technologies mentioned in the article:
lane-keep assist, automatic emergency braking (AEB), and blind-spot detection
AI-powered traffic systems
On-demand breathalyzers, smartphone saliva tests, and eye-tracking sensors
And they missed some really low hanging, inexpensive solutions that would also work:
- roundabouts
- mass transit
- physical barriers for bike lanes
- zoning changes
Those are all old “technologies” that are proven to be effective and don’t require giving car manufacturers an excuse to make cars even more expensive or retrofitting existing cars.
Only one of my cars has just one of those things (2015 Toyota Highlander and it’s the blind spot monitor). That aside, all of my vehicles - cars and motorcycles - are paid off. I’m not going into debt just to have nannies yelling at me.
My vehicles are a means to an end. I would absolutely love more public transit, but there is just a single train station about 12 miles from my house, while my work is only 6 miles in the same direction. “You could bike” you might say, which is a fantastic idea. However, 90% of my commute is on a 55mph rural highway with minimal shoulders and zero bike lanes. It’s literally a perfect candidate for a bus route, yet there are none, and I am not risking my life on a bicycle next to 55MPH traffic during commuting hours.
Now tell me how I’m the problem.
with every section it just became worse
All of those things are garbage and don’t work, they just drive you nuts until you turn them off.
Public transportation or bust
I’m all for better safety features but perhaps an easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed option to use is city planning/enforcement and change of current regulations. For instance, closing the loophole that lets car manufacturers ignore safety and emissions rules for “light truck” classified cars, which at this point is most of the oversized SUVs and pickups.
Alternatively having safer options for pedestrians and cyclists would help too, like having separated bike roads, and pushing highways and stroads out of residential areas and reclaiming city space for pedestrians. Public transit investment also helps reduce the number of drivers, which helps traffic and safety too.
I don’t hate the idea of these extra AI tools like emergency braking being required or at least encouraged with stuff like safety ratings, but I think it’s going to be very hard to get that implemented anytime soon considering you’d be fighting consumer interest(higher cost cars) and companies who don’t want to have to make or license AI tools.
Edit: also the current regime in the US is more interested in de-regulating things to the point where I can get a happy meal wrapped in asbestos with a nice lead toy. So uh… Good luck
The Problem is, the whole pedestrian and cyclist centric society only works of we also restructure the entire economic system to where workers have an extra hour and a half to two hours of free time outside of work. Because we already don’t have enough time for our families and children.
Like me for instance. I have like 3 waking hours to spend with my child (once you minus, cooking, cleaning, adulting) if I’m lucky each day. Driving to work is a highway exit away on the other side of town. With a car, that’s 6 minutes each way. On a bike? 40 minutes minimum. Public transit? With transfers, even longer.
And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car. And living closer to your work is a funny idea unless you expect every neighborhood to have offices and warehouses representing every industry. I mean it sounds great for the upper middle class with shorter office jobs and the finances for that kind of lifestyle, but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently
It’s for singles who can tralala themselves around on a bike or have a leisurely stroll to wherever they’re going and who don’t really cook or anything themselves.
but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently
Nothing to do with economics, everything to do with city planning and resource allocation. Public transit and bikes are a bad option in the US because the transit is completely underfunded, “only poor people take the bus”, and bike paths, even pedestrian paths (if they even exist) are sent on detours around car infrastructure instead of cutting through everything.
And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car.
My mum did just fine first coming by with the bike, putting me on the back seat, then swinging by the supermarket, groceries in the front basket, later on coming by with the bike, me riding along on my own, still swinging by the supermarket. We were driving on calm backstreets and through a park which was actually the most direct route, much more direct than with a car as you’d have to get onto the collector, first. Got more than one kid to wrangle? Put them in a trailer, or get a suitable cargo bike. They can even have seatbelts.
No, you don’t need a warehouse full of washing machines in every neighbourhood. People don’t shop for washing machines daily. People don’t need cars to shop for them, either, delivering bulky stuff makes a ton of sense. Groceries? Wherever you were that day, a supermarket should only be like a two or three minutes detour.
And it’s not like European cities didn’t go down the car-centric route, mind you. Difference being we realised it’s a stupid idea.
It seems really time consuming still for not much gain. I mean I value public transit because I’ve always wanted to live in a big city with a metro, but bikes seem impractical with the weather, terrain etc. and I hate going for groceries, etc so don’t it more often along the way is a nightmare.
I just don’t think people have that kind of free time, because how many people can work ten minutes via bike from where they live?
I hate going for groceries
Have you tried ordering ahead and picking it up? Get some panniers on your bike and the whole trip would be super quick since you can pull up right to the front.
how many people can work ten minutes via bike from where they live?
With a properly designed city, most people? With mixed zoning, people could live right next to transit or where they work, and main attractions (grocery and whatnot) could also be along the transit lines. Ideally, everything you’d need would be within a few stops, and everything else you could just order.
The question is rather “how many people have a metro station within walking/biking distance” and “how many long-haul trips do you need to make”.
Over here we don’t set aside half a day (or more) to to drive to walmart to buy groceries for a fortnight, we pick stuff up as we need it when we’re out, anyway. Dropping into the supermarket to grab some things is like a five minute detour if you know what you need and where it is. You can spend the metro ride thinking about what to cook, buy what you need, then get going.
According to statistics commute times in Europe are actually slightly longer than in the US, but that doesn’t take into account that combining trips is much easier over here and that riding public transport gives you time to, whatnot, knit, biking or walking counts as exercise, while driving a car counts as, at best, nothing, at worst, the road rage will ruin your day.
I’m not saying that you, personally, can flip a switch and make it work for you, on the contrary: The reason that you’re not doing it organically is because the infrastructure where you live is right-out designed to not make it work for you. What I suggest is that instead of saying stuff like “It cannot be the case that Europeans are living better lives, they must be imagining things” you say, to your compatriots, “How are those bloody europoors better at this we are supposed to be the best let’s figure out how to beat them”. Or at least that’s how I imagine motivating Americans looks like.
I don’t hate the idea of these extra AI tools
Those are not AI.
considering you’d be fighting consumer interest(higher cost cars) and companies who don’t want to have to make or license AI tools.
Openpilot is FOSS. Any OEM could use it without even asking permission.
The reason I mention AI is because the article talks about AI tools to predict accidents as well. I also googled Openpilot and this is from their wiki page.
In contrast to traditional autonomous driving solutions where the perception, prediction, and planning units are separate “modules”, openpilot adopts a system-level end-to-end design to predict the car’s trajectory directly from the camera images. openpilot’s end-to-end design is a neural network that is trained by comma.ai using real-world driving data uploaded by openpilot users.[34]
So uh. It might be AI
Also it seems openpilot requires hardware for the cameras and stuff, they aren’t going to strap third party cameras to cars to sell new. They’d have to implement the sensors in the car itself, and doing so would cost more than nothing.
While I agree in concept, redesigning and rebuilding society to be less car centric would NOT be fast or easy.
It’s better in so many ways and I wish more Americans could experience the freedom and convenience of walkable and transit oriented areas to understand how unpleasant their cars really are. But if even if we seriously pursued that, it would be many decades, probably more like a century. In the meantime electric vehicles are much better than what we use now
Trains? We’ve been using those for over a century now.
They don’t help with last mile.
Bicycles.
Have you considered more trains?
Sure! let’s put train lines in every other street! Brilliant!
I have an HO gauge rail that takes me from my couch to the refrigerator.
Are you very small, or is it a lot of HO track and engines?
It’s like the crawler that takes launch vehicles to the launching pad at Cape Canaveral.
Beautiful
There are a lot of other neat inventions that deal with that.
The problem with traffic is caused by lack of investment in public transportation. Have a look at how they solved it in Paris.
The last mile can be 25 mph. That alone will eliminate 99% of traffic deaths, especially if the roads are designed to make it uncomfortable to go above 25 mph.
More trains, trams, bicycle and/or e-scooter rentals, walking (a mile is what, 20 minutes walk at most?)
Trains?! For last mile?!
Trams, sure, smaller buses that run more often too. More routes.
Bicycles et al so long as they pay insurance, have a plate and know the traffic rules like everyone else - and preferably put them in their own lanes when possible.
Walking… if you have time and physical ability, but who cares about that, right? It’s so cool and eco-friendly to say “just walk 20 minutes”.Trams, sure
Still trains.
If cities are designed better, trains get more effective. Do mixed zoning and put housing on top of shopping, and the last mile plan problem is largely solved. For the rest, bicycles and buses work well.
And walking can be way better with moving walkways. They’re popular at airports, and I’d love to see them more in malls and maybe underground/covered sidewalks.
The most important thing is to commit and make driving more annoying so solutions to the last mile problem can be created. Otherwise you’ll just end up with gridlock.
Still trains.
Subways makes more sense.
put housing on top of shopping
Somewhat common where I live, not common enough though.
Subways
Also trains. If it runs on rails, it’s a train.
Bicycle insurance and plates? Why? That makes zero sense. We have these for cars because cars are dangerous, not just for funsies. Bicycles don’t pose the same danger.
Walking… if you have time and physical ability, but who cares about that, right? It’s so cool and eco-friendly to say “just walk 20 minutes”.
Yeah it is cool and eco-friendly to walk 20 minutes (assuming one is able-bodied, as you mention.)
Bicycles do pose similar dangers. A cyclists running a red light it the typical example. Forces someone else to swerve and hit a post then what?
Trains never crash.
Well, they do, but don’t cause traffic deaths.
Because too many people in too many industries that would be negatively affected have too much money.
The technologies to end a lot of problems exist. We aren’t using them because the oligarchs think it’s better this way.
This is definitely a great example of individuals being obstinate and entitled. Just mention you support speed cameras on all roads and find out how many of your friends think speeding is a good given human rights.
Speed cameras are a privacy issue that doesn’t solve the problem of speeding. People are most comfortable driving the speed the road is designed for, and if that speed is too high, the solution is to modify the road for a safer speed. The speeders in your example are right here, for the wrong reason; speed cameras should be rare if they’re allowed to exist at all. They have, at most, a short term benefit, and broad public surveillance is a very serious issue they contribute to.
It’s my understanding that speed cameras don’t actually make roads safer, they just generate revenue for the city.
In my city a program of speed cameras was instituted about a decade ago. A private speed camera corporation lobbied the city to install, maintain and administer the system. Whoever it was that they bribed to approve it did so and the system was installed. For the first year it brought in a bunch of money extorted from the citizens. Then the revenue dropped below the minimum amount that the corporation wrote into the contract as their cut (people figured out where all of the cameras were). At that point the system was costing the city money rather than generating revenue as the corporation had promised. So they started using mobile cameras. This worked for a short time but the blowback was sharp. In the end the system was scrapped.
What technology?
Safety features like lane-keep assist, automatic emergency braking (AEB), and blind-spot detection…
… AI-powered traffic systems that predict and prevent accidents.…
Impaired driving is also solvable. On-demand breathalyzers, smartphone saliva tests, and eye-tracking sensors… Uber is already testing real-time driver sobriety verification…
Why aren’t we using it?
The article doesn’t have an answer.
Because its garbage :
A Tesla in FSD randomly just veered off the road into a tree. There is video. It makes no sense, very difficult to work out why the AI thought that looked like a good move.
These tools this author is saying we have do not work how people claim they do.
Tesla gets telemetry that should show exactly what happened. We need to require that to be collected with each accident so someone can look for patterns and improvements.
But I’ll agree with the other guy that’s it’s still quite possible this is safer than human drivers already. It makes news because it seems like a ridiculous failure. But what happens when you compare it to the number of accidents caused by people falling asleep or getting distracted, or letting their rage out?
The critical data is the cost in human lives, and it’s quite possible for technology to fail spectacularly while saving lives overall
Tesla self-driving failures are in a class of their own because the asshat in charge didn’t want to outfit the cars with the needed sensors to provide reasonable self-driving capabilities.
Get the data. Get it without putting me and my family at risk.
They only have to work better and more consistently than humans to be a net positive. Which I believe most of these systems already do by a wide margin. Psychologically it’s harder to accept a mistake from technology than it is from a human because the lack of control, but if the goal is to save lives, these safety systems accomplish that.
Evidence, please.
I have literally been in thousands of driving incidences where a human has not randomly driven into a tree.
You are making a claim here: that these AI systems are safer than humans. There is at least one clear counter example to your claim in existence (which I cited - https://youtu.be/frGoalySCns if anyone wants to try to figure out what this AI was doing) and there are others including ones where they have driven into the sides of tractor trailers. I assume you will make an argument about aggregates, but the sample size we have for these AI driving systems relative to the sample size we have for humans is many orders of magnitude different. And having now seen years of these incidents continuing to pile up, I believe there needs to be much more rigorous research and testing before you can make valid claims these systems are somehow safer.
It’s all in how you combine the numbers, and yes we need a lot more progress, but …. When was the last time an ai caused a collision because it was texting? How often does a self driving vehicle threaten or harm others with road rage?
I do t know what the numbers are but human driving sets a very low bar so it’s easy to believe even today’s inadequate self-driving is safer
This is the same anecdotal appeal we get over and over while AI cars drive into firetrucks and trees in ways even the most basic licensed driver would not. Then we are told these are safer because people text or become distracted. I am over this garbage. Get real numbers and find a way to do it that doesn’t put me and my family at risk.
I always said this will be the problem. Self-driving cars will never be perfect. They’ll always have different failure modes than human drivers. So at what point is increased safety worth the trade off of new ways to die. Are we there yet?
At what point is it acceptable to the rest of us? Humans will always prefer the risk they know over the one they don’t, even when it’s objectively wrong
https://fuelarc.com/tech/can-teslas-self-driving-software-detect-bus-only-lanes-not-reliably-no/
edit: it’s trivial to find examples of these utterly failing at basic driving. This isn’t close to human performance and it is obvious.
There are 5 classified levels of automation. At the lower levels of automation, the very article you are responding to quotes this evidence for you. Here is another article that gets deeper into it, I haven’t read it all so feel free to draw your own conclusions, but this data has been available and well reported on for many years. https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/autonomous-vehicle-safety-statistics.html
Lane.assist… fine.
Autobreak? Fuck no.
AI?! ffsBecause of how it will go when everyone assumes the car they are trying to merge with will auto brake if they go for it.
It does. It says it’s optional, only in new cars, and it costs extra money, which anyone with half a brain could have told you.
One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.
They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.
It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There’s a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.
Meanline Tesla: were removing radar and make the car blind when it rains to cut costs.
Agree also a good catalyst to help solve almost all of our problems is having Revolt, & Matrix community servers setup where people can join based on their State, & also other community servers for their Country too.
With the goal of having a single spot where people get together online to get things done collectively, inform each other about all kinds of good and bad things, discuss topics, make stuff happen for better, collaborate on projects, have fun together, educate each other, & much more
I’m one of a couple hundred people working on it but need more people on board to do it.
We The People means Unity in every sense of the word in person and online to get things done together by doing. Being focused, & locked in instead of all of us doing things by ourselves
Autonomous vehicles. They don’t get high, they don’t get distracted, and if they’re made by literally anyone except for Tesla, they have superhuman vision and not only don’t have blind spots, they can also see in the dark and see through steam and fog.
If I could cut my work time by my driving time, because I would be able to work from the car, it would be an absolute game changer for my family life.
This will only ever work if all vehicles were autonomous. Any human interaction introduces unpredictable behavior into an otherwise “perfect” system.
This is misleading and dangerous rhetoric.
Autonomous vehicles - actual autonomous ones, not Tesla bullshit marketing “self-driving” - are already significantly safer than human drivers. Yes, they are limited to certain conditions (they don’t handle inclement weather very well yet) but the point is that they are already improving safety over human drivers.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Additionally, once autonomous vehicles become the standard, you will see a dramatic shift in how the insurance industry operates.
Think about it: if I’m not the one driving, why would I be the one taking on liability? I wouldn’t. The manufacturer would. Suddenly, the insurance industry would be targeting vehicle/software producers instead of individuals. And anyone who chooses to drive themselves anyway? They would almost always be liable by default. Premiums for drivers would skyrocket and this would be a huge disincentive to getting behind the wheel in the first place.
Don’t. Let. The. Perfect. Be. The. Enemy. Of. The. Good.
We all lose out. And it costs lives.
The returns grow exponentially, yes. Even removing some of the bad (i.e., human) drivers is clearly better than *none."
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Because people want to drive theur cars instead if let a system handle everything perfectly. Theres no way to have safe driving with people behind the wheel.
More sensors in the car might help a bit, but the real problem in US is its car dependent infrastructure. If the only way home after a night in the pub is by car, then you’re going to get a lot of drunk drivers. Add to this that bikes have to share road with cars, then it’s a death sentence to ride bike by night.
