I'm just going to point out that nearly every time someone gets their learners permit, or graduated from a learners permit to a full license, an insufficiently tested driver is allowed on the road in order to develop more skills and become a better driver. Often they kill people in the process of learning. Should we require years of private training for every human driver as well?
They can't even share what they learn with each other effectively.
Our city (which is pretty small tbh, 150k) had 424 DUI arrests just this past weekend (Fri-Sun) due to St. Patrick's day. This is despite availability of uber, lyft, taxis, public transit, and bar services which will give you a ride home and allow you to park your car until morning.
Ignoring these facts is just as intellectually dishonest.
These cases are not what the parent comment was referring to.
The PP was insinuating that people with leraner's permit (and, by law, an experienced driver in the passenger seat) or people who just got a license (and hence were, literally, tested) are "insufficiently tested".
The PP was responding tho the claim that letting "insufficiently tested" systems on the road with the goal of letting them improve is irresponsible.
For the response to have any merit, you need to cite accident statistics for people with learner's permits, or new drivers.
To be clear, the testing for getting a learner's permit (where I live at least) is 7 out of 10 questions on a multiple choice test, and the test for a driver's license is a 20 minute drive-about where the driver gets to more or less choose the area they'll drive and the weather when the test is done.
I don't think it's even a very tough argument that these are at best basically limited filters on actual driver skill. I've known people who literally went to another city for favourable conditions for their driver test. I've known of people who passed having driven not much more than a few hours in their lives.
Nowadays if you want to be the driver in the passenger seat for a learner you need to do a somewhat more difficult test and be older.
Also, I'm really not talking about this specific case but I think it's particularly relevant that in this case there was a qualified driver able to take over for the autonomous vehicle, which is actually more supervision than a 14 year old with a learner's permit has.
Are you really scaling off a single data point? I feel like you'd also have to compare the types of driving. What is the death per 100 million miles on a city street? If you exclude highway miles I'd imagine it's much worse.
It is the only data we have. Ironically, one reason for the paucity of such data is that these companies have been so reluctant to make public their records—the reason this accident occurred in Arizona and not California is because Arizona has relaxed reporting requirements. And the commenter notes that extrapolating might not be wise.
Are you really asserting your statements without any fact whatsoever?
I'm curious what your dispute is here. Unless you're reading something into it that I didn't say. I certainly didn't say most new drivers kill someone. But to say that this is not a thing that happens with a decent level of frequency is just silly. There is an actual reason insurance is higher for teenagers.
The post I'm responding to, from my perspective, has a flippant attitude towards the deaths caused by human drivers.
A learning driver on their first day has at least 16 years of experience with traffic (and life in general), and thus a fine model of which actions can map to injury and loss of life.
I'm sure there are some people who are attentive enough about traffic before they start studying for a learner's permit (at 14 most places, I believe, not 16) to be described that way, but many are not. Especially if you live and go to school in a suburban area your experience with traffic is probably largely a) crossing not very busy streets, b) riding a bike on, again, not very busy streets where traffic laws are honestly barely obeyed anyways, and c) getting on a bus or being driven everywhere, at which point maybe you pay attention or maybe you don't.
There's definitely going to be some osmosis but I think you're pretty vastly overstating it (and including several years in which your ability to even comprehend what traffic is is going to be severely limited).
That's not even remotely true. When I started learning to drive I had 0 experience with traffic. When I was fully licensed I had less than 2 years experience.
The difference is we have a lot of experience with the human brain, and not much at all with self-driving cars. All we have to go on are the statistics, which say that although humans are bad drivers, self-driving cars are even worse (or at best that we don’t have sufficient information).
Again, why not just test them in private and hire people to be pedestrians?
> why not just test them in private and hire people to be pedestrians?
And get these employees to do what exactly? You obviously can't tell them to put their lives at risk to test what happens if they walk onto a car's path, or if they ride a bike on a car's blind spot wearing dark clothes at night, or if they fall from a motorcycle in front of a car after hitting a raccoon.
The dichotomy here is that private courses are inherently orderly and the real world is inherently chaotic.
That is exactly what those employees would have to be paid and consent to do—just like test drivers. In fact, someone else linked a Waymo blogpost saying that they have employees do exactly those things (walking into cars’ paths, lying down on skateboards...)
How is it not OK to have consenting people do these things but OK to have random people on the street participate in exactly the same tests?
People willingly operate unsafe machinery in 3rd world country factories but personally I don't think it's OK when they get crippled due to some accident or malfunction.
If all you're testing are scenarios that are known to be safe for the employee in question, then what exactly are you gaining from that testing?
It's not a matter of whether they are better or worse, it's a matter of whether these tests are sufficiently realistic.
Anyone with half a brain would hopefully quickly realize that you don't actually need a live person to lay down on a skateboard. Heck, you can simulate a much more risky jaywalking scenario with a mannequin on a dolly than with a living person.
Waymo is deploying its fleets on public roads too, which suggests to me that they think that private course tests can only get you so far.
> Waymo is deploying its fleets on public roads too, which suggests to me that they think that private course tests can only get you so far.
No, it just suggests that building and operating huge private courses that realistically emulate daily traffic situations in cities is much more expensive than just (ab)using the "real" public infrastructure paid for by tax dollars for your beta-testing needs, and that Waymo (just like Uber) takes full advantage of this chance to privatize gains and socialize losses.
They can't even share what they learn with each other effectively.