this illustrates a serious problem with drivers more than it highlights problems with "driver assist" or whatever the manufacturers decide to call it.

Perhaps instead of trying to develop "better" AI the whole idea of "driver assist" ought to be dropped completely until there has been some proper research into driver behaviour in the hope of finding out whether eliminating human error (for which read downright stupidity as often as not) is a realistic prospect.

Whence cometh the clamour for "self-driving vehicles" anyway? I know the concept seems to make politicians salivate but that offers no insight into whether the idea is a good one or not.

Not least it comes from the owners of taxi fleets, bus companies, delivery. Companies and long distance hauliers who would be much happier if they didnt have to pay for all those pesky employees who want things like sleep, and sick leave, and pensions.

Personally I'm a big fan of the idea for my own vehicle because it would allow me to drive to a nice pub in the afternoon, have a few beers with my lunch, and have the car drive me home again.

We are a long, long way from that tho, and the "it's not for hands free driving *wink wink*" approach the current systems have been marketed with is absolutely irresponsible.

pesky employees who want things like sleep, and sick leave, and pensions pay

The way to eliminate human error is either to ground all vehicles after every incident and have proper investigations, with additional training for all drivers at the conclusion.

Or to get self driving working.

To my mind, the problem isn't specifically the drivers so much as the terminology. Put an outright ban on all such terms as autopilot, self driving, etc and require them to be described as driving assistance aids and promoted and marketed as such.

If people get given all sorts of marketing promise and buzzwords, they may feel that these "aids" can rescue them from a sticky situation, or take over if they have this one important text to send...

And, furthermore, ban all actual self driving vehicles from public roads until such time as they can be demonstrated to be as good as a reasonably competent driver on test tracks (different ones, not the same one for obvious reasons). The rest of us are not your alpha test crash dummies.

Well we do have a Tesla - but I would rather check into rehab than turn on 'self-driving' - in fact, it would probably be a good idea if I found myself turning it on.

However, the idea (well concept) of self-driving cars is great - nothing better than being driven to a restaurant/pub and then rolling back out to be taken home at a time of our convenience. It would also work well fo my Mum - out in the middle of nowhere and self-drive would allow her to live there for longer.

Unfortunately, it won't happen soon.

nothing better than being driven to a restaurant/pub and then rolling back out to be taken home at a time of our convenience.

i.e. a taxi?

"Whence cometh the clamour for "self-driving vehicles" anyway? I know the concept seems to make politicians salivate but that offers no insight into whether the idea is a good one or not."

Seriously? It may still be a long way off, but it's a wonderful idea. It improves many different areas. Here are a few - note that I'm talking about hypothetical future vehicles with working self-driving:

- Driverless cars make more efficient use of energy inputs

- Driverless cars make more efficient use of road space

- Driverless cars never crash or mow down cyclists

- Driverless freight vehicles cut freight costs by around a third

- Driverless deliveries cut local delivery costs significantly (though you might have to go out to the kerb to pick up your pizza)

And that's without even getting into the personal benefits of being able to sit in traffic or on the motorway and do something other than stare through the windscreen. I strongly suspect the killer app for driverless cars will be the mobile shitter.

"After years of news stories where driver assistance systems are called "self-driving cars", a study by the US-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) suggests motorists continue to use their vehicles as though they are fully self-driving."

FTFY

Did many drivers ever give up on thinking their cars were self-driving? Well before any promises.

Hell, even the part *I* thought was figured out... doesn't work.

The emergency self-braking stuff is broken:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/automatic-emergency-braking-isnt-as-safe-as-you-might-think-aaa

If they can't do something THAT simple...

Emergency braking did not understand the concept of corners. Other parts of the car may know the road has a corner. Some cars may even know they intend to go around the corner but do not inform the emergency braking system of the planned route. Even that is only one step in a long path. The next step would be to guess if an on coming vehicle is going to follow the curve of the road.

Today I saw some light reflected from the side of a van and inferred the presence of a vehicle around the next corner. I reduced speed so I would pass that vehicle at one of the wide points on a narrow road. Last month I did something similar because I caught a glimpse of a car shaped shadow moving towards me through a gap in the hedge beside the road. These are low probability events that will barely show up in training data. They require real world experience to interpret and some persistent memory to continue the required response after the evidence has moved out of sight. The only way full self driving will become safer than humans within a couple of decades is if we retro fit humans with Elon levels of foresight.

Inferring hidden vehicles by changes in lighting would be super-tricky.

There are other ways to know about hidden vehicles.

One way would be to use a grid of satellites to monitor all cars on all roads and have the car in communications with that grid to tell it what's near and their vectors.

Hopefully such a system would be prohibitively expensive. But if not, what could possibly go wrong with a total surveillance system.

Another method would be for all cars to enter a radio network of cars within a certain range but that would need to be retro-fitted to all existing cars for it to work - not going to happen.

Anybody else get the feeling the author was desperately trying to stitch unrelated fact-points into a coherent story just to prove a point?

Like "the damning statistic that Tesla's Autopilot system is involved in 70 percent of accidents where driver assist software is a factor." Or, 70% of cars with high assistance are Teslas, perhaps?

Tesla doesn't advertise but GM does, so lets see if we can make it look like they both push their messages down your throat? ... Super Cruise ads focus on hands-free capabilities while Autopilot "implies ...

Self driving is coming, and it'll change the trucking industry once people accept that it works. Not much else.

It's the usual clickbait, this one trolling the Tesla fanboys.

Tesla's advertising works differently to traditional car manufacturers. Elon writes tweets. Very quotable short tweets about how great full self driving will be real soon now. Those tweets get walked back in longer vaguer less quotable statements. People are good at hearing what they want to hear and the advertising standards authority does not regulate Twitter. After another disaster Elon's lawyers can repeat "Twitter is a home to invective and hyperbole. No reasonable person would consider Mr Musk's Tweets as a source of factual information." Regrettably the internet is not populated entirely with reasonable people.

Sometimes the statistics you want are not easily available, like accident rates per million miles on roads where Tesla's advanced driving assistance features can be activated. Comparing Accident rates with assistance activated to unassisted accident rates on all roads (including the difficult ones) gives a really false impression that has been amplified by social media.

You can have a waterproof watch, or a water resistant watch. I'm sure plenty of people purchased the water resistant watch thinking it was waterproof. I'm thinking some of the same people have purchased one of these vehicles under the same misunderstanding.

Never underestimate the stupidity of the human animal.

"70 percent of accidents where driver assist software is a factor"

Maybe if Tesla didn't call their driver assist feature "autopilot" then people wouldn't treat it as full self driving? Just random thoughts really.

Have I got this straight? A car with autopilot (or whatever its called this week) disables itself if the driver isn't paying attention. Surly that means no driver and no autopilot == more chance of a crash?

boolean chart----

Driver non attentive no autopilot max risk

Driver non attentive autopilot lower risk

Driver attentive no autopilot some risk

Driver attentive autopilot lowest risk

Wont affect me, I use SWMBO for all my autopiloting from the pub !

just jail elon and problem solved.

He's a twat anyway

STOP CALLING IT AUTOPILOT!

People know what 'autopilot' is. They've been on aeroplanes, they've see movies. Autopilot is "switch on, take a nap".

This is great opportunity for an aggressive law firm to target high net worth Tesla owners and sue them for criminal negligence.

It is trivial to prove that the literature and manuals warn against this activity; therefore anyone who would ignore the warnings is criminally negligent

Or at least it would be if the drivers in these "self-driving" accidents were killed. Survival of the Cynical? I feel the same about these morons as I do about people who drive off cliffs and quaysides because their SatNav told them to.

If it were just the drivers then maybe but there are passengers, people in other vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists who had noting to do with abusing the driver assist but suffer the injury or death just the same.

"You actually just have to solve real-world AI".

The word "just" does an awful lot of heavy lifting here, Elon...

Anyone for betting?

What will come first: Practical fusion or functional "strong" AI?

I suspect both will be 20 years away for a very long time.