At the .08 BAC legal limit odds of crashing a car are 200% higher than a sober driver. The risks obviously increase with higher alcohol levels. A .16 ‘double the legal limit’ drunk is 1500% more likely to crash. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/09/how-j...
So yeah, ‘safer than a drunk driver’ means basically ‘only about twice as likely to crash as an average sober human’.
Alcohol based mouthwash becomes a requirement in the glove box. Whiskey manufacturers start doing sponsorships where the autopilot is named after them. "Had a long day? Jim Beam will get you home."
Should we let drunk people get home in their fully autonomous Mercedes? It's an interesting problem!
I think the answer right now is no, we're still requiring the driver to be able to take over, and our thought experiment presupposes they're inebriated.
On the other hand, it's obviously better to have the computer take a shot (no pun intended) at getting home than letting the driver do it themselves, even today. At what point does that moral balance tip? It seems like we're not too far off from the answer being "obviously let the car drive, whatever the drunk person was going to do is probably riskier for both themselves and everyone else".
That problem cries for a solution... Maybe some service, paid of course, that can drive those people home? Maybe combined with an app, and self-employed people providing that service, shared economy and so on... Seems to be a great opportunity!
In my town, Uber absorbed a bunch of the travel, public transport was cut in half, and now with gas and other expenses no one can afford to run Ubers up here. Maybe one car around, often a 20 minute wait. Car pool services cannot fill the gap.
I thought Uber had some fancy math that raised their rates to incentivize more drivers when their pool of drivers got too low? So why hasn't their math increased pay to offset the increase in gas prices if they don't have any drivers?
I don't live in an area that has Uber, so I'm not that familiar with it, only used it a few times when traveling :)
I don't think I know them any better than you do. I used one to get to the airport once and it cost $40. Economy parking would have been cheaper, so I use that now. That's the only time I've used one personally.
My impression of the the way drivers are compensated is that the hours, fuel, and wear on your vehicle make it kind of slim margins.
An Uber driver needs to be able to cover gas out of their pay plus make enough extra to effectively receive a decent wage. If gas prices go up but the price of an Uber fare (and subsequent payout) does not, then it becomes uneconomical for people to drive for Uber and they stop doing it.
Other than when Uber deeply discounts to drive growth, it's always been cheaper to drive yourself than to pay Uber. The reason you pay Uber is for other reasons (e.g. convenience, cost of parking, being away from your vehicle, intoxication).
The problem is that people are rational and 1) the costs of using Uber for routine trips to the bar are very high; and 2) the likelihood of getting in a crash on any particular trip are pretty low. So millions of people every year do the math and decide it's worth the risk.
I think they're wrong to do this, because the worst potential outcome of drunk driving is so devastating and catastrophic that it's personally optimal to eliminate that risk to zero. But the fact is that this isn't really how humans weigh risk.
Obviously anti-drunk-driving campaigns have been somewhat effective. People take this problem more seriously than they did 40 years ago. But I wonder if we aren't at a point of diminishing returns. Some people are going to drive drunk, no matter how many times you tell them to take an Uber.
When I say "costs" I don't mean the $20 for the Uber (although that's not nothing). You have to think about the guy who wants to stop at the bar on his way home from work. To do that properly, he has to drive right past the bar, park at home, schedule an Uber, wait for it, then take it back to the bar.
Or he can just stop on his way home.
We both know what the right thing to do is, but one has significant costs the other doesn't.
Or imagine he does stop at the bar on his way home and tells himself he'll just have one beer, but he ends up having four and shouldn't drive. Now he has to get an Uber, take it home, get another Uber before work in the morning, and take it back to the bar to get his car. And then, finally, head to work.
Or he can just drive home.
Again, we both know what the right thing to do is, but one has significant costs the other doesn't.
It's probably a negligible portion of drunk driving incidents, but there definitely are people like that. In the past year there have been multiple drunk driving incidents with well-paid NFL players in nice cars, and these are just the ones who get caught. Whether those guys would turn on self driving mode is another question I guess, but every time it's baffling they didn't just request an Uber Black or something.
That tells you that the "cost" of taking an Uber isn't primarily monetary. It's a big hassle to leave your car at the bar, take an Uber, wake up, get another Uber, go get your car, then drive your car back home. People are weighing that hassle against the odds anything bad will happen on their trip home and deciding it's worth it.
People with expensive cars don't drunk drive? Seriously?
Even if that were true, I have a hard time imagining that the cost of self driving packages won't continue to decrease until it's included in literally every new car. Just a matter of time (assuming someone is able to make a fully working version).
It's way cheaper and safer if they just ride a bus/taxi/the car of their "designated driver friend" instead, all with tech that's already here.
I'm way more interested in self-driving (and, more broadly, driving assistance) for emergencies like someone having a heart attack while at the wheel. For example, I feel a lot better now that, should I somehow die or lose consciousness while driving (but not due to being drunk!), my car with autonomous breaking will mostly keep going in whatever direction I had it but with a much better chance of stopping before causing someone else harm.
I had a heart attack a few years ago and while I kind of know the fear is not very rational, I still wanted to be able to continue driving and not feel like I could hurt or even kill someone if I get another one that kills me while at the wheel.
So, hopefully not very often :) But it's one of those things where, since I could afford to change the car, I felt I had to go ahead and make that investment in safety.
There is much more cheaper and safer solution, a system that detects if the driver is drunk,ill, not paying attention etc. But some fanboys prefer faked self drivers systems with faked stats because it looks SciFi rather then say force a drunk detector in all cars.
It's way cheaper and safer if they just ride a bus/taxi/the car of their "designated driver friend" instead, all with tech that's already here.
I think a lot of people are unfamiliar with rural America -- the nearest bar might be 10 miles away (which was the case in my hometown... well more of a "village" than a town), and your friend may live 10 miles on the other side of that bar, so he may not want to drive that far out of his way so you can get drunk and he can't. And taxis and buses aren't an option.
Relying on humans to make the correct and safe choice to not drive while drunk is a losing proposition, our DUI death rate shows that.
Even if a smart car can't be trusted to drive you, it should be able to notice that you're drunk and refuse to let you drive. My car notices when I'm losing focus and gives me an alert reminder, so it should be able to notice when I'm drunk.
It always strikes me as odd, when I'm driving on country highways and encounter a bar in the middle of nowhere.
How is the bar not sued out of existence? There is no plausible way to travel to and from the bar, other than a private automobile, and no taxi service within an hour's drive. There are no houses nearby with clientele that could walk to the bar. Why isn't that considered an attractive nuisance like a swimming pool?
Exactly. And yet, many people choose to do exactly this on a regular basis.
Granted, it becomes an issue when people who wouldn’t drive drunk decide to use self-driving functionality simply because is there. But, there will be a point where it crosses over into being a net improvement, and that point may very well be a fair bit before meeting parity with humans. Obviously it’s not quite that simple (not all failure modes are equal) but it’s not that far off, either…
Reminds me of what I've heard about how bicycle helmets can cause riders to take more risks, so overall accident rates go up (I don't know how true that is, but it sounds plausible).
People who may not have chosen to drive (e.g., tired, drunk, impaired, or otherwise incapable of driving) might choose to do so since they can "lean on" the car doing it for them, and if the car encounters a situation it can't deal with the driver is completely incapable of handling it.
I gave the ‘better than a drunk driver’ claim the benefit of the doubt and allowed it to be merely 2x as likely to crash than a sober driver, since that is still ‘better’ than a driver who is exactly at the federal US legal limit (and who will crash 3x as often).
The all cause rate is somewhere between once per 10.5 years according to Allstate [1], which at an average of 15,000 miles per year is ~157,000 miles, or once per 500,000 miles according to the Bureau of Transportation [2] numbers of police-reported accidents. The rate of injuries is 84 per 100 million miles (once per ~1.2 million miles or ~80 driver-years) and fatalities is 1.11 per 100 million miles (once per ~90 million miles or ~6,000 driver-years) by the same Bureau of Transportation statistics.
200% (2x) higher is not as high as I believe many would guess. If you did a straw poll you'd likely get answers like 10x, 20x etc. Hell SOBER driving had 10x more crashes when you/your parents were learning to drive compared to you/your kids.[1]
It's actually 3x, not 2x. Probably why writers shouldn't express things this way, but it's clearer reading the article, this is a 200% increase, not that the rate is 200% of the normal rate.
Also, the link to the NHTSA doesn't work, but I'd be interested to read the primary research. Concern is they're just taking accident rates for sober drivers and BAC 0.08 drivers, which isn't a fair comparison because they aren't time matched. As in, drunk driving is a lot more likely to happen very late at night/early in the morning when bars close, when traffic is extremely low and accident rates are also very low. If your chances are 3x the chances of a person driving any time at all, you're much more than 3x the chances of someone driving unimpaired at 2 in the morning.
Of course, even if they time match the rates, there's still the reality that a lot of sober people driving at 2 in the morning are still impaired. Tired driving is also quite dangerous.
I found literally the most conservative statistic I could for how dangerous drunk driving is - that someone whose impairment is literally on the threshold of legal is 3x as likely to have an accident than a sober driver.
I could have gone for a shock stat - 100000 people a year are injured in accidents involving drunk drivers. 10000 people are killed.
I could have taken the position that a typical drunk driver is probably actually 10x as likely to have an accident as a sober driver, based on those NHTSA numbers.
But I didn’t need to to make the point that a self driving car could be literally twice as likely as an average driver to crash and that would still be ‘better than a drunk driver’.
That's not a low bar at all. A lot of activities people do while driving are way more dangerous that driving "drunk". In fact, "drunk" (0.08 BAC) driving is often the baseline multiple that such activities are reported in.
Self-driving cars which are merely as safe as driving with a 0.08BAC will still greatly reduce traffic accidents. Of course, no one will report it as such. Having something that's paying attention 100% of the time is going to be a huge boon for traffic safety. Spending 15 seconds picking a song on your phone is all it takes to rear end a car or blow through an intersection.
At the .08 BAC legal limit odds of crashing a car are 200% higher than a sober driver. The risks obviously increase with higher alcohol levels. A .16 ‘double the legal limit’ drunk is 1500% more likely to crash. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/09/how-j...
So yeah, ‘safer than a drunk driver’ means basically ‘only about twice as likely to crash as an average sober human’.
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