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.
We are well past that point. At even just 0.08 BAC a driver is 7 times as likely to cause a fatal accident and it gets dramatically worse as BAC increases. Self driving are close to the norm right now, even if they where say 20% more dangerous than an average alert driver it would take a massive increase in miles driven by drunk people for things to end up worse.
Anyway, the penalties are currently the same with and without self driving, hell sleeping in your car while drunk is illegal. As long as the laws stay the same things should stay about the same while saving 10’s of thousands of lives.
You’re going to compare self-driving cars to drunk drivers so you can grade them on a curve?
If you’re drunk you’re going to have pay for a ride either by a person or possible by program or you can break the law. I don’t see anyone who was going to drive drunk not do it because they could pay for a robot taxi over a real taxi.
Here’s my comparison. If your self-driving car kills or maims someone in a situation where a normal sober person driving wouldn’t have it shouldn’t be on the road.
It already is illegal (certainly to drive under the influence). But consider even someone driving "buzzed" (not "drunk", and maybe not even strictly over the legal limit): is the roadway safer with or without "Full" Self Driving technology?
It's already illegal to drive a car drunk, including a Tesla with Autopilot engaged.
This doesn't stop drunk drivers from ending lives every day, including lives of other people who couldn't reasonably do anything to avoid it. We're just used to that. Self-driving cars promise a future of less death, though not complete elimination. It's a good future.
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’.
Suppose we have a lot of self-driving vehicles that are slightly better than drunks, and the worst drunks use them. Maybe they can be hooked up to breathalyzers or something.
How can we ensure that the increase in the amount of driving (riding) that drunks do, doesn't more than cancel out the reduction in the rate of accidents?
What if, the self-driving being available to non-drunks, they use it because it's fun and futuristic, and that increases the amount of accidents even more?
Most people think they're a better driver than average [1], and I bet if you asked 100 people with a history of drunk driving, 90 would say it was a one-time thing, deny it, or argue that it wasn't really that dangerous because they were just going around the block.
The autonomous car doesn't get drunk. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get road rage. It isn't in a hurry, and it doesn't need to text its girlfriend while going 80 mph. Whatever its flaws will be, they will be consistent.
As someone who knows people who died in a crash with another drunk driver, it is hard for me to accept your view. Certainly, at a bare minimum, the penalties for drunk driving that results in fatality should be much harsher than they are now -- at that point there is hard empirical evidence that you cannot be trusted to have the "skill and maturity" necessary for driving -- but we can't even bring ourselves to do that, not even for repeat offenders.
Eventually I am optimistic that autonomous driving will solve the problem entirely, at least for those who are responsible drivers. In an era of widely available self-driving cars, if you choose to drive drunk, then that is an active choice, and no amount of "social lubrication" can excuse such degenerate behavior.
But that's not the paradigm unfolding here. The reckless drivers will shun self driving because they want to show off and have fun. The drunk driver part could be reduced after sufficient rollout, but we'll have to see how that plays out - the people whonaleays use it would use it when drinking too, but you'll still have people going "I'm fine to drive" and not using it if it's not habit.
Quickly reading though that, it doesn't strike me as convincing.
People drinking to 0.08 drove slower, braked faster (!), had normal reaction times, and got in 0 accidents. Yet the study says they are more aggressive because they followed the car in front of them by 9.5 meters instead of 10.3.
This study doesn't make me think hands-free sets should be illegal, but that the blood alcohol limit level is too low.
1) Society tolerates a small amount of alcohol for most drivers.
2) Driving while drunk impairs your physical and mental ability to drive safely and only gets worse as you drink more. Obviously a manual driver has slower reaction times than an autonomous system but they are within a level that society tolerates and far better than someone who is drunk.
There are also risks with autonomous vehicles - the potential for equipment/sensor failure, software being unable to adequately handle bad weather, the potential for exploitation by hackers etc.
I'm currently in the process of buying a new vehicle and have been test driving vehicles with various sensors designed to prevent accidents (specifically the Subaru eyesight system). One of my first thoughts was that it would be easy to become reliant on the technology and have a serious accident when a sensor fails (particularly for blind spot detection). I'm still likely going to buy a vehicle with that functionality but am not sure how much I will trust it.
True, but they often run into the nearest stationary object because they're texting, or eating, or putting on makeup (an ex-gf of mine caused TWO accidents that way), or arguing with a passenger, or speeding, or driving tired after a long day of work, or driving after having a few beers but I'm totally fine I swear I'm cool to drive home, etc...
You're absolutely right that there are risks. But honestly, I suspect drunk drivers alone cause more fatal accidents than autonomous cars ever could.
I think I read that ninety something perfect of driving deaths or accidents are people being irresponsible in the manner you said, but can’t find a source again, so take it with a grain of salt.
I was able to find one that of the 37k driving deaths in 2016, 10-11k involved BAC over .08 and about the same involved speeding. Not knowing the overlap, 10-22k/30k is 27-59% of deaths involving drunk driving or speeding.
If it was on the high end of that, then to do better than speeding and/or drinking alone, you have to be at least 2.5x safer than human.
I wish there were better stats on the safety of the sort of driver you would let drive you around (e.g. you wouldn’t get in the car with your drunk friend behind the wheel).
A drunk driver might be 7 times, or 70 times, or 700 times as likely to have an accident. That range is plausible to me.
But estimates of the proportion of trips under the influence of alcohol that I was able to find were around 0.03%. (111 million out of 411 billion)
So I don't see a logical reason to rule out their driving increasing by ten times, or 100 times, or more.
And I don't see what the justification would be for assuming a self-driving system is within 20% of an arbitrary standard. Because drunk drivers are so bad, as you point out, there's a lot of space between "as bad as a drunk" and "as good as an average non drunk".
I think it's completely plausible that a system could be ten times or a hundred times worse than an average human and it not be obvious. That's because an average human has one fatal accident in approximately 100 lifetimes (in the US). Or, for another reference point, drivers had fatalities about 7 times more often per mile, in 1950 than now.
Without saying I know exactly what numbers to use, I'm pretty certain that betting on things matching to within 20% is unjustified without, well, a specific logical justification.
However, regarding penalties being the same, this seems like a lack of incentives that would mean neither lives saved nor lost.
Also, I don't think saving tens of thousands of lives per year is a possibility if we're talking about alcohol in the US. I believe there are only on the order of 10,000 fatalities per year.
I note that millions of people (again, in the US) seem to think 10,000 covid-19 fatalities in only a few weeks is not worth even wearing a mask to stop.
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.
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