To add to what has already been said, I sorta disagree with "they just have to be better than us." I would prefer the car to not just be better than an average driver, but be better than me. As any person, I'm sure I dramatically overestimate my skills, which makes that bar quite high. So it doesn't have to just be better than us, it has to be better than we (however wrongly) think we are.
Adding to this to really drive the point home: it doesn’t even need to be better than a human that’s good at driving. It only needs to be better than the average human driver. Anecdotally speaking, that’s not such a high bar to pass (relative to the topic at hand).
It won't be about an abstracted concept of "safer". It will be about whether the car is perceived to be a better driver than "me". Most people estimate their own abilities as above-average.
> IMO, minimum requirement for level 5 driving is merely to match human driver accident rates.
Minimum requirement for nerds, maybe. Minimum requirements for ordinary folks will probably be more along the lines of "will be noticeably better than me on average" and "will not make any given mistake more frequently (or more severely) than I would".
i.e. I expect people a lot of people would want "strictly better than me on practically every axis" as their minimum requirement, not just "on par with me based on the average accident rate". People just aren't going to put up with seeing cars make dumb mistakes that they would never make, even if the accident rate ends up being good on average.
It's also not good enough for them to be better than average human drivers. There are many bad drivers and if you are a good driver, you wouldn't want to switch to anything less safe than your driving
Certainly we can do better than this tho? Your bar for very good driver" is pretty low. I'm sure everyone has at least one acquaintance they know who has died in a car crash. I can count 3 who have died from car crashes and 3 others who have been seriously injured. Humans arent going to get any better at driving. Something has got to change.
"Better than many human drivers" is not good enough. "Better than 99.99% of human drivers" might be
I can't wait to remove the entire "fell asleep and hit a tree", "drunkenly drove through a stop sign and killed a kid" class of accidents, but that alone is not enough
More than that, if it's only doing the driving in ideal conditions, then it's unfair to compare the two. You need to compare against the human drivers in ideal conditions.
> People tend to overestimate their own abilities, knowledge and skills. For example, if you ask 100 people if they are better than average drivers, then you might not be surprised if more than 50% of them reply “yes”!
Also people don't actually need to think they're great drivers to think this– there's a selection bias at play. We remember every single time some other driver almost killed us, far more than we notice when people are driving nice and smooth.
Jesus, I don't know what you're on about in this thread. When people think to themselves that they are better than average drivers, they mean "I am better than the majority of people, for example most of my coworkers, at driving." No one had to swallow any quasi-mystical nonsense about Gaussian distributions to understand this. It's human nature. They are implicitly comparing themselves to other people and believing they are better.
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