Technology

Bay Area native here. They're also prone to dead stopping in the middle of the street and other moving violations, blocking emergency services and public transit in addition to normal traffic. Ideally, we'd like these vehicles to be held accountable for these violations like normal drivers: fines, suspensions, impounds. But we'll settle for a human driver on standby who can immediately override the software when a moving violation occurs.

Compared to how many traffic incidents involving human-operated vehicles? Because if that number is greater than 90, the AVs are the safer choice.

Well that is simply flawed logic. How many autonomous cars are there compared to human-operated? Far far more.

The comparison needs to be normalized for distance driven. There's far more human driven cars. But most humans don't spend that long driving (I'm not sure how much of the day is spent driving by these AI cars, but they theoretically could drive all day long).

The quota also does say "involving", which may include accidents where someone else hits an AI driven car. If so, that's highly misleading.

To play devil's advocate, how many AVs are on the road everyday? There are millions of cars on the road so naturally there are going to be a ton of accidents.

One of the car companies is quoted as having caused no serious injuries or deaths, so it seems like the 90 incidents number only includes those. Unfortunately the article doesn't question those numbers or explain what is counted, which is very poor journalism. I don't understand how they can write about the protesters' motivations without asking how many moving violations those cars have caused, or at least mention that this number is unknown.

If the numbers indeed don't count the times where they block traffic, stop for no reason or block emergency vehicles where they need to wait for the company to send someone out to the car, then AV's could be far worse than human drivers, not only in the number of incidents but also in the total delays they cause. At least a human driver can be removed from the car so that someone more competent can take over and resolve the situation quickly. And a human generally doesn't just stop in a lane and refuse to move out of the way for a very long time.

Another bonus: a human can just remove a cone from the hood and continue driving.

And they will definitely be better than people. Just them being able to communicate with each other, even locally, can remove the need for traffic lights already.