Cruise recalls all self-driving cars after grisly accident and California ban | All 950 of the General Motors subsidiary’s autonomous cars will be taken off roads for a software update::All 950 of the General Motors subsidiary’s autonomous cars will be taken off roads for a software update

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      What’s acceptable?

      Every 50 million? 100 million?

      It will never be perfect, and there will never be no deaths at all, so if there is no acceptable limit you may as well ban self driving car research right now.

      The rate of pedestrians killed in 2021 was approximately 1 in every 25,000,000 miles driven manually (8000 deaths and 203 billion miles travelled collectively. Should that be the minimum target?

          • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            It really could be zero for pedestrians if we spent the money to ensure no human and vehicle would ever share the same space. It is less about how many humans/miles driven and more about how many humans/cost to avoid sadly.

          • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            It really could be zero for pedestrians if we spent the money to ensure no human and vehicle would ever share the same space. It is less about how many humans/miles driven and more about how many humans/cost to avoid sadly.

          • Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            It really could be zero for pedestrians if we spent the money to ensure no human and vehicle would ever share the same space. It is less about how many humans/miles driven and more about how many humans/cost to avoid sadly.

        • wahming@monyet.cc
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          1 year ago

          So, no human driven cars, buses, trains, planes or anything else, then?

          • sugartits@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            And literally no people leaving the house at all.

            Have been unfortunate incidents of pedestrians accidentally striking other pedestrians which then result in heart attacks or suchlike, which then results in death.

        • jetA
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          1 year ago

          Walking isn’t even zero.

    • Jondar@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It would be interesting to see what the actual stats are for pedestrian deaths vs miles driven for non autonomous cars. I’m willing to bet autonomous cars will ultimately be safer, but it will take time to get to that point.

      Edit: Apparently, according to the transportation safety in the US article on Wikipedia, the average is 1.25 pedestrians killed per 100 million miles driven.

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That page doesn’t exclude commercial road vehicles or interstates, so the apples to apples comparison may be much closer to the autonomous rate. A 700 mile/day truck cruising I-40 through the desert is going to skew the data as safer while I bet a casual city driver will be an order of magnitude more dangerous. Maybe the best would be stacking it against taxi and other ride-hail drivers

        Edit: Cruise didn’t even cause the incident. A human-driven car hit the pedestrian into the Cruise. This sky-is-falling reaction was started by a human doing worse.

      • SoylentBlake@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        GM was just getting it out of the way, that’s all. Nothing to see here. They operate better under pressure, see. Right? Sure they do.

    • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      No they don’t which is why they suspended all vehicles pending a software update.

      Also, how does this compare to human drivers?

      The best thing about this is that now the problem has been identified the software can be fixed and this particular problem won’t happen again. If a human makes this mistake you can’t push an update to fix all human drivers.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      But they recalling the vehicles so clearly not.

      Unless you’re suggesting that the software update is too make the cars more efficient at killing pedestrians?

      • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Read what they said. That they’re doing the recall even though it’s only 1 per 10m. Implying they think that is an acceptable rate for serious injuries.

        • SoylentBlake@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Ford thought 180 dead per year was acceptable when it shipped the Pinto. GM looks like a saint by comparison, fuck.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          I think they mean they’re not legally required to recall them. I guess the government have a limit on what they think is acceptable and that’s below the limit probably because it’s less than what human drivers achieve so it’s an improvement in safety.

        • Steve@communick.news
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          1 year ago

          It is more than zero. Anything that beats humans is a win. Getting to zero is unrealistic. Nothing has a zero risk of death.

          • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Correct, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Zero is the acceptable number, so anything that gets us closer to that is good.

            • Steve@communick.news
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              1 year ago

              You’re shifting goal posts.

              What’s the acceptable vehicular homicide rate? GM seems to think it’s more than zero.

              Correct, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Zero is the ideal number, so anything that gets us closer to that is good.

              Acceptable is different than ideal.

                • Steve@communick.news
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                  1 year ago

                  That’s true. But then you run into the issue of “The perfect being the enemy of the good.”

                • Steve@communick.news
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                  1 year ago

                  But now you’re misusing “acceptable”.

                  We would need to get to the other side of acceptable for widespread use of autos (self driving vehicles). It’s not an unachievable goal you always try to get closer to. That word is your previously used “ideal”. Which its seems now is what you meant with your original comment, instead of the “acceptable” you actually used.

                  It’s not just pedantic. I’m not the only one who thought you said something you apparently now didn’t mean, because you used words you apparently don’t understand. The words you use are vital to your being understood.

                  You could just humbly admit your original mistake in language, and nobody would give you a hard time.

                  • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
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                    1 year ago

                    I’m misusing “acceptable” because you think I mean something that I didn’t mean? Move along then.

        • raptir@lemdro.id
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          1 year ago

          That’s equally ridiculous to say. Self driving cars just need to be better than people to be worth it, they just currently are not better than people.

          • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            It’s ridiculous to think that cars shouldn’t be killing people? Well smack my ass and call me an extremist.

            • raptir@lemdro.id
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              1 year ago

              Yes, it’s ridiculous to say that if self driving cars kill fewer people than human driven cars but still more than zero that we should not use them. That’s like saying “why use seatbelts, they’re not 100% effective.”

            • wile_e8@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Are you calling for a ban on human driven cars? They killed more than zero people yesterday! If you aren’t, you’ve accepted a human-driven vehicular homicide rate above zero.

      • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Emphasis goes on “even though”.

        As in “At GM we’re so benevolent that we’re doing a software update even though we think this will only kill someone every 10m miles (which we consider an acceptable murder rate for our cars)”.

          • great_site_not@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, but a car running over a woman, dragging her twenty feet and parking on top of her, could easily have killed her.

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              Yeah but equally you could argue that if all cars were self-driving this accident wouldn’t have happened. It involved a human making a mistake first.

              I kind of feel like we’re getting the wrong takeaway from self driving cars.

              • great_site_not@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                What kind of mistake can a pedestrian make to cause a self-driving car run over them, and how does making more cars self-driving prevent that mistake?

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This incident started with a human driving their car into a pedestrian. It’s not exactly a smoking gun