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GhostVII | 2 years ago

> In a statement on Wednesday, the GM unit said that it did the recall even though it determined that a similar crash with a risk of serious injury could happen again every 10m to 100m miles without the update.

This kind of misses the point though (probably intentionally). Sure the odds of this exact same type of crash happening again are quite low. But the question is how many of these "one in 10 million mile" crashes are there? Fixing just this type of crash doesn't solve the broader problem.

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dangus|2 years ago

As long as driverless cars perform any behaviors in crash situations where the general public would say “no conscious human in their right mind would do that,” driverless cars won’t be accepted by society even if their overall statistics look better than human operated vehicles.

The other thing about human drivers is that they can be punished for negligent actions on an individual level.

mbrumlow|2 years ago

The problem is we have all heard similar stories of humans doing similar things.

Even more so in elderly, it is common for humans to make contact with a car and the driver not be aware.

If I read this right this was such a bizarre accident. Another car driven by a human initiated the accident by hitting a pedestrian and launching their body in front or near the cruise car.

Just a while back we saw the same thing happen with zero automation cars at an intersection. A pedestrian fell close to the front of a car making a left hand turn. The light turned green and the person was dragged across the intersection.

If anything. Depending on the software update, cruise cars might be 1000s times safer knowing that we have programmed the car to look for this specifically.