Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
The only industry to have produced truly driverless public transportation systems is the rail industry. Not aeronautics. Rail systems happens to be my business and what I read here makes me very worried.<p>I don&#x27;t think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation. It&#x27;s not about running miles and miles without accidents and basically saying &quot;see&quot;? It&#x27;s about demonstrating &#x2F;by design&#x2F; that the &#x2F;complete&#x2F; system over its &#x2F;complete&#x2F; lifetime will not kill anyone. In terms of probability of failure it translates in demonstrated hazard rates of less than 1E-9 &#x2F;including the control systems&#x2F;. This take very special techniques and if that could&#x27;ve been done using only vehicle sensors, it would have been adopted by us long ago. I am also sorry to report that doubling cameras and sensor fusion will not get you an acceptable safety level. We&#x27;ve tried that too, rookies.<p>Is it &quot;fair&quot;, to use Elon&#x27;s argument? After all, isn&#x27;t additional safety enough compared to existing situation. Ah but we have been there too! For driver assistance it is indeed better. Similar systems were deployed during the second half of 20th century (e.g. KVB, ASFA, etc). But the limit is clear. It only &#x2F;improves&#x2F; driver&#x27;s failure rate. It does not substitute for the driver. If you substitute, you have to do much much much better. Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, &quot;already an improvement when compared to a typical driver&quot;. Is it fair? Maybe not, but that&#x27;s the whole point for entrusting lives to a machine.