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

www.theguardian.com 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

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

61 comments

Apparently GM thinks killing a pedestrian every 10 million miles is acceptable?
- GM saved like $2 on an ignition switch and killed 13 people. They knew about the issue for years. So yeah, GM doesn't care if a few people have to die in order to turn a profit
  
  https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/business/13-deaths-untold-heartache-from-gm-defect.html
- 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?
  
  The acceptable number is zero. For any type of vehicle.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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?
  
  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.
- 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.
- What's that rate for human drivers?
  
  According to these numbers 1 death in 73 million miles. Which is much better than I thought.
  
  Around 1 per 100 million miles.
  
  What's the acceptable vehicular homicide rate? GM seems to think it's more than zero.
- Permanently Deleted
  
  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)".
- Not just GM, if you tried ro question the safety of these cars on even Lemmy before these revelations came out you would get brigaded by people claiming they were safer than humans statistically and thats all they needed to be in order to be acceptable.
  
  This incident started with a human driving their car into a pedestrian. It's not exactly a smoking gun
This is the best summary I could come up with:

General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle unit is recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street in early October and a subsequent ban by California regulators.

The company said in documents posted by US safety regulators on Wednesday that with the updated software, Cruise vehicles will remain stationary should a similar incident occur in the future.

The 2 October crash prompted Cruise to suspend driverless operations nationwide after California regulators found that its cars posed a danger to public safety.

The state’s department of motor vehicles revoked the license for Cruise, which was transporting passengers without human drivers throughout San Francisco.

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.

“As our software continues to improve, it is likely we will file additional recalls to inform both NHTSA and the public of updates to enhance safety across our fleet.”

The original article contains 712 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Instead of "what number of deaths is acceptable?" Ask, "who is responsible?"

When a human driver in control of a car hits a pedestrian, the human is responsible, not the car.

Who is responsible when a computer driven car hits a pedestrian? Also, whose insurance pays the bill?

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