Technology

Boom.

A times B times C equals X… I am jacks something something something

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Woman on Plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn't believe.

Woman on Plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

”One of the major ones”

It remains to be seen what hardware is required for autonomous driving as no company has a fully functioning system, so there is no baseline to compare to. Cruise (the "4k monitor" in your anaology) just had to cut their fleet of geofenced vehicles after back to back crashes involving emergency vehicles along with blocking traffic and attempting to run over things like fire hoses.

Here's how to do self driving cars in a reliable way. First, instead of cameras that try to use road markings designed for human eyes, use specially designed roads with guide rails on them to ensure it follows a safe path. Second, for added convenience, these roads could also power the cars so you don't need to stop to charge. Then we could even connect those cars together to increase efficiency. To mitigate the cost, no individual has to own them, they can stop at fixed points to pick up and drop off passengers, charging an affordable rate for each trip, or monthly/annual passes for frequent users. Maybe we could call them trains.

https://www.wardsauto.com/blog/my-somewhat-begrudging-apology-ford-pinto

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-02-10-mn-1335-story.html

Two examples of the media creating a frenzy that wound up being proven completely false later.

In OP's case, both of these drivers failed to see a semi crossing the road right in front of them even though they were sitting in the driver's seat with their hands on the wheel. This technology certainly needs improvement, but this is like blaming every auto manufacturer when someone crashes their car while texting on their phone.

Probably because calling something "not real" is infuriatingly vague.

Feel free to expand on your position, I actually do want to know what "not real" means in this context.

If you mean, from a semantics perspective, that FULL means it should be a completely independent and autonomous system, bravo, you've made and won the most uninteresting form of that argument.

I have nearly 20k miles on tesla's FSD platform, it works amazingly well for something thats "not real". There are countless youtube channels out there where people will mount a gopro in their car and go for a drive. Some of them like AIDRIVR and Whole Mars Catalog pretty much never take over control of the car without any drama. Especially in the past ~6 months or so of development it has been amazing.

At the very least, they would prioritize the driver, because the driver is likely to buy another Tesla in the future if they do.

Meanwhile hundreds of people are killed in auto accidents every single day in the US. Even if a self driving car is 1000x safer than a human driver there will still be accidents as long as other humans are also sharing the same road.

I think the whole premise is flawed because the car would have had to have had numerous failures before ever reaching a point where it would need to make this decision. This applies to humans as we have free will. A computer does not.