this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Broadly speaking, an AI driver getting stumped means it's stuck in the middle of the road - while a human driver getting stumped means plowing into a semi truck.
I'd rather be inconvenienced than killed. And from what I've seen, even our current AI drivers are already statistically safer than the average human driver - and they're only going to keep getting better.
They'll never be flawless though. Nothing is.
Ai drivers have run over and crushed people slowly before too though because they didn't see the person as an "obstacle" to be avoided, or because they were on the ground, it didn't see them
And they always will. You need to look at the big picture here, not individual cases. If we replaced every single car on US roads with one driven by AI - proven to be 10 times better a driver than a human - that would still mean 4,000 people getting killed by them each year. That, however, doesn't mean we should go back to human drivers and 40,000 people killed annually.
I fully agree with you, but there is the issue of robotaxis crashing 3x as often as human drivers - and thats with a human supervisor on board. So if we switched completely to AI cars with the current level of integration, thats 120000 people killed.
Tesla made the idiotic decision to rely entirely on cameras, waymo used lidar and other sensors to augment vision.
That’s Tesla, not Waymo. Tesla’s hardware is shit and does not even include lidar. You can’t judge the entire industry by the worst example.
New HW4 Teslas do in fact include a front-facing radar, but it's currently only used for collecting data - not for FSD.
Still, gotta give them credit for getting by with vision-only quite well. I don't personally see any practical reason why you absolutely must include LiDAR. We already know driving relatively safely with vision only is possible - all the best drivers in the world do it.
LiDAR lets you see better than humans, so why wouldn’t you use it? What about fog, darkness, or other common roadside conditions?
Ignoring the best sensors means they can never surpass the safety of other self-driving vehicles. It was short sighted (pun intended) to remove that hardware. They have intentionally crippled their vehicles.
Big picture is AI not being able to operate under unusual conditions means that the "10 times better" (if it were only true) has a big fucking caveat where we can't say the stat will hold true if we replace all drivers.
As long as they use level 3 autonomous cars and then cheat with remote operators instead of using real level 5 cars, such statistics remain quite meaningless.
However, they tell about the people who use them as arguments.
As the OP stated, the low velocity cases are not causing deadly accidents. And you can’t drive by wire at high speed (too much latency). So I doubt it’s affecting the stats in any meaningful way.
Honestly I much prefer they have a human as a backup than not.
Make humans drive as slow as these cars and deaths will drop too.
The cars aren’t driving that slow the vast majority of the time…