These cars don't even go onto highways or areas where accidents are more likely.

Accidents are less likely on highways. Most accidents occur in urban settings. Most deadly accidents occur outside of cities, off-highway.

Avoiding dangerous scenarios is the definition of driving safely.

This technology is still an area under active development and nobody (not even Elon!) is claiming this stuff is ready to replace a human in every possible scenario. Are you actually suggesting they should be testing the cars in scenarios that they know wouldn't be safe with the current technology? Why the fuck would they do that?

So no, I would absolutely not say they are “less prone to accidents than human drivers”.

OK... if you won't accept the company's reported data - who's data will you accept? Do you have a more reliable source that contradicts what the companies themselves have published?

to say nothing about the legality that will come up

No that's a non issue. When a human driver runs over a pedestrian/etc and causes a serious injury, if it's a civilised country and a sensible driver, then an insurance company will pay the bill. This happens about a million times a week worldwide and insurance is a well established system that people are, for the most part, happy with.

Autonomous vehicles are also covered by insurance. In fact it's another area where they're better than humans - because humans frequently fail to pay their insurance bill or even deliberately drive after they have been ordered by a judge not to drive (which obviously voids their insurance policy).

There have been debates over who will pay the insurance premium, but that seems pretty silly to me. Obviously the human who ordered the car to drive them somewhere will have to pay for all costs involved in the drive. And part of that will be insurance.

Well hey - atleast I provided some statistics to back me up. That's not the case with the people refuting those stats.

With Tesla the complaint is that the statistics are almost all highway miles so it doesn't represent the most challenging conditions which is driving in the city. Cruise then exclusively drives in a city and yet this isn't good enough either. The AV-sceptics are really hard to please..

You'll always be able to find individual incidents where these systems fail. They're never going to be foolproof and the more of them that are out there the more news like this you're going to see. If we reported about human-caused crashes with the same enthusiasm that would be all the news you're hearing from then on and letting humans drive would seem like the most scandalous thing imaginable.

Let them drive in fog and suddenly they can’t even see clearly visible emergency vehicles.

That article you linked isn't about self driving car. It's about Tesla "autopilot" which constantly checks if a human is actively holding onto the steering wheel and depends on the human checking the road ahead for hazards so they can take over instantly. If the human sees flashing lights they are supposed to do so.

The fully autonomous cars that don't need a human behind the wheel have much better sensors which can see through fog.

I can imagine in the future there will be grid locks in front of the police station with AV cars full of black people when the cops send out an ABP with the description of a black suspect.

We’ve seen plenty of racist AI programs in the past because the programmers, intentionally or not, added their own bias into the training data.

You're putting words to my mouth. I wasn't talking about people on Lemmy not wanting to get into one of these vehicles.

The people here don't seem to want anyone getting into these vehicles. Many here are advocating for all-out ban on self-driving cars and demand that they're polished to near perfection on closed roads before being allowed for public use even when the little statistics we already have mostly seem to indicate these are at worst as good as human drivers.

If it's about Teslas the complain often is the lack of LiDAR and radars and when it's about Cruise which has both it's then apparently about corruption. In both cases the reaction tends to be mostly emotional and that's why every time one provides statistics to back up the claims about safety it just gets called marketing bullshit.

All of these are solved by better public transport/safe bike routes and more walkable city designs. All of which is we can do now, not rely on some new shiny tech so that we can keep car companies profits up.

The day I can get in a car and not be simultaneously afraid of my own shortcomings and the fact that there are strangers driving massive projectiles around me is a day I will truly celebrate. The fact is that automobiles are weapons, and I don't want to be the one wielding it when a single mistake can cost an entire family their lives, although I would like to be there to slam on the brakes and prevent it if needed.

The possibilities really are endless.

When the light turns green the entire row of cars can start moving at the same time like on motor sports. Perhaps you don't even need traffic lights because they can all just drive to the intersection at the same time and just keep barely missing eachother but never crash due to the superior reaction times and processing speeds of computer. You could also let your car go taxi other people around when you don't need it.