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As someone who is often on SF city streets without a car - I bike and run a lot - I absolutely love Waymo. I am continuously seeing human drivers cut me off, perform illegal maneuvers (i.e. run red lights when I'm going through a crosswalk), and break various other traffic laws. All these things genuinely put people in danger. Just the other day, a guy started running a "no right turn on red" lane in SF, and when I pointed it out to him he floored his car - through the red - right in front of me and laughed at me as he sped away. To say nothing of all the times when cars will honk or give me the finger for doing normal things on a street, like walking on a crosswalk.

Waymo is like the most courteous, respectful driver you can possibly imagine. They have infinite patience and will always take the option which is the safest for everyone. One thing which really impressed me is how patient they are at crosswalks. When I'm jogging, a Waymo will happily wait for me to cross - even when I'm 10 feet away from even entering the crosswalk! I don't know if I even have that much patience while driving! I've had a number of near misses with human drivers who don't bother checking or accelerate for no reason after I'm already in the crosswalk. Can you imagine a Waymo ever doing that?

If I see a Waymo on the street near me I immediately feel safer because I know it is not about to commit some unhinged behavior. I cannot say enough good things about them.

The one time I ever rode in a waymo (in Los Angeles), I had a contradictory experience. My Waymo was attempting to make a right turn at a red light. We were stopped behind a human driver who was waiting for pedestrians to finish crossing before proceeding to make the turn. This was a college campus (UCLA), so there were lots of pedestrians. After a few seconds of waiting, the Waymo decided that the driver ahead of us was an immobile obstacle, and cut left around this car to complete the right turn in front of it. There was only one lane to turn into.

Luckily, no one was hurt, and I generally trust a waymo not to plow into a pedestrian when it makes a maneuver like that. I also understand the argument that autonomous vehicles are easily safer on average than human drivers, and that’s what matters when making policy decisions.

But they are not perfect, and when they make mistakes, they tend to be particularly egregious.

I perhaps quarterly see this as a pedestrian with two human drivers.

I'll be happy when the average driver is a computer that does better than the average human. Deaths won't go down to 0 but at least it'll less chaotic.

That mistake might induce human error—which is absolutely a source of danger—but it undoubtedly had a clear path to pull around the “stopped” vehicle, and as you said, you can generally trust Wayno not to plow into pedestrians. So what made it “lucky” that no one was hurt?

If the "stopped" vehicle made the turn as the Waymo made the presumably-illegal turn into the "stopped" vehicle that was now moving?

So the answer is that we clearly need that car also to be a Waymo. Problem solved! Hah.

Why don’t we have cars talk to each other and coordinate their routing? Like some sort of peer to peer mechanism that helps them not crash each other. Why can’t vehicles be made to stop at cross walks when someone is crossing with some sort of communication to the vehicle?

There is a long and glorious research bibliography on v2v comms for this purpose :-) The obstacles are pretty obvious, the chicken-and-egg problem and trust.

As someone who works on autonomous driving, having wireless communications on a path where it’s responsible for safety guarantees is a nightmare

Solve this problem and LA traffic will get much better

"Safer on average" needs independent validation.

Fellow SF cyclist:

Even setting aside the malicious SF stuff, Waymo's have enormous advantages over humans relying on mirrors and accounting for blindspots. I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me.

I can't wait until the technology is just standard on cars, and they won't let drivers side-swipe or door cyclists.

> I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me.

Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/

Their site is even proud of it: https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ section titled “Keeping an eye on everything, all at once”

“The Waymo Driver's perception system takes complex data gathered from its advanced suite of car sensors, and deciphers what's around it using AI - from pedestrians to cyclists, vehicles to construction, and more. The Waymo Driver also responds to signs and signals, like traffic light colors and temporary stop signs.”

Totally fair to be concerned about pervasive surveillance for the _potential_ of privacy violation. Not sure what to do about that.

That being said, just speaking with some knowledge of current state: the scans don't live forever. At this point, all the data they collect is way too big to store even for a short period. They'll only keep data in scenarios that are helpful for improving driving performance, which is a tiny subset.

Personally identifiable information is also redacted.

You should probably be more worried about what gmail knows about you than Waymo.

True; I should have said metadata and not just data since you're right that the volume of raw images would be too big to store indefinitely. It's way more feasible to process the raw images and store the inferences, like number of persons visible in last 5 seconds, or dates and times a person who looks like me has been seen by a Waymo while my particular Android phone is nearby, or dates and times they have seen [my OCRed car number plate].

Flock is the same way. For example here's the Flock privacy policy from one of SF's fine local shopping centers: https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-poli...

> Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely. Should any information from the LPR Dashboard be needed to assist with a security or law enforcement matter, it may be retained indefinitely, in paper and electronic form, as part of the security file until it is determined it is no longer needed; in addition, it may be shared with local law enforcement who may retain it in accordance with their own retention policy.

If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. The one on their website is conspicuously labeled Waymo Web Privacy Policy lol

> If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it.

For riders, there's the Waymo One privacy policy: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444...

Beyond that, https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en seems to be more relevant to your interests.

That's still not really what I'm looking for. I am curious about a “what we keep, for how long” policy for the sensors on the outside of the cars like the Flock one I linked above.

Your second link does mention cameras and microphones outside the car but doesn't mention what they keep (full video? stills? LIDAR? RADAR?) or for how long:

“Waymo’s cameras also see the world in context, as a human would, but with a 360° field of view. Our high-resolution vision system can help us detect important things in the world around us like traffic lights and construction zones. Our systems are not designed to use this data to identify individual people.”

The “Our view on your privacy” section links to the same page as your first link, and that page's “What we keep” section is explicitly only about riders:

“We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active.”

It's Google we're talking about. In no way do I trust them to take pictures of me using their city-wide camera network and not use face/body recognition to keep track of where I go, for the purposes of targeting advertisement.

People are able to get their very boring suburban house that you can find pictures of the interior on zillow of blurred for years (indefinitely?) on google street view. If they were so cartoonishly evil they would not let you do that.

Google is pretty good at not letting other people see your information. They're not good at preventing themselves from using that information.

I agree in principle that a privately run company could use information in nefarious ways internally, and that barring any additional knowledge you should not trust them.

That being said, I have an anecdote as a former googler: the reality with Google though is very thoughtful and favorable for users if you ask Googlers who've worked on their software products. There are audit trails that can result in instant termination if it's determined that you accessed data without proper business justification. I've known an engineer who was fired for an insufficiently justified user lookup (and later re-hired when they did a deeper look -- hilariously they made this person go through orientation again).

And safeguards / approvals required to access data, so it's not just any joe shmoe who can access the data. Wanna use some data from another Google product for your Google product? You're SOL in most cases. Even accessing training data sourced from youtube videos was so difficult that people grumbled "if I were outside of Google at OpenAI or something I'd have an easier time getting hold of youtube videos -- I'd just scrape them."

This isn't to say any of this is a fair thing to make decisions on for most people, because companies change and welp how do you actually know they're doing the right thing? Imo stronger industry-wide regulations would actually help Google because they already built so much infra to support this stuff, and forcing everyone else to spend energy getting on their level would be a competitive advantage.

The impression I have, as an outsider, is that Google hoovers up all information available to them and uses it as input to various algorithms and ML models for targeted advertising. I'm sure individual Google employees are as thoughtful as you say, but I don't think the organization views itself as it users' "enemy" or as something which its uses should be protected from.

I'm not afraid of employees at Google or random Google divisions obtaining unauthorised access to information at me, it's not about that. I'm certain that there's very little data that the targeted advertising part of Google can't access.

Traffic isn't the right place to be if you demand not to be seen. If you do not want your data to be stored that's a different matter, but I'm still gonna look at you while driving to not crash, I have to.

There are a lot more Tesla cameras than Waymo cameras. Tesla also has a history of sharing private/intimate video from inside the cars.

And not just with law enforcement but internally for memes.

There are somewhere between several hundred and a couple thousand Waymo vehicles per city being served. Even if that expands tenfold, it will be a small fraction of the number of cameras you pass by every day.

> Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/

It's not going to be stored forever.

That would be incredibly expensive.

Those cars are taking in TB of information each daily. Scale that to 10s of millions of cars.

It's just not going to happen.

Maybe an ultra compressed representation of you that shares maybe 1 bit in 1 weight somewhere in a NN will live forever.

Maybe.

> Scale that to 10s of millions of cars.

Don’t they currently have less than 1000 cars? I don’t think they will keep every recording forever but technically, they still could at the current scale.

That's still close to an Exabyte of data per year...

They have plans to grow 1000s of times this size.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863276

Human drivers have dash cams, too. Maybe without as sophisticated a data ingestion system as google, but they could theoretically put their dashcam footage on youtube if they wanted to.

I will be sure to think of that the next time I see a human driver whose car has 29 dash cams, 5 lidars, 4 radars, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime images of me: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...

A ring camera can do image recognition and store durations of video where a person is in frame. I'm not sure what the privacy difference is between these two. Is lidar and radar recording that much more of a privacy concern than video recording.

I'm pretty sure between traffic cameras and security cameras lots of commuters on th street are being filmed. With or without Waymos

Frankly I'm not ok with Ring cameras with a field of view extending past the property line either

Yeah, I mean it’s apples and a two trillion dollar adtech business.

I don’t understand why so many comments here are missing the context

What is someone doing with all that which they can't do with front and back dashcams?

Correlation of data across time and other cars in the fleet.

What bothers me regarding surveillance and self driving cars is that an executive sympathetic to the surveillance state could build a system that allows arbitrary surveillance of vehicles or housing by license plate or location. Eric Schmidt was a regular visitor of The Pentagon and Billionaires simply live in a different world than we do. So while some driver could happen to capture me and upload it to YouTube, Waymo could, if someone wanted, have a secret operations center which allows surveillance of all sorts of people, locations, and vehicles. The same way that AT&T had a secret NSA closet that split off major fiber pipes, some data pipeline could have an invisible filter that duplicates data matching certain variables and delivers it to a surveillance partner.

Wouldn't that would imply that Silicon Valley companies collude with governments? That's simply impossib ... oh, wait ...

See non-Waymo, human driven car?

Fear not, your images and recordings will get piled on somebody's dashcam to do as their heart desires.

I got a dashcam in my Camry recording front and back everytime i drive. I have no interest in preserving those images outside of an accident, but who knows what sommebody else will.

We have no expectations of privacy in public spaces and ultimately I would trust Googles IT security more than some dude with a dashcam

man, the Googs already has a library of images of you. If there's anything about you that the Googs doesn't already know, I'd be shocked. the Googs probably knows you better than your therapist, because you've only shared with your therapist what you wanted. the Googs gets data about you from places you know nothing about.

being concerned that a Waymo car took your picture isn't invalid, but man is it a tear drop in the rain of everything else the Googs is doing.

When I met my ex and we linked over what was then Google+, we found that I had been auto labeled in a photo of a protest from years before we met. They've got a lot of info that they don't surface...

If "the Googs" knows so much about me, why do they keep showing me ads for products I not only have zero interest in, I'm also not even the target demographic for?

Because they need to hide some of what they know about you. There have been cases where they (in this case target not google) knew a 14 year old was pregnant - but the ads for things she needed are sensitive. So the industry has learned everyone gets a few ads that don't apply just to give cover for those that do but someone doesn't admit to.

also some ads really are to everyone. You may not be in a place where you would think about a car, but car makers don't want you to forget you could just in case your situation changes. They also want you to think of some goods as luxuries so you are impressed when you see someone who does have it.

> Because they need to hide some of what they know about you.

My favorite example of this is in the desktop web version of Google Maps. If you search for some place and try to plot directions from “Your Location” it will prompt for the browser's Geolocation API and will refuse to give directions at all if you don't consent to the prompt: https://i.imgur.com/fIQswnD.png

This is despite the fact that it opens the map with a perfectly-centered and reasonably-sized window around my current location. I have never seen this fail when not using any sort of VPN that moves my GeoIP. They could totally give a reasonable mix–max time estimate based on that window just like the one they show for variable traffic.

Because all the smart people at Google who worked on Quality (Ads Quality, Search Quality, etc) got promoted and moved away from those, and the revenue is good enough that google can maintain its monopoly without improving the product.

This is laughable. This isn't incompetence.

The system was never designed to show you relevant ads that you want to see and would like to buy a product from. The system has always been designed to show you profitable ads. Those have always been and will always be a completely distinct set, with only coincidental overlap if at all.

It's almost like people think that the phrase "relevant ads" means interesting to the person viewing the ads. Instead, it means you are relevant to the person buying the ad, so Googs shows you their ad. It means you are in the age range and income range, and possibly the geographic area that the person buying the ad placement finds relevant. The person viewing the ad is never relevant to Googs.

Because someone is paying Google to show those to you.

Second this gripe. At this rate they're going to turn American cities into copies of beijing or london with cameras every other place you look. "Oh but the police will then be able to subpoena footage to catch criminals more easily" yes I don't want a world in which the government can instantly do that. It sucks.

Definitely a big privacy concern, especially for people like you who aren't using the technology, and haven't consented to giving your data.

But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm). As a society, I think the benefit outweighs the cost in this case, and we can (theoretically) continue to make progress on privacy as a society. Seems like much more of a step forward than a step back to me

> But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm).

No, that says “Accidents (unintentional injuries)” as a category are collectively the third leading cause of death, and that category contains a lot of things.

CDC “Underlying Cause of Death” dataset sez… https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg

- “Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic” is the 50th leading cause of death at 0.4% of deaths.

- “Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)” is the 108th leading cause of death at 0.2% of deaths.

Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes.

Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years.

More than half of all road traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

Do you dislike it enough to be happy with the increased car incidents that a human dominated driving world implies?

Why are you so worried of something snapping tens of thousands of pics of your body (mostly identical) that don't tell much about you while the world's biggest ad companies know you better than any single human ever will. I feel popular western sci fi has made people fear companies taking some visual data of their bodies covering minutes at max while fully overlooking the dangers of having your behavioural data covering years at a very granular level.

Yes, I know it's not a choice, both are bad. But I find people everywhere, including here in HN, are overly conscious of getting a few minute worth pictures of their bodies uploaded to some private servers while they are nowhere near as conscious when it comes to non-visual data about them (which I would argue mostly covers behavioural data imo).

Buy your scramble suit now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc

It's probably measuring the temperature of your bodily fluids.

Good point

Honestly future generations will be aghast at how we accepted road deaths caused by human drivers.

It's only more than a 9/11 every day of the year

120 traffic deaths per day in the US - not sure where you’re getting your data, but you’re off by more than an order of magnitude

I bet that when this tech is in normal cars some will have it tuned to drive much more aggressively and/or simply have that be a setting. I suspect that would be a big selling point / driving tacitly would be an anti-selling point.

Nah, insurance companies will change their coverage rates based on the feature, and / or it'll become another legally mandated feature like backup cameras.

On the other hand, I wonder why insurance companies haven't led to the ubiquity of dashcams. I thought by now every vehicle sold would have one built in.

And my suspicion is that insurance companies don't push for you to get one because it prevents them from fighting claims that they would've won had there been no evidence.

Maybe it's similar for self-driving or whatever we're talking about here (sensors?).

They don’t care because at their scale it would be a wash - you’d only come out ahead if your insured drivers were consistently and significantly better drivers than every other insurance provider you fight claims against.

Then why not offer a "dash-cam discount" to the subset of customers that the insurer believes _are_ better drivers, like those with a long history of having no accidents or tickets and tons of miles?

Point is, there is flexibility in how different brands implement it. I think it will be the same as eco mode / sports mode / track mode.

In the first years maybe. However governments are watching this data and will make it mandatory on when they decide it is really better. (Assuming it is better in unbiased study) There are many governments, it only takes one and the car makers will be looking at if the override button is worth having.

Dooring is so incredibly preventable with simple computer vision and some kind of actuator that adds an audible alarm and mechanical 3x resistance to the door opening when a cyclist is detected. The door should still be openable in emergency but should be hard to open until the cyclist passes.

(For cars that have both a normally-used electronic door open button and a manual emergency release (e.g. Teslas), the electronic button can use the car's existing cameras to detect cyclists first before actuating the door to open. This would be a trivial software change in the specific case of Teslas. The only thing I dislike about the Tesla setup though is that most non-owners are unaware of where the mechanical emergency release is; it is not obvious and not labelled.)

> This would be a trivial software change in the specific case of Teslas

Tesla already has dooring prevention. If it detects a bicycle or something coming, it prevents you from opening the door the first time, and shows a warning. You can override it by trying to open it the second time, if you are sure.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1gwjq4v/new_an...

Waymo already warns you if it detects road users when you open a door. They just don't actively prevent you from opening the door, but they could implement it in their next generation vehicles.

They won't have to if they use sliding power doors (the geely cars have them). They should have had them for the jaguar generation :)

Dooring people aside, what do you do if someone just leaves the door open when they leave their ride?!

You charge such riders additional penalty fee on their account.

Waymo needs to have staff in SF anyway to pick up cars that malfunction (flat tire, or just close the door).

> Dooring people aside, what do you do if someone just leaves the door open when they leave their ride?!

Continue billing them for the ride and send an app notification or phone-call to their phone.

Other potential solutions: If the door is still not closed after n minutes, plead with passers-by, or offer a passing or nearby rider the chance to earn credit by closing the door.

Oh, that's already a problem for them. There are videos of many Waymos stranded because the previous rider didn't close the door fully.

Haha yep! I meant that as a rhetorical question, it's just silly to not move to sliding power doors.

You won't hear the end of complaints about how cyclists are now making cars more expensive...

Health insurance companies should pay for it. Their costs would come down if they subsidize the full R&D cost of this system for all car manufacturers. It would work in their favor.

They're probably too stupid to think like that, though.

Health insurance generally has a fixed profit margin (state legislation). They have little incentive to reduce cost because then the entire pie shrinks. A nice example of where well meaning legislation can completely backfire.

Of course, passing costs to all insurance companies is really the same as passing it to all people paying insurance premiums, at which point you can just use tax money to get the same effect. At which point, it's probably easier to regulate it and have the cost passed to everyone buying a car.

You could just design infrastructure and road rules such that cyclists aren't encouraged/required to ride in the dooring zone, or even hold people accountable for their actions beyond just the cost of the damages they cause. Car based damages are so normalized that we allow reckless or negligent behavior around cars that we would never allow in any other part of our cities.

You could probably design the latch jaws to have an electronically controlled second catch. It would activate whenever a cyclist is present so if someone tries to slam the door open it would catch with the door slightly open and trigger a warning. A second pull then opens the door no matter what for safety.

That would lead to ridiculously overengineered car doors. It's already incredible how such a simple thing like a door can be so unreliable on newer cars, with handles that sink into the doorframe when not in use, or a locking system that only works with battery power. I'm not sure that adding more complexity would be a net benefit for society.

It's already there, my new fancy car has it. Push the lever to open with electronic help, pull the lever twice for mechanical release. The electronic help version checks for safety first (as long as you do it with a timeout from when the car was running/ready) We'll have to see how the fancy car does over time, but I did get one with handles on the outside that don't disappear.

I’m a fellow cyclist in SF and can only wholeheartedly second this. To add some extra anxiety, I’m usually riding a cargo bike, ferrying a child to or from daycare.

I still remember the first time I went through a four-way stop intersection and saw a driverless car idling, waiting for its turn. It was weird and nerve-wracking. Now… I’d much prefer that to almost any other interaction at the same spot.

It's really interesting seeing all the comments from cyclists regarding Waymos. I currently live in a Waymo-less city and they weren't common enough in SF when I was biking there to be a big factor but I remember some harrowing moments with human drivers (without precious cargo - that sounds extra scary!). I'd be curious to try it again and am pleasantly surprised to hear it makes such a big difference!

Best part is that they probably have data to show that all that patience costs the typical passenger mere seconds to a minute on 99% of rides.

This has always bothered me about aggressive or impatient human drivers: they are probably shaving like 30 seconds off of their daily commute while greatly increasing the odds of an incident.

Driving is a cooperative game, which we all win if everyone arrives at their destination safely.

I experienced this phenomena on my electric scooter. I could always scoot faster than someone walking but ultimately it makes little difference because I just spent more time for the crossing signal to turn green. So they end up catching up to me.

Now, when there's long stretch or when you have to go up hill, that's where the electric scooter begins to shine and makes the largest difference.

You are missing all the times where you are enough faster that you catch a green while the other person gets there on red and so they never catch up. It is easy to see/remember the times they catch up.

Interesting - I'm definitely substantially faster on a scooter than walking. Part of it is knowing the best routes, but I think even if there are crossing signals, if you're going further than a few blocks there's just no comparison to walking.

This is also why streets inside cities in the Netherlands are converting to be single-lane, except at intersections - the ability to overtake doesn't make traffic flow faster.

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Please don't do this here.

Or just implement vastly more automated ticketing systems. They are standard in many countries. They could be implemented with limited-purview privacy preserving architectures where that aligns with expectations and values.

But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.

But they won't be implemented with a privacy preserving architecture. They'll be outsourced to a third party with unknown privacy and security, and eventually be treated as a revenue generator, leading cities to implement rule changes that enhance revenue at the cost of privacy and safety.

It's so frustrating. These things are trivially solved. There's basically a 50/50 shot, every time the light cycles, that someone will illegally take a right on red on the street outside my house. All you need is a single cop sitting there and watching. Or just one camera! Argh.

signaling humans for bad behaviors tend to backfire. it program us to recreate that situation in anger. we aren't smart enough to naturally learn lessons that way.

good thing drones are getting smarter

Well sure but drones won't shit, that's why we need the organic piece. I guess they could drop rotten fruit in lieu of shit, but then we need a supply chain to restock the rotten fruit in the drones.

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My favorite thing from my first Waymo ride was watching a lady walk up to the middle of the street to cross. The Waymo saw her, slowed, and waited to let her cross. She smiled and waved and immediately felt dumb because who is she waving to? Do I wave back? We laughed at each other as it drove away.

Ever since then my fear melted away. They see every direction, never blink, and are courteous and careful with pedestrians.

More than half of all road traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

Hey, sometimes I say "Thanks!" to Siri.

Might as well keep an automatic response even if it's not always useful.

I am also hopeful that Waymo has other positive externalities for bikes/pedestrians: less need for parking spots, car ownership, etc. At the same time, I guess you could say the same for rideshare, so it would depend on if robo-rideshare is cheaper than ownership

My prediction is that car usage will go thought the roof when AI cars work.

People can have a stress-free commute to a nice house in the countryside and work in the cities. Because the car is electric, it will be inexpensive to run.

Commute time still matters, and congestion pricing will become the norm.

I can read on the subway, but while a 20 min subway ride is fine, an hour each way is still a lot, and a two hour train commute just doesn't leave much time in your life for doing social things.

Also, I think there's going to be a huge surge in in-demand AI buses. Rideshares will take people to a random spot, you'll wait 2 minutes for a predetermined seat on a specific bus, and then switch to a rideshare van for the last 5 minute drive to your office in the city.

It's just going to be so much cheaper. With economies of scale and urban congestion pricing, you'll have to choose between dropping $45 on a dedicated hour-long door-to-door car trip, or $6 for the car-bus-van version which is only 20% slower anyways.

You've clearly never been to the US.. Late-stage capitalism will find ways to make it cost exactly as much as driving your own car.

OTOH, if I'm in a decent-sized car (minivan?) for 45 minutes+, I can get work done. I can then stay less time at work.

> You've clearly never been to the US.

You're clearly wrong.

> Late-stage capitalism will find ways to make it cost exactly as much as driving your own car.

Late-stage capitalism is a defunct theory based on Marxism.

Real, actual capitalism results in competition which drives prices down, as long as there are two or more competitors and antitrust law is enforced. Which is generally the case.

And in the case of monopolies like city buses, cities set prices directly in response to democratic pressure. By your argument, NYC subways ought to be $25 a ride... but they aren't.

> Real, actual capitalism results in competition which drives prices down, as long as there are two or more competitors and antitrust law is enforced.

I generally agree with you here, (though it's a bit simplistic for things not directly related to price: for example good luck avoiding arbitration clauses)

> Which is generally the case.

Now our opinions differ. Lina Khan was an exception, and I certainly can't imagine the current regime standing up against money.

Some recent(ish) ones I think have been less than great for competition

  HBO / Discovery? 
  Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp? 
  LiveNation / Ticketmaster? 
  Disney / Fox? 
  Charter / Time Warner Cable? 
  AT&T / Time Warner? 
  CBS / Viacom? 
  Comcast / NBC? 
  JP Morgan / Chase? 
  CVS / Aetna? 
  Cigna / Express Scripts?
  Sinclair Media

Waymo can drive cars but it can't magick new roads into existence. If car usage goes through the roof, so will traffic jams.

Probably not, if they're all computer-controlled, and can communicate with each other. I posit traffic jams is mostly caused by idiot and reckless drivers...

Yup, and if every car is computer controlled and in communication with nearby cars you can safely reduce spacing. Most of that space between cars is due to human reaction time. (And even then that's not always enough. 40 years ago, I'm going along, geezer is being awfully slow about their left turn so I lightly apply the brakes. Geezer then proceeds to completely stop, utterly unaware that I'm heading right towards his door. I slam on my brakes. I was able to stop for said geezer but the woman behind me didn't have the usual warning of brake lights flaring and came up a couple of inches short in stopping. Geezer proceeds off, apparently completely unaware of the accident he caused.

(And that was not the only close call I had with that geezer at that corner.)

Most humans don't leave sufficient braking time on crowded roads. They leave almost enough space to stop, not accounting for reaction time at all.

The future where all cars are computer controlled is even further away than the future where fully self-driving cars are available for purchase.

The throughput of a road is car density * speed. So from a pure throughput perspective, the ideal driver is a tailgating speed demon. To maximize time spent at high speed you should also floor it when the light turns green, and slam the brakes at the last possible moment when it goes red.

well, I guess my hope is that renting a car whenever needed is cheaper than the cost of purchasing, maintaining, insuring, and storing a personal robocar. It would be quite hard to make the US more car-dependent than it already is! But I am speculating - you may very well be right

It will only be cheaper if you don't drive much anyway, and you are the type who would never be seen in a car more than 3 years old.

If you drive a lot (like the person in the countryside) the car that is there when you want to is worth owning vs a shared car that you might have to wait for. Plus by owning the car you can just leave your golf clubs in the trunk.

If you can stand being in a used car you will discover that shared cars are all more expensive just because at the first sign of cosmetic wear they get rid of it while seats that have been sat in a few times are still good enough for many more years. (unless you almost never drive anyway)

Because of the above I don't see much growth in the shared car market. There will be some because there are people who don't have parking, people who don't drive much, and people who demand a new car that they don't otherwise care about. However the vast majority of people will still own their own car.

Cost is only one dimension of renting a car. As long as the car rental companies keep making it as painful as possible, it won't be a solution for usual usage. Hopefully Waymo goes after them too.

Very much. They often don't have cars at all - despite letting you reserve them. Or they are not open when your train arrives / leaves. I'm considering a 3 day drive my next trip in part because it is the only way to be sure we can get around when there.

(we are going to a remote location where I wouldn't expect public transit to serve, but the train station is in a small town that still should have some transit but doesn't)

I sincerely believe this thesis and desperately want a REIT that owns real estate in a 2 hour radius of major urban downtowns.

Even weekend vacation homes will go up in value. It's no big deal to have a vacation home on a lake 10 hours drive away if I can sleep in the car overnight on Friday and Sunday.

Ride hailing gameification negates safety benefits. They do monitor for smooth, driving, but that's about it.

The thing I dislike about Waymo is other drivers.

I've now had it happen twice that a car will fully blow through an intersection because they know a Waymo will slam on the breaks to avoid a collision. They basically abuse the car's reflexes.

Also in any sort of situation where the Waymo is being very cautious the biggest danger is the impatient people behind the Waymo who will break the law to go out and around it.

Most of the world already solved this problem with red light cameras.

Returning to Houston after living abroad for 10 years, the biggest culture shock was that everyone runs red lights.

Every time the light turns green for you, you can expect 1-3 cars to keep rolling through until you can go. I've almost been rear ended by not running a light that just turned red because the person behind me also wants to floor it through. Yakety sax shit.

Then I found out in 2019, the Texas legislature outlawed the use of red-light cameras.

Muh freedum.

>Then I found out in 2019, the Texas legislature outlawed the use of red-light cameras.

>Muh freedum.

To be fair you have progressives arguing against red light cameras as well, on the basis that it's a regressive tax on poor people, and that it causes more accidents through drivers slamming on the brakes on a yellow.

The cameras are a regressive tax on poor people? That would be the tickets. You can correct this by having ticket penalties scale in proportion with wealth or income, which is something you probably want to do anyways so that they still act as a deterrent for people who are otherwise rich enough to flaunt traffic laws.

As for causing more accidents through slamming brakes on the yellow, I simply don't believe that. But if it helps you can extend the yellow duration by an extra half second.

Maine does not have red light cameras and this isn't a problem.

The variability of how much people crash in various parts of the US is fascinating, like at least one entire order of magnitude difference in otherwise comparable cities.

This probably bizarrely justifies the pulp scifi trope of the automated car having an human-like android driver.

I mean, if you want to merge in heavy traffic and nobody is letting you in everyone knows to cut in front of a very expensive car. They’ll brake.

One night a few weeks ago I took a Waymo ride at night. Somewhere out in an unfamiliar neighborhoood, I realized that I hadn't seen a human being for dozens of blocks. The streets were full of cars, but every single one was an empty Waymo or Zoox. I spent the rest of the ride musing about what would happen if an armed mugger jumped in front of the car at the next traffic light, and the whole thing felt a little bit less safe.

It’s really cool to read reports like this, keeping in mind that just a few years ago many people were loudly proclaiming self driving cars were decades away, and would never be safer drivers than humans.

If they keep up the slow and steady improvements and roll outs to cities worldwide it’s hard to imagine my one year old ever needing to drive a vehicle.

I feel like this study aligns with my experience. I don't live in a Waymo city but I do sometimes drive to the office. I find many other drivers to be impatient, short tempered, selfish and at least once a trip, borderline reckless. Computer drivers definitely aren't perfect. But from what I can tell they aren't intentionally unsafe and will probably improve over time. I wish I could say the same for humans.

I wonder how will this behaviour evolve over time? Right now waymo is definitely prioritising safety, but as the tech matures (and competition grows) will the systems start to prioritise speed and so little-by-little start cutting the margins they give to pedestrians? As with any digital platform this degradation wouldn't be explicitly chosen, but just the consequence of many little A/B tests designed to optimise some other metric

I agree, to a point. Waymo has some vaguely aggressive habits that are usually for the best, like initiating their turn forcefully, but there is one specific thing I've noticed. Coming down Mason and turning left onto Bush it is a one way street turning left onto a one way street. Twice now while trying to cross with the light Waymos have crept into the crosswalk while I was already crossing. It's very unsettling.

I imagine the weirdness of the situation (legal left on red) triggers it's "creep forward so I can see" logic but it definitely shouldn't be blocking a busy crosswalk there when there is little to know chance it will be able to turn AND peds from both sides.

I saw a waymo break a red light yesterday in Nob Hill. I think they’re cool but I exercise extra caution around them.

Besides, this is a study on Waymo probably influenced by them too to publish on their blog.

Once pedestrians and cyclists figure out that Waymo cars will always stop or avoid them they will start ignoring crosswalks and signals and just cross or cut in front of them.

Which would be wonderful? (assuming all cars have similar tech at that point)

Basically every street could be a shared space like Exhibition Road[0]. Making the city optimized for cars is a relatively recent development in the history of cities. I say this as a car owner and driver.

[0] https://www.udg.org.uk/publications/articles/exhibition-road...

That already happens all the time where I am, so I guess it would at least be safer.

You just described situation in Switzerland (and some other western European countries). I don't mean some tiny isolated situation or place, I mean whole countries, anything from tiny village to biggest traffic jam-packed cities.

Sometimes I am ashamed a bit how early drivers break for me as a pedestrian and let me pass, like 3m from road when they and 2-3 more cars could easily pass through without affecting my crossing.

The problem is getting used to this and then going to places where this is not the norm, potentially very dangerous especially for kids.

Unwary drivers would be at the bottom of my List-of-Dangerous-SF-Things

They are now because winning trust is their biggest hurdle. They've got the "public risk" slider turned all the way down. Let's hope they don't later start to optimise for speed and realise that people probably won't just step out due to fear of death and it's in their best interest to nurture that fear like human drivers currently do.

As a cyclist, this is the dream IMO, letting everyone be in cars while safely being able to ride my bike without fear of death or road rage.

Looking forward to this future.

This will surely get some skepticism as it's a Waymo study, but it's nice to see a real‐world dataset this large at 56M miles. An 85 % drop in serious‐injury crashes and 96 % fewer intersection collisions is a strong signal that Level 4 ADS can meaningfully improve safety in ride-hail settings. Still curious about how much of that comes from operational design versus the core autonomy, but it’s a big leap beyond “novelty demo.”

Really excited for autonomy to become more and more common place. People drive more and more like distracted lunatics these days it seems

It's good to be skeptical of the source, but I can't remember seeing any substantive criticism of the methodology or conclusions.

Here is one,

Humans drive in all weather conditions on all types of roads and also many types of personal vehicles of varying ages and conditions.

Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather and is limited to a relatively large and safer expensive SUV that is maintained professionally in a fleet.

Studies like this rarely account for such factors , they are compare optimal conditions for self driving to average conditions for humans.

Even if waymo was better when accounting for these factors , if it was much worse in the conditions humans typically are expected to drive [1] they self driving is still less safe than humans on average .

A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group .

[1] no study will ever show this as they wouldn’t be able to trial it under those conditions if it is not safe enough

> A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft). > I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group.

If you've been in both a human drive cab and a Waymo, you'd definitely not say this. I see cabs have accidents all the time. Never seen a Waymo have one.

Also, being in a Waymo feels much safer than a human driven car, even my own when I'm driving!

I highly doubt taxicabs are safer than Waymos.

In fact, here is some data:

Over every 1 million miles driven, there are 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars. And according to Waymo, they have 2.1 crashes per million miles.

> 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars.

> Waymo 2.1 crashes

The numbers become much less 80+% plus claim in the article as you remove factors. It comes closer to 30% with professional drivers.

Livery car is still not always well maintained a high sitting SUV with better visibility[1], perhaps with all these factors included if it is 20% better it is impressive technical achievement for sure, but not going to create headlines anywhere.

The point is the methodology is not as objective as it could be, and this is biased/selective claim, not that self driving cannot be better than humans.

[1] Also there is major difference in the price point between Waymo and Livery cars, I cannot say how it will influence rates but the different rates means different class of clients using at different times of day/night to different locations that needs to be normalized for.

The percent improvement doesn't really matter though. The fact that it is better than even just professionals still means that there are fewer crashes, and therefore they are improving overall road safety.

* In a better car, serviced much better than the average professional vehicle.

The % matters because it is close enough excluding these factors, so we can not definitely say it currently better than humans yet, close but not conclusively so.

That is not a argument against them. It is a simple function of economics, i.e. as long as it better than Lyft/Uber(they are already) that is the price point that Waymo operates at, so it is safer for most users and easy choice to make.

However if you can afford and regularly use high quality private livery car services then the data has to be lot clearer to make the switch.

> Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather

the study is comparing Waymo to accidents occurred in the same cities where Waymo operates, and my understanding is that Waymo drives 7 days a week, 24h a day in those cities, so same roads, same weather. Seems a legit comparison

Also there is some sort of bias not accounted for: People drive when most people drive and most people are stuck in the most dangerous area: traffic. Waymo driving at night on empty streets is not a good indicator for accident prevention when measured against the average human, who is stuck mostly in traffic.

Why do you believe Waymo's miles are from driving at night on empty streets? They drive when there's rideshare demand, a majority of which occurs during daytime and in the busiest areas of a city. They are no less stuck in traffic than the average human.

Not the same cars though, people are not driving newish mid range SUV with professional maintenance all the time.

This isn't even true because the dataset compares against conditions IN THE CITY they operate in. They operate year-round in SF and in the same conditions human drivers do.

I am very curious where waymo is at in adverse conditions. Do the cars totally lock up and become useless? Or are they at the level of your 65 year old mother driving in a thunderstorm at night? Passable, but nothing they are gonna put their name on.

Seems they intend to come to Washington D.C. next year, which does get a pretty wide gamut of weather.

Maybe humans shouldn't drive in those conditions then.

It may not be option to most people in the US (most self driving use case is built around the US market)

In America driving is a economic necessity, from going to work to even the grocery shop needs cars and dependency increases inversely with affluence [1]

Mass public transit is non existent barring very few regions.

So car (for commute) and flight (for long distance) are the only two viable transit options .

People cannot choose to not work because weather is bad, and remote work / work from home applies to only some jobs.

[1] food and other service deserts are more likely less affluent neighborhoods meaning you will need to drive and for longer for food , pharmacy or any other services if you are low income .

Waymos drive in all weather in the cities they're deployed in; cities where people crash all the time in all types of weather.

Waymo ( and self driving programs as well) have been careful not to go for public large scale deployments in any city with difficult weather and for good reason focused on cities like Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, SF[1] so far with easy driving weather.

There have been promising progress and there have been hints of a New York trial soon, but it it well known that self driving cars have not done large scale trial in cities with bad weather.

[1] Yes, I am aware SF gets a bit of bad weather with fog and rain but not nearly not as much to make driving quite unsafe like somewhere that gets a feet of snow in 24 hours in winter, and likely promixity to engineering HQs and favourable regulatory climate influenced the SF choice.

They only compare to human accidents in the areas they operate. It doesn't matter where they don't operate today as they don't try to include human crash numbers from those cities either for the comparison.

Every time someone thinks this is some gotcha, but it isn't. Their methodology clearly attempts an apples-to-apples comparison.

I saw a Waymo completely freeze in road construction and then pull off into a different lanes through cones.

This is all low speed so wasn’t a safety issue (aside from road rage it might trigger in someone), but focusing only on safety also ignores incidents like this.

Aside from the criticisms about the safety methodology outlined in another chain, I think there’s a bait and switch here where they don’t talk about negative impacts to traffic, freezes, inability to handle situations and don’t evaluate their performance against other drivers.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Waymo is doing well to being the first to truly autonomous, but they’re intentionally putting their best foot forward and trying not to draw attention to any of their shortcomings.

It's an incentive problem.

Uber/Lyft drivers are strongly incentivized to drive as quickly and aggressively as possible.

The individual drivers are trading risk for cash.

A company like Google isn't going to make that trade because it's actually the wrong trade across millions of hours.

There was a study a few years back that showed male uber drivers earned more than female drivers. How could this be so, when the dispatch algorithm doesn't discriminate? Turns out men just drive a little faster in the aggregate so they made iirc around 3% more money.

Not sure if this is the study but this looks like a good study where they found it was 7% when the study was done.

https://economics.uchicago.edu/news/study-finds-gender-pay-g...

Yep that was it, an even bigger gap than I remembered. Thanks for linking it.

I think the problem is a general one about drivers, not just ride-sharers. I live in a fairly busy area and I am beset by aggressive drivers any time I need to cross a busy road. So many drivers simply ignore pedestrians by default. Not that many of them have Uber or Lyft signs in the window, if anything commercial drivers tend to be a bit more careful in my experience because the downside risk is being unable to work any driving job.

About half of commercial drivers is my conclusion. (though I'm not collecting statistically valid data) Just judging by the number of commercial vehicles who drive into the crosswalk I use often.

Good point: Part of Waymo's safety stats comes from settings that are probably tuned right now in favor of safety stats even if it means a longer or less-profitable ride. It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late.

So a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.

>a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.

no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.

> they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point

For now, yes. My point is that there's very often big gap between "how safely does it work in a lab when the people running it are trying to play up its safety" versus "how safely will X actually work once we start using it everywhere."

Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well!

If we want self-driving cars to retain the same safety later, there needs to be something which prevents humans from flicking the safety-versus-speed dial a little bit over and over in order to make quarterly earnings projections.

> Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well

But they aren’t. These are. Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not.

> But they [manual vehicles] aren’t [being operated by a corporation with a very strong incentive to publicly demonstrate safety]. These [automated vehicles] are.

Uh, yes, you're kinda repeating my thesis, and two copies don't cancel each other out.

> Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not.

I don't understand what you're trying to convey with this tautology.

_________

Imagine two fleets of cars/planes/whatever with utterly identical equipment and expertise. The only difference is that for one of them, the management is being pressured by politicians to demonstrate a high degree of safety.

For that scenario, wouldn't you agree that the better-safety comes from temporary external cause? And also agree that the better-safety is unlikely to persist long after the incentive disappears?

[TLDR] Some portion of Waymo's safety-stats are due to the investor/regulatory context in which it currently operates, rather than the underlying technology; the effects of that portion will not be permanent; this should affect how we do comparisons.

> Imagine

We don’t need to. I could also imagine every human driver is always drunk. But those are suppositions. You’re comparing actual and hypothetical risks.

Isaac Newton: "Did you see that apple fall? Now imagine that both an elephant and a feather were to begin falling at the same moment, in a place where the atmosphere was--"

Your ancestor: "No, we don't need to. I could also imagine them underwater. Those are suppositions. You're comparing actual and hypothetical falling."

*headdesk*

____

How about this: Which parts of the final TLDR do you disagree with?

I disagree that "the effects of that portion will not be permanent". The safety level can be set to whatever is desired by governments, since governments control how much liability Waymo has. We haven't seen cars get less safe, we've seen governments force car manufacturers to make them more safe. (As well as institute seatbelt requirements, speeding cameras, etc.) I expect the same to happen with self-driving tech. The benefits to driving more aggressively are also likely to be pretty small to the company - I don't think I've ever been in a Waymo ride that's spent more than a minute waiting for pedestrians. So even if they were twice as aggressive, that's saving 30 seconds per ride. Probably not going to have a huge impact on the bottom line.

Also, if you want to include the speculation that they'll make their cars drive more aggressively, you should also include the speculation that the technology will become better and the driving tech will become even safer than they are now.

Ultra Safe Even if it's Slower Chauffeur company doesn't exist and doesn't have data that can be compared. This is a comparison against the thing Waymo is actually replacing.

> It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late.

Good. I don't want my kid who's crossing an intersection to be endangered by an Uber driver that you paid $30 to go extra fast. Nothing like externalizing your poor planning skills onto others.

I may be out-of-date here, but I had thought the accelerometers in the phone detected if drivers were too jerky in the movements of the car and that the drivers would be informed of poor service

DoorDash (so food not people) will give you a report for hard braking / acceleration but it doesn't actually affect anything afaict.

[dead]

Literally riding in a Waymo right now in Los Angeles.

IMO they already won. The amount of stupid things you see people do here while driving is astonishing, so many people are not paying attention and looking at their phones.

I used an Uber on the way here and the car was dirtier while the service was identical (silent ride, got me where I needed to go.)

I’ve also been stuck in a Waymo that couldn’t figure out its way around parked buses, so they have edge cases to improve. But man does it feel like I’m living in the future…

> I used an Uber on the way here and the car was dirtier

To be fair, the fact that Waymos are fancy clean Jaguars is kind of ancillary to the main technology. The tech is currently expensive, so they are targeting the luxury market, which you can also get on Uber if you select a black car or whatever. The people willing to pay for that are less likely to make messes, and the drivers put more effort into frequent cleanings.

Once the tech becomes cheap, expect the car quality and cleanliness to go down. Robocars do have some intrinsic advantages in that it's easier to set up a standard daily cleaning process, but they will still accumulate more garbage and stains when they are used by a broader cross section of the population and only cleaned during charging to reduce costs. (Of course, cheaper and more widely accessible tech is good for everyone; if you want a immaculate leather seats cleaned three times a day, you'll generally be able to pay for it.)

I don't think the Jaguars are particularly spacious or nice. They just got a good deal on the platform. If anything, given the commodity nature of vehicles I'd expect car quality to improve.

Cleanliness doesn't seem that related to how expensive the tech is either - if anything it would only go down if it ceased to affect willingness to pay. As it stands, clean cars are important to their customers. If usage increases, cleaning can ostensibly increase too, no?

YMMV but for me Waymo is usually significantly cheaper than Uber Black and more comparable to UberX (within a few bucks before taking tip into consideration)

Yea, but I strongly suspect the current Waymo price is much higher than their operating costs. I don't think we should infer to much from the price they are charging.

A quarter of the ubers I get now absolutely reek of cigarettes. It has been mostly eastern european immigrants ridesharing as of late in my experience.

White people smoke, too, in my experience.

What is 1000% better about Waymo than rideshares is the liveried fleet vehicles.

Regular taxis around here are also liveried fleet vehicles. Especially the very large providers: if I summon a taxi cab, I know for sure its make and model, and its paint job will clearly indicate it's on-duty as a taxi cab. You don't understand how incredibly important this is sometimes.

For the simple yet panic-inducing task of strapping on my seat belt: I can do it in seconds with a liveried vehicle, because I know exactly what to expect. In a rideshare like an Uber, every time a car arrives, it is a new make, new model (I swear to god what the fuck is a "Polestar"???) and the owner might have wrapped on some crazy aftermarket seat covers, and finding the seat belt and its mating latch is a huge drama. I've taken to leaving the passenger seat open, until I can get the belt safely latched, because otherwise the driver will promptly take off, and panic will increase 3x as the vehicle is moving and I can't find the seat belt.

Other than that, the liveried vehicles are easier to maintain; they're easier to keep clean; they're much better for brand recognition. Hallelujah for Waymo!

Polestar is Volvo, inventor of the three point seat belt.

I considered getting a Waymo once in LA but I found that since it doesn't go on highways, it is incredibly slow, and cost $60 to spend the same 1 hour as riding the E line for my trip. I ended up riding the E line.

Just last week, I was able to walk to the E-line in daylight; E-line to downtown; E-line back; and take Waymo at night home. It can be useful for a "last mile" scenario.

Yeah the human drivers in socal are really choosy at night. Many a times I’ve waited 20 minutes for a ride because I was not in a choice neighborhood to deadhead rides I guess.

I found I can't rely on it too much. Rain and a momentary (2-second) power blackout and suddenly my pickup in 3 minutes is cancelled and they're sending me a human driver who's 20 minutes away. Wonder what happens if the blackout occurs during the ride

Was genuinely impressed when I took my first Waymo, not only for comfort, but the small microdecisions it made as a driver. As a person whose lost a parent to a sleepy driver, and a victim to 2 texting drivers, I welcome AI driving revolution.

Sorry for your loss. I hope we get road deaths to 0.

Anecdotally, as someone who bikes a lot in SF, Waymo's are a lot safer than human drivers simply because they follow the letter of traffic laws. Stopping at stop signs, waiting for pedestrians to clear the box, following the posted speed limits, etc.

Just following the letter of the law is so huge. Even people who think they're being nice by doing something out of the ordinary make the situation so much more dangerous because now you don't know what's going to happen. Even if they weren't great drivers, the consistency makes so much of a difference.

Oof yes. People who stop when they have the right of way and try to wave other drivers to go first just end up slowing everybody down.

There's some nuance to it. You're first at a light and a semi across from you is trying to take a left, the right thing to do is to wave him through rather than mat it when it turns green. You don't stop a line of traffic to be nice to someone who can take their own damn turn. As with everything else, people who don't Get It(TM) ruin it for everyone.

I was just on a business trip to San Francisco for a few days, and I observed the near opposite of this from the Waymo fleet in SoMa:

* Waymo vehicle creeping into the pedestrian crosswalk (while the pedestrians had right of way to cross), which caused someone to have to walk around the car into the intersection ahead of the Waymo.

* Waymo vehicle entering a dedicated bike lane and practically tailgating the bicyclist that was ahead of it.

These might be safer than human drivers in aggregate and normalized by kilometer driven, but they drive like humans — greedily and non-defensively. I wouldn't want one these anywhere near a high-pedestrian traffic area ever, and I feel the same about human-driven cars, too.

> * Waymo vehicle entering a dedicated bike lane.

In California, California Vehicle Code § 21209(a)(3) expressly permits a motor vehicle to enter a bicycle lane “to prepare for a turn within a distance of 200 feet from the intersection” -- among other cases. (The vehicle must yield to cyclists in the lane.)

The vehicle code not only permits cars to enter the bike lane prior to a turn, it requires them to do so (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....). My brother failed his first driving test because he didn’t know that he had to enter a bike lane on the left side of Fell St right outside the DMV (back before they separated the bike lane).

I hope that means yield to cyclists ahead of them. To me the whole point of getting in the bike lane is to avoid cases where the cyclist going straight is in a blind spot during the car's right turn. As a cyclist I'll sometimes get into the car lane at intersections to make sure I'm seen. seems like the car being required to let the bike behind them go straight is exactly what you'd want to avoid

Merging into the bike lane before turning right is safer for cyclists. Drivers are supposed to do shoulder checks when changing lanes (I mean they're also supposed to do them when turning but you know) so they likely won't hit a cyclist when merging into the lane.

Once the car is in the bike lane, any bike going straight is forced to remain safely behind the car until the car completes its turn.

> I wouldn't want one these anywhere near a high-pedestrian traffic area ever, and I feel the same about human-driven cars, too.

Much of San Francisco is a "a high-pedestrian traffic area" and Waymos operate in those areas constantly and more or less flawlessly. As someone who lived carless in SF for nearly 15 years, I see nothing but upside from more Waymos and less human drivers on those busy streets.

Note that you have to enter a painted bike lane before turning, because it's safer to do it that way rather than crossing the bike lane right at the turn.

I know it can seem discourteous to cyclists, but it really is the smarter way.

Neither of the examples you cite strike me as particularly dangerous nor even illegal. The pedestrians were given the right of way. And entering bike lanes is fine for crossing or short distances where merited unless grade separated.

A vehicle that becomes blocked in a crosswalk is unsafe for pedestrians who want to use that crosswalk if it forces the pedestrians to walk around the blocking vehicle. There are crosswalks in SoMa that provide for 45 seconds or more of crossing time. A Waymo that enters one of these crosswalks after 15 seconds into the 45 seconds allocation blocks the crosswalk for the remainder of the 30 seconds. This presents an unsafe situation for all existing and future pedestrians (e.g., a pedestrian who inadvertently steps into the intersection while trying to go around the blocking vehicle).

We also know that in North America that the municipal services skimp on grade separation for bike lanes for budget and political reasons. I did bike in San Francisco when I lived there, and these non-shared colored lanes never ever felt safe.

I can guarantee that if you leave your North American context for a couple of years and come back to it you'll find CA Vehicle Code § 21453 unsatisfactory.

I totally agree that grade-separated bike and pedestrian lanes would be better. What I’m arguing against is that this behaviour by Waymo is less safe than San Francisco’s human drivers given the rules as they are.

Don't think for a minute I want human drivers anywhere near bicyclists or pedestrians or assume they are anywhere better for general-purpose driving. Human drivers are awful, but I'd posit the behavior of these automated vehicles isn't much better toward making a welcoming road environment as they are programmed. The laws — particularly for California and what is treated as standard in North America — don't help matters at all.

This is great and there’s another area of influence that I’ve heard other traffic engineers discuss: platoon pacing. A platoon is the word that traffic engineers give to a group of cars traveling together. A platoon is most explicitly visible on a corridor with signals timed for a green wave, but occurs in many other contexts.

Human drivers often race when in a platoon— not even on purpose it’s just an instinct to go as fast or faster than other cars which has a feedback effect to increase platoon speed.

Waymos, following the exact speed limit, don’t do this. On 1 lane streets they literally set the platoon pace to the legal speed limit.

The effect of this is hard to study and quantify but it’s a real and positive impact of self driving cars on city streets. Haven’t seen research on this topic yet.

This also came up recently in a thread about speed governors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812856 Just a few governor-equipped vehicles (e.g. from public fleets or prior speeding offenders) can reduce speeding on the whole road.

On most roads, speeding isn’t a safety issue and shouldn’t be discouraged, as road throughput is important. Speed limits are usually set too low due to standardized inflexible policies or desire for revenue.

On some roads, however, it is a massive safety issue, and everyone is driving unsafely because the road is designed badly for its intended purpose. (So-called “stroads” are the canonical example.)

Yeah and we should definitely leave deciding the appropriate speed to the drivers. Because, uh, throughput is important, got it. Is safety important? Who knows, but throughput definitely is!

That is what happens now. Most drivers do not cause accidents from speed most of the time. This is a red herring.

If you are going slower you can make up for missing details, missing a brake signal, missing a pedestrian.

Speed is the underlying reason accidents happen. No one is creeping at 2 MPH and just running into things, they have time to stop.

This doesn't even take into consideration that speed results in significantly larger impact (and thus damage to passengers, environment, and vehicles)

Speed is always a contributing cause to a collision. It's pretty simple to understand, if colliding parties are going slower, they would have more time to prevent collision.

It’s an issue for everyone not in a car

The above comment is getting downvoted, and I suspect it's due to a misunderstanding of their intent. Yes, high speeds can make collisions (especially, as another commenter points out, to pedestrians and cyclists) more dangerous. However, just as human drivers subconsciously speed up when part of a group of cars, they are not often conscious of the environmental queues informing the speed at which they drive. Given the poster's allusion to 'stroads', I suspect that they're in favor of traffic engineering patterns that encourage speed reduction based on safe context queues without solely relying on an unenforced and often unobeyed traffic speed.

Consider this video on Dutch traffic calming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA.

Lane narrowing, raised walkways, curves in the road (chicanes), etc. are all environmental queues that enforce safe traffic speed based on context, without relying on conscious human compliance.

I would expect "most roads" to be comprised of residential roads, and I find it hard to believe speeding on those roads is not a safety issue.

The speed limits on most residential roads are too low from a variety of factors, including tradition, policies, and desire for revenue or to generate PC to pull over drivers.

You don't drive 25 on residential roads, because you know this to be true. Neither do I, nor does anyone else.

Patently untrue. I do, sometimes slower. My kids’ friends live on these roads.

Yeah, well, I don't/can't drive, so maybe my perspective as a pedestrian is just different :)

Do you have any sources to backup your claims that that's too fast and is more unsafe than speeding?

I saw a Waymo stop at a crosswalk last night in the dark where there was a person standing there waiting to cross that I don't think I would have seen. The person was not standing out in the road, they were standing there patiently waiting to make sure the car actually stopped since it was dark. I was really impressed! I don't think I'm a reckless or impatient driver, but I think the Waymo's are probably better at driving than I am. I know I prefer the Waymos to the human drivers I typically see on the road.

For those that are interested, our Safety Research team also makes the underlying data available for download:

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/#downloads

(I don't work on that team, but I've noticed a few comments that would be better served with their own analysis on top of the available data)

For what it's worth, I have exclusively used Waymo in SF ever since my last Uber driver was smoking weed while driving. I just don't want to deal with the human variable anymore.

Waymo is a nice guy, he will definitely share his weed with you

We don't have waymo in France and I am not sure it wrote work well.

Streets in France are full of entitled people. Drivers, bikers (both bikes with pedals and the ones with an engine) and pedestrians.

Everyone thinks that they have all the rights but ultimately some kind of order emerges from the chaos.

Pedestrians will walk on red lights, but are also careful.

Cars will park anywhere, but usually in a way that is just really frustrating but not blocking.

Bikes will slalom, but to a point.

This does not always work, but it is so much driven by culture that somehow we are statistically alive when moving outside.

Personally I hate it with all my heart. I dream of the dystopian world where everyone will follow the rules.

would you like to trade your french citizenship for my american citizenship?

How do AI cars fare with those instinctual "decide which way to swerve in a split-second" scenarios that come up maybe once every 10-20 years over the course of a driver's history?? It's happened to me about 2-3 times and I've always made the "(assumedly) correct" split second swerve decision. Wondering if that is a "human/instinctual" skill and if AI cars do just as well or better, or perhaps not as good? I don't have any evidence backing this but my gut tells me these scenarios are something that a human driver would handle better than AI.

They test extensively on those types of scenarios. See: https://waymo.com/research/collision-avoidance-testing-of-th...

Blog post for the paper: https://waymo.com/blog/2022/12/waymos-collision-avoidance-te...

> those instinctual "decide which way to swerve in a split-second" scenarios that come up maybe once every 10-20 years

The correct answer is almost always to hit the brakes. Not to swerve. And Waymo will hit the brakes earlier than you or me.

There was a notable case recently where the Waymo did swerve, to avoid someone who had fallen off a scooter into their lane (video here): https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1hfvb5o/waymo_visual...

Hard to say for certain, but it looks like just braking probably wouldn't have avoided the collision.

I’d argue that’s more straightforward collision avoidance than a swerve since the rider was to the side when Waymo turned. As such, there wasn’t a choice between braking and swerving. One had to do both, and there was no real optionality as to whether to swerve right or left.

I disagree. High percentage of these scenarios are at speeds and scenarios where hitting the brake would not prevent a collision and a quick swerve is the only option to not collide. Obviously your quick swerve could cause another collision so I guess it's which decision on average causes the least harm/death? I agree though that most people's extinct would be to brake. Mine never has been though.

> quick swerve could cause another collision so I guess it's which decision on average causes the least harm/death? I agree though that most people's extinct would be to brake

If it’s 1989 and you don’t have ABS, yes. Otherwise, swerving is a gamble [1]. If you don’t have time to stop, you physically don’t have time to evaluate and choose a right or left swerve. You’re trading the certainty of a head-on collision with whatever is in front of you against the uncertainty of what’s to the right or left, compounded with all the fun that comes with a side/tumbling collision and increased risk of not hitting a car.

[1] https://peterhancock.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/201...

If you cannot brake you are following too close. I know everyone else does it (except 3/4ths of semis!), but you can be the one who maintains a long following distance and thus can stop in time. Every time setup the long following distance 5 cars jump into the gap - but then the gap remains as no more do.

what about when there's an idiot slightly ahead and in the next lane who decides to randomly swerve into my lane?

do you also maintain a long following distance when there's a car right next to you in the next lane? I try to, because I don't want to stay in someone's blind spot, but sometimes it's not really possible to fall back.

> what about when there's an idiot slightly ahead and in the next lane who decides to randomly swerve into my lane?

You're safer hitting them head on while aggressively braking than attempting a microsecond swerve.

Is your nickname anti-swerve or something? Have you never swerved even once in your life?

I watch a lot of car accident videos and I've seen that happen exactly once.

Perhaps you mean the far more common scenario when the car in the next lane simply decides to merge into yours? Nothing about that is random[1] and the response in 90%+ of cases is just to let off the gas for a few seconds. That's it.

[1]: In most cases, it's because your lane is open and theirs is about to be backed up. You'd want to switch lanes too, so it really shouldn't be surprising they do.

The rest are mostly people realizing at the last second they want to turn right/left at an upcoming intersection (or highway exit). Again, predictable.

Because all the "person doesn't look, pulls out into road, other traffic swerves around them" don't cause crashes and don't get posted to your accident feed.

FFS, this is like selection bias 101.

I watch accident videos, not crash videos. Pulling out/switching lanes while not looking is like 40% of the clips in the videos. It's a common, predictable driving scenario, nothing to get one's panties in a bunch about.

Here's a classic example with an explanation: https://youtu.be/kTczmnkz824?t=882. No experienced driver should be surprised here.

"what about when there's an idiot slightly ahead and in the next lane who decides to randomly swerve into my lane?"

Exactly, this is the situation I am mostly talking about.

Right, so you've created a dangerous scenario by speeding and by the direct consequences of your actions you're now forced to execute a dangerous manoeuvre of swerving. Maybe, just maybe, the solution is not speeding.

> I agree though that most people's extinct would be to brake. Mine never has been though.

...

You operate a motorized vehicle and your first instinct when seeing anything dangerous ahead is to do something other than braking?

I would be interested to see waymo adapt to the snow and ice, where “hit the breaks” Is the wrong answer, and the correct is to drop the car into neutral. I believe waymo will figure this out in time, nut SF and Phoenix are idealized driving conditions.

The correct answer is to not drive so fast (or at all) in conditions where braking might lead to a skid. I'd expect an autonomous vehicle to be rather better at this given they can hook directly into the electronic stability control system in a vehicle and constantly monitor temperature (and ideally measure upcoming road temperature).

Also, shifting into neutral is really only a thing for old vehicles without ABS/ESC. In modern vehicles, you let your foot off the gas slowly.

I am in upstate new york, unless the situation is extremely bad, just dont drive isnt a valid answer for 5 months a year.

> snow and ice, where “hit the breaks” Is the wrong answer, and the correct is to drop the car into neutral

This is only true with 2WD and no automatic stability control, and if you’re going down a slope. For every other case, ABs will out perform in snow and gentle braking will evenly distribute traction force with stability control doing microsecond evaluations.

You still need to be in neutral as the ABS/stability control doesn't control the engine. 2wd makes no real difference other than rear wheel drive tends to be the most susceptible to this issue, but any wheel can lose traction.

> stability control doesn't control the engine

Stability control is tied to power in all modern systems.

It is also the case that Waymo will be dramatically better than all humans in ice because it is going to take the aviation approach and stay in the depot, rather than fooling itself into believing it is competent at driving on ice.

I spend about 5 months every year driving in snow and ice - this is the first I'm hearing about dropping it into neutral. Can you elaborate on when that would be appropriate? Obviously you shouldn't be slamming on the brakes, but they do work fine in snow and ice. I don't see how rolling into things while not in gear is an improvement?

I think the OP means in a manual transmission. Auto will decouple at low speeds / engine braking won't be as severe. In a manual car, in 1st gear, I could possibly see it.

As someone who grew up BEFORE ABS, drove in the winter (in Canada), including first winter owning my own car with sport tires because I couldn't afford winter tires, spun / slid a few times even with top-of-the-line winter tires, etc.

ABS is a game changer in the snow. I used to go to an empty parking lot every winter during early snowfalls to play around and skid, start/stop, etc. Even EARLY ABS ('94 VW) means that 98% of the time (IMHO), the answer even in snow/ice is "slam on the brakes". Sure, you might have a few percent longer stopping distance than an expert who can do threshold braking - are you an expert? And the fact that you don't lose control of the steering is a huge advantage.

I remember being taught the neutral trick for emergency braking back in the 90's, and it had nothing to do with traction in poor conditions. It was simply to remove any engine power that might extend your braking distance. It's definitely bad advice in any modern car.

They mean go into neutral and lightly brake. In a 2WD car, the braking force applies more strongly to the non-powered wheels. Since those were traditionally the back wheels, this meant when going down a hill the front wheels would have more traction. Those are also your steering wheels, which means them locking up is bad. Again, this is the sort of advice that is germane in highly restricted environments which become folk knowledge and later mis applied by humans in ways that reduce safety.

(You also only get into this scenario when your stopping distance is shorter than your reaction time and perception length. Something automated drivers can manage better than humans.)

I think it's often about when you're on rural single lane roads and perfectly bad ice/snow/slush conditions where you need to keep your speed very low, and sometimes even very moderate braking can cause your vehicle to veer off the road and into a snow bank, not necessarily the need to avoid something in front of you

When you let off the throttle your wheels start driving the engine and slowing you down. In snow/ice that engine breaking alone can be more braking force than is safe and so you go into a skid. Shifting to neutral removes engine braking and allows for more controlled slowing down.

When it's those conditions though I just use a light touch on the throttle to make wheel speed match ground speed, a lot of easier than trying to shift in and out of neutral.

If you are in a situation where your car is sliding, like down a slick hill. You dont hit breaks, you put the car into neutral and steer into the way your car is sliding to try and keep the car on the road.

If hit the brakes is the wrong answer, you are driving too fast.

Almost all of these tricky situations are avoided by slowing down and giving more space around hazards.

Far quicker and with better situational awareness probably.

Those instinctual human responses can be wrong/misguided as well and can have pretty serious ripple effects (e.g. most chain collisions after somebody panics and steps on the breaks). And even when those instincts work correctly, they rely on driver focus and attention; which to put it mildly is not very reliable. The lack of that is a well known root cause of many accidents. People get tired, distracted, etc. or become otherwise unfocused from driving safely. And of course some drivers are simply not that competent, barely know traffic rules or how to drive safely. The barrier for getting a drivers license is pretty low. And all that is before you consider road rage, drunk drivers, elderly drivers with cognitive and visual impairments, and all the other people who really shouldn't be driving a car.

If you rank AIs against most drivers, they probably hit the top percentile in terms of safety and consistency. Even if you are in that percentile (and most drivers would likely overestimate their abilities), most human drivers around you aren't and never will be.

Traffic deaths in the U.S. are staggering — annually far exceeding the fatalities of most U.S. military conflicts since World War II, including the peak years of the Vietnam war. It's hard to do worse than that for AI drivers. The status quo isn't very safe. Most of that is human instincts not working as advertised. People really suck at driving.

- Humans have awful reaction times, so the "AI" cars should fare 10-100x better. "split-second" is laughably slow to a computer.

- How seldom these scenarios come up for human drivers is a huge disadvantage for them. For self driving, it doesn't matter, the cars' reactions can be simulated in arbitrary scenarios as many times as needed, so even the rarest of scenarios can be ensured to be handled properly.

- There's nothing special about the decision to swerve vs to say, brake. I'd expect self driving cars to not need to swerve nearly as often because the need to swerve probably only ever exists due to excessive speed and/or poor following distance to the vehicle ahead.

> It's happened to me about 2-3 times and I've always made the "(assumedly) correct" split second swerve decision.

Easy question: Did you make that decision with full awareness that you would not end up in a collision path with another vehicle by swerving? Oops.

Even if you did, how many drivers do you think would "instinctively" swerve into another lane and get hit by an oncoming vehicle because they do not maintain constant situational awareness around their vehicle? The majority, at least.

Probably better? 'Who' can process more data faster is likely impossible to answer, but (e.g.) Waymo can train on those scenarios and have way more 'experience' than any individual driver who's seen it once every 10-20 years of their driving career.

Yeah it's interesting, these scenarios are generally at high speeds on an interstate highway, and generally involve some level of predicting what the villain driver is going to do (split second prediction though mind you, it all happens in the blink of an eye), and sometimes the right thing to do is to swerve (if no one is adjacent in surrounding lanes) whilst either not using the brake at all or almost no braking. Basically avoid the brake and do your quick swerve after you've confirmed there is no one in the left/right adjacent lane or close enough behind you. Once again this all happens in the blink of an eye. Perhaps AI would be better? I'm not complete sold though..

One big difference in favor of the software is your "after you've confirmed there is no one in the left/right adjacent lane or close enough behind you." The car has been looking in every direction the whole ride. The car already knows what there is to know about all the neighbours. A huge advantage over the human driver.

I feel also that the car having a far better experience of its kinematics / dynamics / features is also a huge advantage - see the good old drifting parallel parking videos.

After that there is the concern about computing reaction time. Can it get stuck hesitating? Clearly the cars hesitate a lot in generally safe places. But we have seen some videos already of a Waymo very smoothly dodging someone running out from in between cars (they were already tracked), and someone mentioned a scooter incident. Hopefully we'll see more videos of emergency responses.

Another comment mentions "r/waymo or r/selfdrivingcars for lots of videos of Waymos avoiding objects."

I'm ok if the AI car makes an incorrect decision once every 10 years.

It's just ape hubris that makes you think these were the right swerves instead of just dumb luck that you did not flip over the center barrier head-on into a school bus.

The Waymo doesn't have to swerve as much as a human because it can see a mile away and never blinks, and it knows that the right thing to do in every swerve-worthy situation is to slam on the brakes to take the energy out of the event. It also drives around with the brakes pre-pressurized because it isn't trying to compensate for the fact that its control system is partially made of meat. Anyway you can go to r/waymo or r/selfdrivingcars for lots of videos of Waymos avoiding objects.

In Holland we have this saying (based on an old commercial): "We from WC Duck recommend... WC Duck". (Which is a toilet cleaning product)

It was a funny ad at the time. Unfortunately based in reality more and more these days.

I'm quick to discount reports that are "by the industry for the industry", but few industries are as transparent as self-driving taxis due to the strict operating laws in most jurisdictions.

This is almost all research though. (Medical) doctors aren't in the habit of doing longitudinal studies on procedures they don't do because they don't believe in them. (I mean, for one thing, where would they get the data!)

But that's why you have peer review, further studies from different authors perhaps on competing methods that point out some flaws in your approach, etc.

Obviously the study should be taken with a grain of salt, given the source, but at least it is a study with actual data, that's been peer reviewed.

Waymo is part of my investment thesis as to why Google is undervalued

Public transport is undervalued

So, what’s it gonna take for Waymo to start selling retrofit kits for existing cars?

If a $10,000 investment reduces the chances of a serious accident by 90%, the corresponding reduction in insurance rates might have a payoff within a few years. Especially if adoption starts to push rates up for customers who don’t automate. I can’t take a taxi everywhere, but I’d sure like it if my car drove me everywhere and did a better job than me at it too.

They did just sign a deal with Toyota[1]. Probably no retorfitting, but looks like they at least intend to license the tech.

[1]https://waymo.com/blog/2025/04/waymo-and-toyota-outline-stra...

I had another post in this thread with the same information, but here again is the current Waymo sensor suite...

>With 13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar, and an array of external audio receivers (EARs), our new sensor suite is optimized for greater performance...it provides the Waymo Driver with overlapping fields of view, all around the vehicle, up to 500 meters away, day and night, and in a range of weather conditions.

They need to work everywhere. How do they do in snow/ice (humans do really bad here - but where I live it happens often enough that we often cannot stay home or we would spend weeks in the house)

Don't get my wrong, I'm hoping it is soon. However they have a lot of work left.

Perhaps, in the same way you may not need an aircoditioner (due to your location), it would probably not be the best for waymo to market itself as 'suitable for all conditions, ymmv, lol'.

It honestly feels like they spend years validating each new platform, e.g. the Zeekr was announced years ago and only recently are they very rarely seen on the streets but only as Waymo Engineering mules. Likewise the transition from the Chrysler Pacifica to the I-Pace took a while. Hopefully they figure something out to scale up to more platforms soon. They announced a partnership with Hyundai a few years ago, also with nothing to show for it.

Of course, safety first, so they should take their time and not rush things...

The zeekr vehicles were heavily affected by changing regulations and tariffs around Chinese made automobiles. The Hyundai vehicles haven't started production yet. They're in an awkward situation because they made a bad prediction about the political direction without a backup plan and it went south right as they were entering production.

Once self driving cars take over and fill the streets with gridlock autonomous traffic, the only way to get around in a city is going to be by bike.

Its great to here their algorithms are good for cyclists, a better solution is to keep investing in infrastructure that separates cyclists completely from cars.

That's great news. I wonder how much insurance rates will go down when autonomous vehicles get popular. Seems like the liability portion could go way down.

It's a 3x effect for insurance agencies: 1) Google/Waymo doesn't buy insurance for their vehicles 2) Waymo vehicles are much less likely to cause accidents 3) Waymo vehicles actively avoid being hit and calm traffic overall

I'm not super familiar with this space, or laws where Waymo is active, what do you mean Google/Waymo don't buy insurance for their vehicles?

Is having insurance not legally required? Do they just pay out when there's an accident where they injure someone?

In many states, including CA, individuals can post a bond instead of carrying insurance. Companies with fleets of vehicles can also self-insure. In both cases the car owner is liable to pay any damages that insurance would normally pay.

Large companies with fleets of vehicles often self-insure.

Interesting!

When I was much younger, I worked for a couple companies that had (what I would consider) large fleets of vehicles, and they all were insured through an insurance company. I guess I just assumed that's how it was. I wasn't aware self-insuring was a possibility. Thanks.

Companies can self insure. That doesn't mean they have to. Your accountant can run the numbers to figure out if it is worth it.

Often self insure means they still pay an insurance company to handle the paperwork, but when there is a claim the company pays it.

While I'm not sure of the specifics for car insurance.

For health care, a lot of large companies technically have say Anthem or whatever but the company pays out all of the claims and it's just administered by Anthem. So you may have seen a similar thing where all claims were handled by say Geico but it's not Geico's pot of money paying out claims.

Self-driving is probably still new enough that insurance companies wouldn't have good actuarial data to properly price the risks, so they'd just have to charge exorbitant rates.

It has been classic lore that Bill Gates couldn't get anyone to insure him after his younger years (see classic mugshot photo used as the silhouette) so he had to self insure. Not sure if completely true but I remember the stories.

The problem is that Waymos can't replace cars (or even Ubers!) since they depend on human oversight and problem-solving. Even at a 20:1 ratio it is not feasible for autonomous vehicles to employ 10m people to account for every American on the road.

This is a very confusing position. Every Uber has full-time 1:1 "oversight". Waymo has a support team that only directs actions (not remote driving) when the vehicle requests. I would be very surprised if the number of Waymo rides that need any intervention at all is greater than 1 in 20.

My point is you're not going to get much more than half[1] of those Uber drivers into a Waymo control center, even if they're facing unemployment. The workers have to come from somewhere. And it has to be somewhat regular hours, surge oversight doesn't make sense.

[1] Edit - I meant 5% not half, I was on the train and very frustrated with these comments. (not yours, though it seems bad faith to say "not remote driving" when I said "problem solving." The problem has always been the 1-5% of driving which truly requires sophisticated intelligence, that's why the oversight is there.)

Every Lyft driver I've spoken to drives because a) they like driving b) they like choosing their own hours and c) they don't want a boss. Telling them to go into an office for an 8 hour shift with a manager is not gonna work, they will find something more appealing. It's a different kind of employee. (I would enjoy that line of work but I would hate to drive for Uber, way too stressful.)

I don't think Waymo needs a significant amount of vehicle support staff now, and will need even less (per vehicle) in the future. The ratio will probably be something like the number of elevator repair people to number of unattended elevators operating smoothly.

I emphasized that Waymo staff does not drive vehicles remotely, because this persists as a common misconception.

The human oversight is mostly to tell off people breaking rules in the cars, not to fix the driving, and is quite easy to automate as they scale.

That might be what human overseers are mostly doing minute-to-minute but it's not why it's necessary. The problem is AI simply does not have the real-world problem solving ability to handle all the minor inconveniences and surprises on the road.

Americans only spend 3% of their time driving, so it's maybe closer to 300k than 10m. Still not scalable at that though so the key will be driving that 20:1 up, which seems very possible given enough time.

If they keep pushing the hours between requests down like I saw on https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-number-of-full..., that might be feasible.

What determines whether 300k is scalable ?

Where does the 20:1 stat come from? Does anyone know how may human interventions Waymo has per trip or per mile? How much human time is needed per intervention? And are the intervention rate and human time increasing or decreasing over time?

Why can't it replace Ubers?

How does oversight handle issue. They are not remote driving, but what are they doing. The more important question is can the car have me (who is already inside it) tell it what to do?

Waymo doesn't say very much, but other self-driving services have been more open. It is things like "the fire truck is at a weird angle and the car didn't know what to do, draw a path where it pulls slightly into an oncoming lane so it can get around." A lot of common sense stuff which is far beyond the reach of AI in 2025.

Those people dont have to be americans though

This does not sound scalable.

i am suspicious of all the anti-human-driver comments and all the dismissal of any concerns about Waymo in the comments here.

I am not convinced that public testing of such services is safe, let alone commercial service. One cannot punish a self driving vehicle in any meaningful sense. Corporate incentives vs the public commons, is a general concern that cannot be sweettalked away.

The metaphors about human drivers recording you also seem like reductio ad absurdum.

puff pieces like this should not be well received on HN or it discredits any pretence at separation of concerns with regards to HN and ycomb.

> i am suspicious of all the anti-human-driver comments [...] I am not convinced that public testing of such services is safe

There are currently over a million fatalities from road traffic crashes every year, being the leading cause of death for the 5-29 year age group[0].

I'd claim that inaction is unacceptably dangerous/deadly here and that, to minimize deaths, we need to be aggressive in trying out and pushing forward potential solutions.

> One cannot punish a self driving vehicle in any meaningful sense.

The goal of punishment for driving offenses is, in my eyes, largely about reducing unsafe behavior - not just to make someone suffer. Fines/incentives for manufacturers and fine-tuning of models based on incident data should fulfill this purpose.

[0]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

Why not just build public transit and reduce car dependency? The technology has been here for decades and decades.

I agree that the US needs to invest far more in public transport.

I don't think that's mutually exclusive with Waymo working on their electric autonomous vehicles, nor that halting Waymo's testing would lead to greater access to public transport. Safer cleaner roads should hopefully even benefit busses, coaches, trams (and bikes) that have to share the road with cars - and the same self-driving technology can likely be adapted for use on public transport vehicles.

China, for instance, has extensive public transport in addition to a fast-growing autonomous vehicle sector. As useful and underutilized as trains are, there will likely still always be a non-negligible portion of transportation that road vehicles are just better suited for, which should be made as safe as possible.

There is also that it seems unfortunately difficult to get financial/political momentum behind building public transport in the US, whereas Waymo's services are something that's already happening and GP is implying should be stopped - which I feel flips the "Why not just" in terms of which is the course of least resistance (but, to be clear, we should definitely still be pushing for public transport).

> One cannot punish a self driving vehicle in any meaningful sense.

One can fine the companies and executives.

> puff pieces like this should not be well received on HN or it discredits any pretence at separation of concerns with regards to HN and ycomb.

Mate... what pretense? Don't ever forget that HN and YC are the same; you'll have a much better time understanding the community.

Can we mention that drivers using Tesla’s FSD are 5x less likely to be in an accident than human drivers?

Or all things Elon bad?

You mean, according to the unbiased Tesla, drivers using Tesla's FSD in the select areas and conditions it's allowed to operate in are 5x less likely to be in an accident than human drivers that operate in all areas and conditions? Sure.

No. Just data from their fleet which is released in a large report. But you’re clearly too biased to think in your own.

This may be true, but paradoxically, the data might be slightly skewed since Tesla's driver monitoring system (which is only active during autopilot) actively rewards drivers who are paying attention.

So is the accident rate lower because people are forced to be more attentive during FSD? Or is it genuinely lower (i.e, if you took out the driver, would there be less accidents)? To be fair, I'd still wager that yes, FSD is probably statistically way better than the average driver.

Maybe some combination of miles per intervention + accident data would give more insights into that.

Yes good point that the human monitoring plays a role. Wouldn’t account for all of that, since humans are more actively monitoring normal cars.

This article has a huge conflict of interest. I would like more independent data.

Seems like the rest of the HN crowd is swooning over Waymo. Nothing but glowing reviews.

As they become the monopolist, like they always do, watch how they’ll run the age old playbook to destroy the market and then hike prices.

I’m not against self-driving cars. I’m against self-driving cars owned by a few megacorps, that will have even control and surveillance capabilities in addition to what’s already in your pocket.

> I’m not against self-driving cars. I’m against self-driving cars owned by a few megacorps

Perfect is the enemy of the good. This sort of technological NIMBYism is, in practice, opposition to self-driving cars and their safety benefits.

a few megacorps cornering an entire market is Not Good

Not even my point and this isn’t about the tech but about the societal context.

>The research finds that, compared to human benchmarks over 56.7 million miles and regardless of who was at fault, the Waymo Driver had [list of better than human stats]

Well considering this sensor package...

>With 13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar, and an array of external audio receivers (EARs), our new sensor suite is optimized for greater performance...it provides the Waymo Driver with overlapping fields of view, all around the vehicle, up to 500 meters away, day and night, and in a range of weather conditions.[0]

...I would hope it is considerably better than humans who are limited to a sensor suite of two cameras and two lower-case ears.

[0] - https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...

I've noticed that nearly ANY criticism here is grayed out.

HN has a credibility problem here.

Why is Waymo waiting so long to roll out more broadly?

Probably because not everywhere has such nice weather.

Well yeah, they stack the deck in their favor. They avoid very hilly roads. They don’t yet go on the freeway. And they don’t get drunk or tired or distracted.

That being said I’d like to see how a typical “good” driver compares vs the average. Someone who doesn’t speed or get duis and gets plenty rest.

source waymo.com???

For cycling and walking in SF, the Waymos are optimal. If there's one at the front of the line at the red light I know I won't be right hooked as I go straight in the bike lane. Very well-behaved. I am so glad they're here. Some concentration of them actually ruin crazy drivers' ability to do damage because they set the speed limit and won't go through reds.

reminder that if waymo type cars replaced human driven cars and cut the deaths to zero. (perhaps a big if)

Then it'd be like finding a cure for cancer, for people aged 0 - 40, who die as much in auto accidents as they do of cancer

Even if they don't cut deaths to zero, they can still make a big difference. Humans are terrible drivers.

A few weeks ago we were in Santa Monica on vacation. This was my first time seeing Waymo vehicles in the wild. We did see one blatantly run a red light, well after the light had changed. Fortunately no car was crossing at the same time. It wasn’t like the sun was somehow obscuring the traffic light at that time. I was surprised it did something so unsafe.

Waymo per their track record I trust and am excited to try / use it once it comes to DC or another city close to DC.

All the other big names that are no longer around... their tech was dangerous and definitely not ready for prime time. Their tech and focus seemed all about making all involved wealthy or wealthier.

They operate in Los Angeles on the city streets in a square between Marina Del Ray and West Hollywood.

They can definitely do better when taking left turns. I've seen situations where Waymo depends on the oncoming drivers to slow down.

It's a bit further than that, the service area now extends to DTLA / Arts District and south toward Inglewood (likely to support LAX soon).

While driving a car, it is possible to do something, even on accident, that can land a person in jail. These crimes do not have the option of paying a fine in lieu of prison time.

A "self-driving" car can cause the same accident but gain advantages over a human driver that the person ultimately responsible is no longer held to the same set of laws.

This seems to undermine foundations of law, placing the owners of those assets into a different legal category from the rest of us.

Currently, penalties for, say, killing someone while driving are already incredibly light.

* Driver whose vehicle struck and killed girl gets $1,200 fine" [1]

* Driver who allegedly struck and killed Staten Island baby charged with $750 fine and 15 days in jail [2]

* Driver who hit Jets assistant coach Greg Knapp won't be charged following his death [3]

[1] https://vancouversun.com/news/driver-whose-vehicle-struck-an...

[2] https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/shannon-cocozza-who-allegedly-...

[3] https://people.com/sports/driver-who-hit-jets-assistant-coac...

These are examples application of law, such as decisions from prosecutors or a judicial system.

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It's a great start, but also shows how driving is not a navigation challenge as much as it is a socialization challenge. If I drove right up to some responders dealing with an emergency and repeatedly refused to stop then I could be in big legal trouble and could end up with fines and possibly an arrest. This has not happened with Waymo vehicles because there is legal ambiguity about who is responsible in such cases. Realistic analysis shows these vehicles have a driving record similar to that of overconfident teens which is worrisome.

what's up with all the waymo sycophantry here? choruses repeating the same claims "its ok for waymo to enter the bike lane" "yeah, waymo is right" "yes, good waymo entering the bike lane because reasons"

this is blatantly obvious and unacceptable.

the site rules prohibit accusations of astroturfing but that is precisely what is going on here.

precisely no sf programmers were convinced, either.

this site had better be concerned with future legitimacy and not being seen as a puppet of specific corps like waymo.

Waymo says Waymo is safe. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/woman-ge...

Tens of thousands of Americas are killed every year in car crashes. The existence of a case or some cases where a self-driving car caused injury has zero value. What matters is the rate of cases per mile driven.

> Tens of thousands of Americas are killed every year in car crashes.

CDC “Underlying Cause of Death” dataset sez https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg

- “Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic” is the 50th leading cause of death at 0.4% of deaths.

- “Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)” is the 108th leading cause of death at 0.2% of deaths.

Was your intent to disprove or back up the claims of parent?

0.4% and 0.2% sound low, but make up for ~110,000 deaths. Spread across a 5 year period does indeed equal “tens of thousands” every year.

My intent was to have some real data. Do you only write comments to persuade others? Form your own opinion, because now you have data to inform one.

The mcdrive is the most dangerous road.

It sounds like you are refuting the parent's claim. But those two categories add up to ~110,000 deaths over a 6 year period, which seems like can be reasonably described as 10000s per year.

But, more importantly, you missed a bunch of relevant categories:

V89.2 (Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic) 80,434

V87.7 (Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)) 29,982

V09.2 (Pedestrian injured in traffic accident involving other and unspecified motor vehicles) 27,934

V03.1 (Pedestrian injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, traffic accident) 15,129

V43.5 (Car occupant injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, driver injured in traffic accident) 9,810

V29.9 (Motorcycle rider [any] injured in unspecified traffic accident) 8,410

V29.4 (Driver injured in collision with other and unspecified motor vehicles in traffic accident) 7,688

V47.5 (Car occupant injured in collision with fixed or stationary object, driver injured in traffic accident) 6,379

V49.9 (Car occupant [any] injured in unspecified traffic accident) 6,349

V23.4 (Motorcycle rider injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, driver injured in traffic accident) 5,851

V43.6 (Car occupant injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, passenger injured in traffic accident) 3,728

V27.4 (Motorcycle rider injured in collision with fixed or stationary object, driver injured in traffic accident) 3,504

For which any such system must be assumed unsafe until proven safe and the burden of proof lies with the manufacturer to present sound, robust, transparent, third-party audited evidence.

You do not get to counter-argue: “What matters is the rate of cases per mile driven” without actually presenting that number with supporting evidence. Otherwise the only sound conclusion is the default presumption of non-safety.

In the case of Waymo, we have some tentative supporting evidence from this and other studies Waymo has run. However, that is still insufficient, even ignoring the lack of audits by non-conflicted parties, to strongly conclude Waymo is safer than a human. The evidence is promising, but it is only prudent to wait for further confirmation.

In contrast, Cruise was almost definitely not safer than a human driver.

In 2023, Cruise ADS cars drove 2,064,728 miles [1] and were involved in, by my count, 29 collisions with 5 causing injury [2], namely incidents on 2023-05-04, 2023-05-21, 2023-06-09, 2023-08-18, 2023-10-02.

That is ~72,000 miles per collision and ~400,000 miles per injury in contrast to the national human averages of ~500,000 per reported collision (which is non-comparable) and ~1,270,000 miles per injury (which is comparable). So, absent a more detailed analysis, Cruise ADS cars were ~3x MORE likely to be involved in a injury causing collision per mile.

Details and evidence matter in these discussions. Blanket rhetoric and optimism is not prudent when discussing new safety-critical systems.

[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/02/03/2023-disen...

[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. By all accounts, Waymo operates more safely than a human driver. It's operated tens of millions of rides in several major cities over several years, hence all the useful data. There is absolutely nothing stopping the continued expansion of self-driving vehicles, Waymo or otherwise, and there are myriad factors moving it forward rapidly.

I think I was pretty clear.

> You do not get to counter-argue: “What matters is the rate of cases per mile driven” without actually presenting that number with supporting evidence. Otherwise the only sound conclusion is the default presumption of non-safety.

I then pointed out how Waymo does present such evidence. But, if you applied that argument to Cruise you would be wrong. That demonstrates how that argument (when not presenting the numbers) can be used to support both good and bad and is thus a bad argument.

The correct argument when somebody points to anecdotes of bad outcomes is to present statistically sound data of good outcomes, not argue they did not present statistically sound data of bad outcomes thus you get to assume it is good.

> The burden of proof lies with the manufacturer to present sound, robust, transparent, third-party audited evidence.

Waymo releases its safety data: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/, which is backed by public reporting requirements.

To say that it is wholly insufficient to make any safety claims on publicly driven 50M miles, is ridiculous. At the very least, it appears sound, robust and transparent, and able to be validated.

> https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo

Is Swiss Re a valid third party? They also address peer-reviewed and external validation in the above safety impact page.

I can understand being skeptical because of Cruise and especially claims made by Telsa, but there is a preponderance of supporting data for Waymo.

Given all of this evidence, you would still conclude Waymo is unsafe?

I think I was quite clear on my position.

> In the case of Waymo, we have some tentative supporting evidence from this and other studies Waymo has run. However, that is still insufficient, even ignoring the lack of audits by non-conflicted parties, to strongly conclude Waymo is safer than a human. The evidence is promising, but it is only prudent to wait for further confirmation.

You are not making a distinction between concluding unsafe and not being able to conclude safe. It is standard practice to not presume safety and that positive evidence of safety must be presented. Failure to demonstrate statistically sound evidence of danger is not proof of safety. Failure to disprove X is not proof of X. This is a very important point to avoid fallacious conclusions on these matters.

To discuss your specific points. Yes, the data is promising, but it is insufficient.

Traffic fatalities occur on the order of 1 per 60-80 million miles. Waymo has yet to reach even one expected traffic fatality yet. They appear to be on track to doing better, but there is not enough data yet.

The reports Waymo present are authored by Waymo. Even the Swiss Re study is in cooperation with Swiss Re, not a independent study by Swiss Re. The studies are fairly transparent, they point to various public datasets, there are fairly extensive public reporting requirements, and Waymo has not demonstrated clear malfeasance, so we can tentatively assume they are “honest”. But we have plenty of examples of bad actors such as Cruise, cigarette companies, VW , etc. who have done end-runs around these types of basic safeguards.

Waymo operational domain is not equivalent to standard human operational domain. They attempt to account for this in their studies, but it is a fairly complex topic with poor public datasets (which is why they cooperated with Swiss Re) so the correctness of their analysis has not been borne out yet. When Waymo incorporates freeways into their public offerings this will enable a less complicated analysis which would lend greater confidence to their conclusions.

Waymo is still in “testing”. As their processes appear to be good, we should assume that their testing procedures are safer than should be expected out of actual deployment or verification procedures. That is not a negative statement. In fact, it would be problematic if their “testing” procedures were less or even equal in safety to their deployment procedures. That is just how testing is. You can and must apply more scrutiny to incomplete systems in use and prevent increased risks especially while under scrutiny otherwise you are almost certainly going to be worse off in deployment where there is less scrutiny. We have yet to see how this will translate out to deployment, so we will need to wait and see if safety while under test will appropriately apply to safety while in release. This is analogous to improved outcomes for patients in medical studies even if they are given the placebo because they just get more care in general while in the study.

Anyways, Waymo appears to be doing as well and honestly as can be determined by a third party observer. I am optimistic about their data and outcomes, but it is only prudent to avoid over-optimism in safety-critical systems and not accept lazy evidence or arguments. High standards are the only way to safety.

Assertion: "50M miles shows that Waymo is safer than humans".

Counter-point: "That's false because Cruise had an accident for which they were at fault".

OP: "The existence of a case or some cases where a self-driving car caused injury has zero value. What matters is the rate of cases per mile driven."

You: "You do not get to counter-argue."

Yes, they do. OP's point is valid. One can't refute the original assertion by citing one accident by another company. It's a logical fallacy (statistically speaking), and a straw-man (Waymo can't be safe, because other self-driving cars have been found at fault). The validity of the original claim has nothing to do with an invalid counter-claim.

> However, that is still insufficient, even ignoring the lack of audits by non-conflicted parties, to strongly conclude Waymo is safer than a human.

When you have a large, open, peer-reviewed body of evidence, then yes, that's exactly what you get to claim. To reject those claims because Waymo was involved is ad-hominem. It's not how science works. It's not how safety regulations or government oversight works. If you think it's insufficient, you can attack their body of work, but you don't get to reject the claim because they haven't met some unspecific and imaginary burden of proof.

The reason they investigate every airplane crash for a root cause is not necessarily because the number of deaths tilts the statistics, it's because they are highly complicated mechanical and electrical machines where there is always the chance for a systematic fault that will doom many further planes if not found and rectified.

The same of course applies to self-driving cars; they are literally cars driven by software, of course you need to do a root cause investigation every time to rule out that it's not a bug in the software that will kill another person (and many after) when the next car happens to go down that rare branch of the system. It's embarrassing to see that the people that call themselves engineers at these companies have not held their work to this standard, and are instead publishing glossy brochures making whacky statistical arguments.

Why do you think they don't do root cause investigations?

I've personally read through the root cause reports for most of the notable AV accidents. They're not always quite as intensive as aerospace, but I'd be hard pressed to describe any of them as wacky statistical arguments.

Obviously most of those reports aren't public, but I'm assuming you also have industry access.

Key point: the root cause investigation is not driven by the company involved. The FAA and the NTSB investigate and can by law demand documentation from the company.

The real shame is we don't investigate normal human drivers the same way.

What the discussion below is completely missing, and the point of my link to the incident involving dragging the pedestrian, is the incidence of harm to people not in a vehicle.

"The number of pedestrian deaths in the United States is skyrocketing. In 2022 traffic crashes killed 7,805 people on foot—that’s an 83 percent rise from 2009, and a 40-year high. The vast majority of those deaths involved a car colliding into a human"[1]

"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars, according to Martin."[2]

The issue with the safety claims of self-driving is focusing on vehicle-to-vehicle interactions and failing to handle the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the environment. There are numerous stories of pathological behavior of self-driving vehicles when encountering simple environmental features that a human driver would handle without a second's hesitation[3]. Pedestrians, cyclists, people using mobility devices, and numerous other non-vehicle road users represent an unaddressed challenge to the safety claims made by Waymo and others.

1 https://slate.com/business/2024/10/cars-suvs-pedestrian-deat...

2 https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

3 https://www.npr.org/2023/08/26/1195695051/driverless-cars-sa...

The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless.

50% of fatalities involve alcohol or drugs and are often single vehicle accidents.

25% involve youth or inexperience.

15% involve motorcycles.

15% involve pedestrians.

What I really need to see is a complete breakdown of every accident a Waymo has had. Then I can start to compare their actual performance to the previously known outcomes.

> The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless.

No, that's not how statistics works.

The percentage data's accuracy depends mainly on the number of incidents recorded (and somewhat on the rate of incidents). But the percentage of the whole is completely irrelevant.

If you are basing something on 10 incidents but it's 50% of the total, it's still terrible accuracy.

Whereas if you are basing something on 100,000 incidents but it's only 0.1% of the total, it's still going to be quite accurate, assuming the incidents come from the same overall distribution.

It reminds me of a large sample in the Reader’s digest poll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Literary_Digest#Presidenti...

size along is not enough. The sample may be biased and it certainly is in Waymo case e.g., roads/vehicle conditions.

This! (Thank you for the comment). There’s a reason a 1000 random samples is adequate to reasonably estimate what’s common metrics in a population the size of USA or India (or infinitely large).

Random samples of the _same_ user base.

If the user base of "waymo riders" and "everyday drivers" does not match then you're not sampling what you think you are.

Yeah, that’s fair, but is implicit since I’m arguing against the “sample size is inadequate” POV, not the “there are distributional biases in data” POV. There are a gazillion ways to adjust for these biases (ex. propensity score matching) going beyond just user-base but also including weather type, road type, location, time of day, day of week, traffic density, pedestrian density … that can be done easily with far less than the sample size waymo has. And I bet they do these adjustments.

> If you are basing something on 10 incidents but it's 50% of the total, it's still terrible accuracy.

The ratio of 3.2 trillion to 56.7 million, which is already incredibly generous to Waymo's position, is 5 orders of magnitude in difference. So any calculations from Waymos data are going to be insanely inaccurate and not something you can extrapolate from.

The main, and most obvious case, evidenced by this, is Waymo does not operate where snow falls. Human beings do.

We're missing so much of the picture I don't think you can say Waymo's are 75% less accident prone, or 80% less likely to hit a pedestrian. Those are just nonsense numbers.

The paper under discussion only considers human accidents in similar environments to where Waymo operates. So it's only making a claim about like-for-like driving.

You could still say you care about snow driving and want to see that comparison, but it doesn't mean the claims in this paper are wrong.

> The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless.

Your third sentence doesn’t follow from your first two. On what grounds do you draw this conclusion?

How would you compare single-incident reports to get to a meaningful conclusion?My guess is that Waymo makes mistakes that a human wouldn't, and vice versa. At that point the overall safety record, which normalizes those differences, seems the most relevant.

> 50% of fatalities involve alcohol or drugs and are often single vehicle accidents.

This suggests that Waymo is cutting traffic fatalities by 50% (per million miles) right off the top.

If an only if every drunk person decides to take one instead of driving themselves home.

Drunk people being known for having exceptionally poor judgement and self awareness.

It suggests that they _could_ cut fatalities by that much. Then again, a whole new mode of accident, where the inebriated decide to step out of a moving vehicle and injure themselves that way.

This is a dynamic system where human decisions are never fully removed from the loop.

> Then again, a whole new mode of accident, where the inebriated decide to step out of a moving vehicle and injure themselves that way.

If I understand correctly, you believe that the advent of self-driving cars will cause passengers to voluntarily exit a moving vehicle? That sounds like absolute nonsense with no basis in reality.

> Then again, a whole new mode of accident, where the inebriated decide to step out of a moving vehicle and injure themselves that way.

Why would they need to be in a self-driving vehicle to do that?

I do want to know how Waymo compares to middle ages adults who are not on alcohol/drugs. However that they are better than humans overall is still a big deal even if the data is somewhat suspect by not doing that additional breakdown.

Our safety research team is interested in this topic, too! In a previous study, they've tried to model it:

> Building on that, the Collision Avoidance Benchmarking paper presents a novel methodology to evaluate how well autonomous driving systems avoid crashes. The study, which to our knowledge is the first of its kind, introduces a reference model that represents an ideal human state for driving—the response time and evasive action of a human driver that is non-impaired, with eyes always on the conflict (NIEON). Put simply, unlike an average human driver, NIEON is always attentive and doesn’t get distracted or fatigued¹. The data showed that the Waymo Driver outperformed the NIEON human driver model by avoiding more collisions and mitigating serious injury risk in simulated fatal crash scenarios.

(From https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety)

AIUI (I'm not on that team), a major challenge is getting good baseline data. Collision reports may not (reliably) capture that kind of data, and it's clearly subjective or often self-reported outside of cases like DUI charges.

This is the statistic I was hoping to see. It wasn't in the paper as best as I looked.

You'll be happy to know, then, that the NHTSA publishes the data you're looking for at https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde..., in addition to Waymo's own reporting in their safety hub. For me personally, I find summary data to be more informative than a pile of individual reports, but I hope your comparison goes well!

Seems like it would more informative to link to an issue with Waymo instead of Cruise.

Note that even in the case you linked to, with Cruise, the initial accident was caused by a human driver.

You could also link to all of the people killed by self-driving Teslas. In my opinion, Teslas (especially) are bringing a bad name to the entire field.

Waymo is using public roads 25/7 for automating profit and not paying fair taxes.

One way to inteprent their data is that Waymo is LESS efficient protecting cyclists and motorcyclists compared to pedestriants. As a motorcycle rider I hope they will work to fix that gap.

What seems more likely, that Waymo is prioritizing pedestrian safety over cyclist safety? Or cyclists are much more likely to engage in risky behavior?

Maybe it's that cyclists are more likely to be trying to use the road and waymo is prioritising driving on the roads rather than the sidewalk?

While Waymo is good for safety, it is constantly collecting data not just from users, but from everyone nearby. The vehicles essentially function as mobile surveillance devices, recording bystanders without consent, with no clear policies on data use, retention, or oversight.