But what about choosing between hitting one doctor versus a group of school kids? /s
Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
41–50 of 182 posts
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Figure 3 almost looks like the responder is lagging. Feels like it slows down and speeds up in several places. Assuming that’s not a gif/video rendering bug, it’s a great way to get rear-ended.
Here's the semi-annual reminder to everyone that you are probably following too closely, and this is exactly why you shouldn't. The rule of thumb is that you want 3-4 seconds between cars, which at highway speeds is 80-100 meters or yards. Yes, almost no one leaves that much room. That's part of why so many accidents happen. It's easy for you to do better.
Maybe not so easy. In my experience, in any even moderately heavy traffic, if you try to stay that far behind anyone, then other cars will constantly move into that empty space.
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#43You can read the California DMV's set of autonomous vehicle accident reports.[1] Almost all the Waymo reports are "vehicle was entering intersection, detected cross traffic, stopped, was rear-ended by human driver". There's one Waymo report where someone ran a stop sign and hit them. The rear-ending problem will be solved as automatic emergency braking becomes standard on cars. Already, it's shipping on almost all hi…
No thanks.
I drive an aged car and drove a friends recent Mercedes long distance. The thing has a feature where it breaks where it thinks it’s good to break, often just when I need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot. I need the vehicle to respond to my inputs directly, not mix my inputs with what it thinks must be done. It’s extremely unpredictable and it feels like I’m not in control of the car.
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#44You can read the California DMV's set of autonomous vehicle accident reports.[1] Almost all the Waymo reports are "vehicle was entering intersection, detected cross traffic, stopped, was rear-ended by human driver". There's one Waymo report where someone ran a stop sign and hit them. The rear-ending problem will be solved as automatic emergency braking becomes standard on cars. Already, it's shipping on almost all hi…
No thanks. I drive an aged car and drove a friends recent Mercedes long distance. The thing has a feature where it breaks where it thinks it’s good to break, often just when I need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot. I need the vehicle to respond to my inputs directly, not mix my inputs with what it thinks must be done. It’s extremely unpredictable and it feels like I’m not in control of the car.
If studies show that automatic emergency braking cuts down on deaths overall, I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff -- I'd even be happy to have it be mandatory/non-disableable. It sounds like the car you were driving had some kind of defective implementation of automatic emergency braking. That doesn't invalidate the good that these types of systems do when implemented properly.
Also I'm wondering what kind of situations there are where you "need to accelerate to get out of a tight spot?" I'm a pretty experienced driver and I think the number of "must accelerate" situations I've ever encountered could be counted on a hand. Almost universally, you can solve whatever problem you're in by being more patient and decelerating instead. For example, if you're trying to make an aggressive merge into the passing lane because someone is coming up quickly behind, you could just wait until that person passes. If you're trying to get up to highway speed as you merge, but someone is slow in front of you, it might be best to leave that person more of a gap and wait until they go. Even in the case of passing on a two lane road (a situation where I doubt emergency braking would trigger erroneously), you've already made a mistake if a rapid acceleration is needed to avoid a dangerous scenario. Etc.
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#45You can read the California DMV's set of autonomous vehicle accident reports.[1] Almost all the Waymo reports are "vehicle was entering intersection, detected cross traffic, stopped, was rear-ended by human driver". There's one Waymo report where someone ran a stop sign and hit them. The rear-ending problem will be solved as automatic emergency braking becomes standard on cars. Already, it's shipping on almost all hi…
>The rear-ending problem will be solved as automatic emergency braking becomes standard on cars. Already, it's shipping on almost all high-end cars and 70-80% of midrange cars. There's a US auto industry goal of it being standard by 2022. That's probably the main feature needed for self-driving cars to coexist with human-driven cars. I really wish we could just enforce proper education of being observant. Most times…
Any solution that relies on "let's just make humans beings better" is basically doomed to failure and little more than hand wringing and virtue signalling.
Cars have been pervasive for over a century and virtually none of the actual improvements in safety have come from "hoping humans do better".
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#46But what about choosing between hitting one doctor versus a group of school kids? /s
This is why we need a social credit-rating type system, then it just totals the points.
Kids are faster, less likely to be hit, and generally have worse credit so it all works out.
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#47This is really cool. I suspect that when we have self driving cars, it's going to take off very quickly due to insurance. In particular, if you are in a non self driving car and in an accident with a self driving one, it'll be hard to not be shown as at fault. So insurance I would guess go up based on the percentage of self driving cars, and likely be really cheap for self driving cars. I wonder if there's a period t…
I suspect the adoption process will be slow because consumers really don't want this product. Self driving cars will drive the speed limit and infuriate both other motorists and their owners who are getting passed by speeding human driven cars. There will also be well publicized stories of the few times that self driving cars perform worse than humans. All drivers think they are above average and therefore the statis…
If there's one thing I don't care about on the road, it's infuriating other motorists with my safe driving. But, for what it's worth, I drive the speed limit and I pretty much never see anyone get angry at me for it. If you hang out in the right lane, all the type A people driving 20 over are in the other lane, zipping past you. You simply don't encounter the type of people who would get mad at speed limit driving in the slow lane. As long as the self driving cars are implemented to follow passing rules, it's not going to be an issue if they were to drive the speed limit (although as another person pointed out to you this is a counterfactual).
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#48Other humans put in place of the ones who caused the accidents would probably have a similar high avoidance rate.
It just shows Waymo was better than a small sample.
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#491) Would a random driver (random steering and throttle) also have avoided these crashes? It seems like they were fatal because several variables coincided very exactly, and really any other input would have avoided them. 2) What input is the Waymo driver using here? If these were not originally Waymo cars, then is it perceiving simulated video or getting raw access to ground truth vehicle positions?
For 2, Waymo has a simulation environment with a whole simulated physics and sensor suite. They use this environment to train their driving systems on far more virtual miles than the number of physical miles they drive. So presumably they induce the reconstructed initial conditions from the crash and then they run the simulation a lot of times to see if their driver also gets into the crash.
Re: Replaying real life: how the Waymo Driver avoids fatal human crashes
#50You can read the California DMV's set of autonomous vehicle accident reports.[1] Almost all the Waymo reports are "vehicle was entering intersection, detected cross traffic, stopped, was rear-ended by human driver". There's one Waymo report where someone ran a stop sign and hit them. The rear-ending problem will be solved as automatic emergency braking becomes standard on cars. Already, it's shipping on almost all hi…
>The rear-ending problem will be solved as automatic emergency braking becomes standard on cars. Already, it's shipping on almost all high-end cars and 70-80% of midrange cars. There's a US auto industry goal of it being standard by 2022. That's probably the main feature needed for self-driving cars to coexist with human-driven cars. I really wish we could just enforce proper education of being observant. Most times…
That last point isn't a "you could argue" or "most cases", it's literally the law. Rear-ending is always the rear car's fault and it's always their responsibility to leave enough space and time to react and stop safely.
If the lead car braked when there was no reason or danger, that driver might also be cited for recklessness or some such, but a rear-end collision is always an error by the rear driver.