This reminds me of a video I watched long ago that analyzes roughly how many miles would a self-driving car need to be driven so that we can have a certain confidence that they are driving better than humans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaYER2M8dcs
Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
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Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#22"Every vehicle-to-vehicle contact event in the first one million miles involved one or more road rule violations or dangerous behaviors on the part of the operator of the other vehicle." That agrees with the California DMV reports. The usual problem is being rear-ended at slow speed when the autonomous vehicle detects a threat at an intersection and stops. That shows up over and over in California reports. The Arizon…
Curious if the car weighs the risk of getting rearended when it decides to be cautious in situations like this. I have a feeling human drivers do to some degree.
>I have a feeling human drivers do to some degree.
Sure. In general, people will try not to hit the brakes any harder than they have to especially if they have the situational awareness to know someone is close (maybe too close) behind them.
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#23One of the reports says that the accident was caused by the other driver looking at their phone. Could potentially the sensors of the waymo detect that and warn the other driver?
I mean if the other driver is using Android it should be possible to use some combination of license plate, phone GPS, Bluetooth proximity, and other means to identify who the other driver probably is and pop a “you are about to run into one of our cars, please loop up” message on their phone.
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious if the car weighs the risk of getting rearended when it decides to be cautious in situations like this. I have a feeling human drivers do to some degree.
>I have a feeling human drivers do to some degree. Sure. In general, people will try not to hit the brakes any harder than they have to especially if they have the situational awareness to know someone is close (maybe too close) behind them.
More often in my experience they will randomly tap the brakes to try to get the person behind them to back off: "brake check".
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#25If you don't want to read the full 30 page paper, Waymo has a blog post summarizing it: https://blog.waymo.com/2023/02/first-million-rider-only-mile... It's refreshing to see Waymo continue to be transparent about their safety data. I guess it's easier to do when you have a stellar safety record.
> I guess it's easier to do when you have a stellar safety record. ... for the conditions that the Waymo vehicles operated in. Deployment of Waymo FSD across the board would seem to be a sure win in SF and Phoenix, so I hope that it gets widely adopted in those areas at minimum since I think it will save a lot of lives. There's a lot of work to be done by Waymo yet to get it to work in other areas of the country and…
SF is not an easy locale to test in. Sure, there is no snow, but the city is narrow, dense, with a lot of challenging situations including fog, rain, and crackheads. This success seems promising.
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#26One of the reports says that the accident was caused by the other driver looking at their phone. Could potentially the sensors of the waymo detect that and warn the other driver?
They should program it to just slam on the brakes whenever it identifies a driver behind looking at a phone. Proactively bankrupt such people.
Fun fact: while daily generally lies on the rear-ending driver, intentionally causing an accident will always get the lion’s share of blame. This would bankrupt Waymo, not anyone else.
If you do that kind of thing, don’t expect it to work out well if the other driver has a dashcam. If they don’t, of course you can lie and deny having caused the accident.
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#27It seems like a map showing the number of miles driven in each state and then in each metropolitan area within that state would be something an intern could do.
Followed by a table with # miles driven in various weather conditions.
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#28This reminds me of a video I watched long ago that analyzes roughly how many miles would a self-driving car need to be driven so that we can have a certain confidence that they are driving better than humans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaYER2M8dcs
That's a pretty superficial take. The whole thing relies on the gigantic denominator of human miles, but humans are artificially inflating their average because overwhelming majority of miles driven are extremely simple trips on limited-access highways. Waymo, by comparison, racked up its million miles driving around the SF Tenderloin, in the dark.
Opposite to the claims seen elsewhere in this thread, which are omnipresent whenever the topic arises, it is in fact humans who are driving around on easy mode and self-driving car developers operate in the most difficult conditions they can find.
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#29The ones where I'd be most interested in the videos were the ones where the Waymo was stopped/slow/preparing for a turn and got hit in the back (4, 10, 12, 14). While likely the fault of the human driver, hesitant/unexpected behavior by the Waymo could have contributed to those.
Three consisted of the Waymo hitting random objects - not catastrophic but clearly shows weaknesses in the self-driving: 3 (Waymo ran over a traffic cone), 17 (Waymo hit a "free swinging parking lot barrier arm"), 18 (Waymo hit a shopping cart).
Ten of the accidents seem unavoidable for the Waymo and clearly someone else's fault:
1 - distracted driver rear-ends Waymo coming to a stop, with a delta-v of 20 mph. A 0.2 g deceleration could be a bit faster than normal but definitely isn't slamming the brakes, and the report mentions at one point that the other driver was using a phone.
2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 19 - someone hits a stationary Waymo in a parking lot or while getting out of a parking spot. [Edit: Someone pointed out that these could be preventable for the Waymo, if it knew how to use the horn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34974313]
16 - Garbage truck tried to squeeze by a stopped Waymo, didn't fit (although for this one, it is possible that a human driver would have pulled over further).
Two were emergency braking situations - would be interesting to see what the reaction time was and how it compared with a human driver:
7 - someone cut off a Waymo and got rear ended
20 - Waymo hit a minibike that had crashed and tumbled into its lane, despite braking.
And of course there has to be a weird one, 15 - Wind blew debris into Waymo.
Overall, it seems like the report mostly avoids assigning fault, which is a good thing - in the end, how many crashes happen matters more than who was at fault. [Edit: and as the "use the horn" example shows, even when the other side is clearly at fault, improvements may be possible]
Re: Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
#30One of the reports says that the accident was caused by the other driver looking at their phone. Could potentially the sensors of the waymo detect that and warn the other driver?
"Hey guys, self-driving is a decent sprint but I think you should expand the scope to include detecting and modeling driver behavior in nearby vehicles. Add a quick study for HCI to warn drivers of their dangerous aberrant behavior and I think we might have something real here!" - tropsis, 2023
I think dedicating a small team on this would be a reasonable thing to do. It should be quite separate from the main self-driving task, and would reduce the number of accidents.
In the end, if I'm in a self-driving car, I care whether the crash happened, not who caused it. The injuries and hassle are mine either way, the financial damage isn't mine either way.