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S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

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Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#601
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data appears to be freely available here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto... . I reviewed a couple dozen incidents and in every case human drivers are to blame. The most extreme example of this was an incident in which a manually operated vehicle repeatedly rear-ended an autonomous vehicle out of spite, then followed it back to the dispatch lot and made a variety of verbal threats.

Self driving cars will share roads with regular cars for possibly decades.

Human driven cars have been "sharing" space with pedestrians and cyclists with gory results. AVs mildly annoy human drivers, but are much better behaved. In fact they annoy drivers BECAUSE they are much better behaved.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#602
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In February they hit 1,000,000 miles cumulative for all previous years. Last week they hit 3,000,000 miles. Cars kill about as many Americans as the Vietnam War, but every year. Aside from guns, I can't think of anything else so deadly that we give to our children as they enter adulthood. It is common, it is not part of the news cycle. We care more about the unlikely terrorist. People are bad with numbers. Personally…

Humans average 60,000,000 miles between fatalitys [1]. It is a average of 1.25 million miles between injurys. 3 million miles is not a statistically significant amount of data to make a valid estimate, not even close. That is not to say that safe testing can not proceed or that they are being unsafe in their testing or validation process, but people are bad with numbers, so it is important to realize the actual magni…

Anecdotally, I feel much safer around AVs as a pedestrian or cyclist than human driven vehicles. Way more predictable, especially post pandemic when it seems like half of drivers have some behavioral issue.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#603
Hmm. I always thought these self-driving taxis were competing with regular taxis. But Cruise is saying "They also never drive distracted, drowsy or drunk," which makes me think they don't think they're competing with taxis, but with random drivers coming home from the bar at 2AM. I'm not sure I quite understand their argument here.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo and Cruise won't actually release comprehensive data. So anecdotes are all we have to go by... and they don't look particularly good. These are egregious driving mistakes that a human driver would almost never make. - https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832 - https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368 Everyone needs to experience these things for themselves before unleashing them o…

That’s really awful. These kind of incidents need to be investigated. Whatever situation caused the car to just run into the path of a pedestrian in a crosswalk can’t be allowed.

That's the wonderful thing. Stuff like this happens to me when I'm in foot and there's no way a human drivers would be held accountable.

AVs on the other hand have enough scrutiny the behavior will be fixed.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#605

Its okay if a few people die as long as Big Tech gets to gobble up more of our lives and make a few more billion in profits.

Yes, a few people will die. More than a few. But I would bet anything that even in the short-term, and especially in the long-term, far fewer will die than if there were human drivers in those cars.

I’d still much rather be killed by a fellow human than a corporation controlled entity.

“Greater good” has been the excuse for some astonishingly bad ideas.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#606

Beware: the State sent a letter accusing the city of manipulating data in order to make AVs looks more dangerous than they were: https://twitter.com/annatonger/status/1673403230804385813 > In the 4 Waymo traffic collisions SF cited to prove driverless cars are less safe, 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended and 1 didn't even involve any cars touching, CA says. https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/…

> 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended While technically this makes them not at fault, it may represent some evidence of erratic braking behavior. Anecdotally, drivers have reported Waymo cars having a propensity for "brake checking" — not with ill intent of course, but risking accidents anyway.

I went ahead and read the accident reports, just because I was curious.

In one case the AV was stopped at a red light when it was rear ended.

In the second case AV slowed down for a person pushing a shopping cart into the street.

In the third case the AV slowed down for pedestrians in a crosswalk.

All the reports are in the report the person you are responding to posted. I do wish we had video footage of the events, while the first one is pretty clear cut, the other two are really dependent on what "slowing down" looks like, and what the pedestrians were actually doing.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#607
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They work for the majority of people of all ages who live in cities where the infrastructure has been properly built to accommodate bikes. Most people rarely need to haul anything and can use carshare when they do. I've demoed a multistory house down to the bricks and re-built it from the outside in without a car. Hired someone to haul off a dumpster several times. For major materials deliveries, like beams or window…

I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replacement for this use case, sorry. My situation is far from unique, raising children is quite universal human experience.

Many of us drive our kids to daycare on an e-bike. It works great. On days when I have to use our car instead for some reason, the kids complain that they want the bike.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#608
post #385
post #315

I lost count of how many times there was a comment about a lack of data > The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. > city transportation leaders this time around informally collect their own incident data using 911 and 311 calls > Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data. Y…

Or Google and GM have the data, but aren't sharing it because people will overreact because despite it being an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, it still has some incidents that people will focus in on.

California law requires all accidents of autonomous cars resulting in "property damage, bodily injury, or death" be reported within ten days.

All of this accident data is publicly available with details about every accident. For example, Waymo had four accidents in May and four accidents in June.

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

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US rate is 0.57 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles.

While OPs statement did make me laugh a bit (I've personally driven almost a million miles myself and I don't think my odds of killing someone were 1 in 4), we do have to realize that MOST miles that make up the 100 million mile stats are done at highway speeds far away from pedestrians. If I had to do 4 million miles in SF, I just might have hit someone by now.

What if you only drove at night and in very narrow corridors?
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