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New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

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Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#11

Post by timewizard »

returningfory2 wrote: post #6
cratermoon wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#12

Post by worldsayshi »

AIPedant wrote: post #7
floxy wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Why can't it replace Ubers?

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#13

Post by ttoinou »

AIPedant wrote: post #7
floxy wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Those people dont have to be americans though

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#14

Post by buckle8017 »

carlgreene wrote: post #10

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 “nov…

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.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#16

Post by [deleted] »

AIPedant wrote: post #7
floxy wrote: post #2

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#17

Post by IrishTechie »

AIPedant wrote: post #7
floxy wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#18

Post by shihabkhanbd »

carlgreene wrote: post #10

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 “nov…

[dead]

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#19

Post by kfarr »

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.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#20

Post by p_j_w »

timewizard wrote: post #11
returningfory2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 com…

> 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?

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