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New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
261–270 of 413 posts
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#262>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...
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#263So, 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…
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.
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#264As 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 p…
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.
Honestly future generations will be aghast at how we accepted road deaths caused by human drivers.
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#265Waymo is using public roads 25/7 for automating profit and not paying fair taxes.
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 achieveme…
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.
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 perceptio…
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.
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.
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#269While 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.
Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
> 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.