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Waymo Safety Impact

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Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#81

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tjoff wrote: post #57
snewman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In essentially all cases where a Waymo and a human-driven car have collided, the human driver has clearly been at fault. This seems definitive and not susceptible to cherry picking.

That could just be, and seems to be in some cases at least, because Waymo doesn't behave like a human would, and people gets tripped up. I don't doubt Waymos are very safe, but I always irk at these comparisons. Majority of human accidents are due to gross negligence and/or driving under some influence or serious fatigue. A system incapable of alcohol etc. is better than that? Well that is a substantially lower bar t…

> could just be, and seems to be in some cases at least, because Waymo doesn't behave like a human would, and people gets tripped up

Driving conventions vary wildly across states and even within them. And foreign drivers are a thing. A human who gets tripped up by a Waymo acting unusually will also get confused by someone getting used to no turns on right in Manhattan, driving on the right side of the road if coming in from the Commonwealth or adapting from California's protected left turners can turn into any lane, not just the leftmost. They'll also get confused by children and pets, who aren't bound by social custom, and deer, who aren't bound by physics.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#82

Post by Retric »

jeffbee wrote: post #58
Retric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo as a system has crossed the threshold where I trust them more than average driver, but all this hardware is relatively new, well maintained, and their software is closely tied to it. I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.

Waymo's software has crossed multiple generations of sensors and vehicles over almost two decades. It does not seem to be tightly coupled to a particular device.

Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc.

Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#83

Post by spankalee »

_p1l9 wrote: post #80

Blaming the kid here is absurd. The kid lives in a system where pedestrians are second class citizens in a world dictated by the auto-petro industrial complex. An industry that has co-opted unelected traffic "engineer" in the US and completely changed the way we live for the last 70 years and have made Americans fatter and less connected. If the child lived in a neighborhood where cars went slower (it was a 25mph zon…

Good thing no one blamed the kid.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#84

Post by jeffbee »

Retric wrote: post #82
jeffbee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo's software has crossed multiple generations of sensors and vehicles over almost two decades. It does not seem to be tightly coupled to a particular device.

Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc. Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.

The only thing an autonomous system should do with janky modified cars is drive them very slowly to the state police barracks for destruction.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#85

Post by Taek »

jjmarr wrote: post #53
jedberg wrote: post #3

Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans. The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they…

Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over. Most human drivers…

> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.

This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#86

Post by georgemcbay »

jjmarr wrote: post #53
jedberg wrote: post #3

Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans. The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they…

Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over. Most human drivers…

> I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience.

You'll probably never forget that advertisement, which is an exciting business opportunity for Waymo.

They could partner with Spotify and other media content partners so that the Waymo can generate an adrenaline-rush near crash experience when a premium advertiser's ad is playing. /s (hopefully)

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#87

Post by skissane »

rootusrootus wrote: post #50
sonofhans wrote: post #13

“Safer” == “Safer than all other human drivers in the same city.” By their own admission, this is not a straightforward comparison. If they could do the math for the same routes, times of day, and conditions … maybe I’d believe it. Otherwise, this data is trivial to cherrypick, and they have every reason to present it as well as possible. I believe Waymos are pretty safe, and that’s a great thing. “Safer than humans…

Perhaps the comparison should only be to other taxis. Since I cannot buy a Waymo, it is not really relevant whether it is better than an average driver (including all the drunk ones, and the speed racers, etc).

There are other safety differences with human-driven vehicles… interpersonal violence does happen with taxis (e.g. drivers sexually harassing/assaulting passengers, passengers robbing drivers) - by definition those things cannot happen with a Waymo

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#88

Post by bryanlarsen »

13X is way more impressive than it seems at first glance.

Let's take a simplistic model of accidents: that the average driver is at fault in an accident 50% of the time. So a perfect driver would only halve the number of accidents -- they only eliminate the accidents where they would otherwise have been at fault.

But Waymo's numbers are better than the "perfect" driver above. How is that possible? Because in most accidents the blame is not split 0%/100%. You can avoid a lot of accidents with defensive and safe driving.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#89

Post by amarant »

vel0city wrote: post #59
amarant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To turn the colourful phrasing against you, I too would like a death robot to protect me from all the murder monkeys having a death race around me if I was out biking on the road/death race track.

Wouldn't the better solution be to prevent those murder monkeys from doing the death races around where people would want to cycle? Some kind of grade-separated trail? More regulations on those murder monkey death races? Crazy thought, I know.

The grade separated trail sounds great in theory, but in practice it's surprisingly ineffective for some unknown reason. In Sweden we have a ton of those and for some reason bikers insist on participating in the death race with the other murder monkeys. Which is annoying because it can really slow the race down! But I guess once they have a good alternative, at least their death race participation is voluntary, and so I guess they're fair game like the rest of us

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#90

Post by Retric »

jeffbee wrote: post #84
Retric wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc. Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.

The only thing an autonomous system should do with janky modified cars is drive them very slowly to the state police barracks for destruction.

Perhaps, but you can do a lot to a car while it remains street legal.
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