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Waymo Safety Impact

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Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#231

Post by tomhow »

_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…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445836 and marked it off topic.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#232

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

hammock wrote: post #224
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, we are not provided with the sensors to swerve safely. If we had some sort of 360 constant recording in the car (on screen?) it would be safer for humans to swerve. Instead we have to move our head, which is cheaper but lacks info. That's why we now have rear cameras

We have rear cameras because people DONT move their head. And because regulations have made cars way taller than they need to be, meaning there is a big blind spot close to the ground

I mean, even in low cars you cannot see a small enough kid walking behind your car. That's why you back slowly. Back when I just got my driver license, there is a big lesson many drivers go through (in Italy) which is you back off a parking and there is an obstacle that's so low that cannot be see through the back window and it's small enough that cannot be seen through the mirror. You hit it and if you followed the "go slow part" you only damaged the paint.

So I'm not opposing the ideas of rear cameras, but I'm totally against tall cars, because you cannot see kids IN FRONT either now.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#233

Post by tim-fan »

Can they just report directly how many human lives they have saved since beginning operation? (of course, within some error bars)

Maybe that's too much of a statistical stretch.

But would be a good to-the-point number to have on hand for some waymo debates.

"yes they caused some disruption in an intersection in so-and-so scenario, but on the other hand they saved X number of human lives last year"

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#234

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

autoexec wrote: post #162
whyenot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you. I know, it's all very far fetched, and Uber/Lyft drivers are almost always nice, courteous and professional, but I have experienced a few times when that hasn't been the case. With Waymo, it's not eve…

> There is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you. There are also new risks that weren't possible before. A software error can send you into oncoming traffic. Hackers can gain control of your vehicle either directly/remotely or by cleverly designed…

Frequency matters.

One of these sets of risk is mostly theoretical (aside from the large scale stoplight outage), one of them is happening often enough that anyone who takes rideshare repeatedly will have a story.

If we limit ourselves to risks that have actually manifested, not hypothetical risks, I'd rather risk getting stuck at an intersection if there is a city wide power outage than deal with the weird conversations I've had on rideshares (not even counting the countless drivers who demonstrated that it is possible to drive a car without crashing for the duration of one rideshare ride without taking your eyes off the phone for more than a few seconds at a time).

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#235

Post by jmalicki »

Taek wrote: post #85
jjmarr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actua…

I wonder if Waymo gets a cut. I also wonder if riding in a Waymo at the time signals that you're in a demographic that can afford a Waymo and thus get more expensive ads.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#236

Post by fc417fc802 »

casta wrote: post #131
ElijahLynn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.

In January YouTube music worked fine when I took Waymo in Menlo Park.

Can you not steam arbitrary audio to it from your phone?

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#237

Post by buildbot »

int0x29 wrote: post #213
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.

The new (as of now than a year ago) Waymo cars still had human safety drivers last I saw one (a month or two ago). I also don't see them taking customers. So they do seem to slow roll hardware rollouts.

Which to me is a really good, encouraging thing.

Overall I feel safer in a Waymo than a rideshare now and I only spent a few days being able to use Waymo...

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#238

Post by svat »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #124
jjmarr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.

I think it's also a privacy thing; you have to go into the Waymo app and “connect” your YouTube Music account (even though both have the same @gmail.com address), because otherwise the terms of service of one do not allow sharing data with the other without user consent. (Contrary to popular perception Google is very finicky about privacy, at least privacy as defined as conforming to the terms of service.)

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#239

Post by [deleted] »

int0x29 wrote: post #213
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.

The new (as of now than a year ago) Waymo cars still had human safety drivers last I saw one (a month or two ago). I also don't see them taking customers. So they do seem to slow roll hardware rollouts.

[deleted]

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#240

Post by freetime2 »

uv-depression wrote: post #170
freetime2 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this debate comes up every time someone mentions the word "car" on the internet, and there are crazies on both sides. But I don't think it's fair to frame either side of the debate by what the crazies are saying. Or to assume that just because someone disagrees with you they have fallen victim to propaganda. I think most Americans just like their cars and are reasonably happy with the status quo. They can be rec…

But it objectively makes cities worse. People love visiting Europe in part because they don't do this to nearly the same extent (obviously this varies by country/city). People aren't entitled to not having their opinions be proven wrong, nor are they entitled to ignore negative externalities (pollution, noise, danger, unpleasant city centres, and so on). > are reasonably happy with the status quo. They're not, except…

I more or less agree with you. I just thought your earlier straw man argument was not made in good faith.
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