Waymo Safety Impact

They cannot. The remote drivers for Waymo offer "nudges" to the robot driver, but they cannot do full remote control.

They can effectively mark a dot in the middle of a crowd of people on their tablet and say "Your best course of action is to drive here", and the waymo very well might decide to try and follow that suggestion, but they cannot override Waymo's brakes nor coded-in "do not hit humans" mandate, and the waymo would stop before hitting anyone.

> Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years.

The average uber driver has driven fewer miles on the road than Waymo's software, and hasn't seen all the conditions either. Most uber drivers have cumulatively like 5-20 years driving experience in the city they're driving in.

Waymo has racked up waaaay more miles than the average single human ever gets, and unlike humans, all the Waymos benefit from improvements to the software.

> There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet.

This is pointless fearmongering. Like, ketchup could cause cancer, but we have no meaningful evidence in that direction, so saying "ketchup has unknown risks we haven't imagined yet" is silly.

We know now that waymo is statistically safer than human drivers, I personally know that I haven't had a waymo driver make me feel unsafe yet, but uber drivers often did, so you know, waymo seems to have some pretty nice improvements already.

I'll wait for actual evidence of these "unimaginable risks and failures" before I evaluate them. At this point, it would have to be a pretty bad failure to change the math though.

They’re preparing to launch and have already been testing in Chicago, detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston, NYC, and London. I think it’s safe to assume they’ve considered winter driving.

That's a hyperbolic false equivalence.

Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground. As long as a self-driving car can detect when it is degraded, it can just stop with the blinkers on. Usually with 0 - 2 people inside.

The car saw this dude coming from way down the street, flying, and was like “yeah, better stop.” Probably saved the biker from serious injury, or worse. I wouldn't have seen him if I was driving.

My reading of all the human crash stats has been that majority of them happen when human drivers are impaired (drunk, drugged or too tired): as this is something we could (in theory, at least) control, I'd like to see and compare with stats for non-impaired human drivers too.

Then, I'd like to see it compared to attentive, non-distracted drivers too (but we won't have crash data for this, as they would avoid most potential crashes).

Note that I am only talking things under every human driver's control, and not things like skill, reaction time, etc.

Also, modern cars (like Waymos) will have a much lower braking distance compared to "average": eg. my Volvo has 35m braking distance from 100km/h or 62mph compared to 50m (45% more) listed as average (excluding reaction distance) — so from 50km/h, it should be around 8m!