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Waymo Safety Impact

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Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#361

Post by cucumber3732842 »

necovek wrote: post #264
jjmarr wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn. Essentially, a meat driver was waiting at a stop sign to make a turn onto the main road. I was in a Waymo driving on the main road and did not have a stop sign. When we were 10 meters away from the intersection, the meat driver suddenly started to enter the intersection. I have no idea why. Full brake would've h…

If instant ( My experience is that for a human driver to react quickly in city driving conditions, style and prep are more important than reaction time: in the case you describe (entering an intersection with another car waiting on a stop sign perpendicular to your path), I'd have my foot hanging over the brake and off the gas pedal — this has helped me avoid hitting many other cars with inattentive/distracted/bad dr…

>Waymo was going too fast for the intersection IMO.

This is literally impossible without slowing to single digit speeds for every intersections. At some point you just have to rely on the other traffic honoring signaling and signage or having some desire for self preservation.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#362

Post by cucumber3732842 »

CalRobert wrote: post #289
necovek wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how you define "average driver": what if 95% of the crashes are caused by 5% of the drivers? 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 at…

To be fair, if 5% of drivers cause 95% of crashes then the average driver is still terrible. The median one might be better, but does it even matter? The average driver is still wreaking havoc.

>To be fair, if 5% of drivers cause 95% of crashes then the average driver is still terrible.

>The median one might be better, but does it even matter? The average driver is still wreaking havoc.

Yes it matters. To be acceptable this technology needs to be at least in the same ballpark as a median-ish person on a median-ish day. Not some nonexistent average that is pulled down by the 1/X people who are drunk and the 1/Y who are from Socal and driving in Maine in a blizzard.

The fact that you basically never hear of "average non criminal driver" or "median law abiding driver" and that there is no real attempt at even standardizing a concept of normal drivers not engaged in bad behavior just reeks.

It's like the door is intentionally being left open for the same slight of hand as when people peddle some policy goal having to do with school shootings and back it up with statistics that are mostly normal crime. Or they are peddling some devious tax that will screw a whole lot of people, and they justify it with an average that's dragged way up by a few oddballs, or dragged way down by a bunch of zeros. Seems like the safety crowd and and self-interested industry are setting up to play off each other in a "recyclable plastic" sort of way.

Second off, what are you talking about that the "average driver is wreaking havoc"? The average driver is filing a collision claim every 15-20yr depending on who's numbers you believe. While I don't know the distance between average and median, either is a fairly high bar that Waymo and friends have to meet.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#363

Post by zx8080 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #320
zx8080 wrote: post #207

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. > ... > Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the t…

Do you not like people being funny, or is there something else you're reacting so strongly to?

Mixing saving one's life with rating for a drink in the same comment makes feel very weird. Not funny, TBH, but actually it reads like a millions of generated bad review comments on amazon, expedia etc.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#364

Post by bryanlarsen »

rootusrootus wrote: post #147
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…

I hope you are misremembering. Swerving is most often the wrong choice, and I would be disappointed if Waymo were opting for that. By far the best option is to panic stop. Human or robot, physics is a harsh mistress and swerving is more likely to make you lose control and end up in a much more unforgiving wreck.

Anecdotally it does appear that Waymo's do default to braking in many situations where a normal human would choose to swerve.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#365

Post by mlboss »

rhizome wrote: post #335
cco wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully they've now shipped their own product, YouTube Music. And Google Pay, imagine my surprise back in 2021 when I signed up for Waymo and realized I had to manually type in my credit card. No Google Pay??? C'mon y'all, you're Alphabet!

Google only hires the best of the best.

Its is corporate fiefdom. Everybody trying to one up other executives to show impact instead of working together towards a unified goal. The bigger the company the more we see this phenomena. Nobody gets promotion if you just used existing internal service.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#366

Post by shmel »

haspok wrote: post #332
socalgal2 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo supporting music services at all is stupid to me. They should just let you bluetooth your phone and play your own music. I don't want any of those services. I want my own music.

Why do you even want music? There is a large group of people (maybe even the majority?) who, as soon as they get in a car, MUST immediately turn on the radio or some kind of extra noise source. Is this some kind of a Pavlovian reflex? I'm always amazed by this, as my car is one of the few places where I have actual control over my environment (unlike on public transport, or at my workplace, or even in my home - neigh…

There are even people who listen to music at home! They even buy expensive speakers just for this purpose =) I listen to music pretty much all the time except when I talk to other people and sleep.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#367

Post by xnx »

jojobas wrote: post #344
srini wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I don't actually trust most folks to be in a "good condition". Even the best drivers have their off days.

Well, if we were talking about forcing people to stop driving and transition to current waymos it's plausible that diligent sober drivers would be facing greater risk. Would that be acceptable to improve average statistics?

> if we were talking about forcing people to stop driving and transition to current waymos

We're not

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#368

Post by tim-fan »

carbocation wrote: post #257
tim-fan wrote: post #233

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"

I think the average is ballpark 1 per 100 million miles, so my guess is that someday they might show this, but they probably want to wait til they have more miles driven.

OK right, so they're at 170 million now, maybe ~1 life saved. I see it might be a bit early to be making claims about that.

Also in comparison the cases of disruption/blocking intersections/emergency-services do seem significant - seems plausible in the right circumstances you could lose lives.

Seems they need to 10x their miles before they can start making confident claims about lives saved.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#369

Post by bikelang »

scj wrote: post #24

"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement weather." I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.

They’re in Denver now (not available to the public yet) for this exact reason. Unfortunately we’ve had our least snowy winter in recorded history this year - so they only got a few days of real snow.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#370

Post by mmmlinux »

Toutouxc wrote: post #67
leovander wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make sure to never be in a hurry to get anywhere because you might then get stuck behind a fleet of them going exactly the speed limit, grid locking you in.

Is this something that I’m too European to understand? How do you get “stuck” behind someone doing the speed limit?

Drive 55 stay alive.
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