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Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

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Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#101

Post by Dylan16807 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #78
greiskul wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Who goes to jail if a child trips and falls down stairs? Should we ban stairs? If there were no negligence from the owner in maintaining the car, and no negligence in the manufacturer, why do you care if anyone goes to jail? It won't bring the child back. If self driving cars reduce the number of fatalities, and specially if they reduce them significantly, would you really be against them just because there won'…

If you drive a car that kills a child, you (potentially) go to jail. If you are in a car that is driven by Waymo and it kills a child, the car drives away with no repercussions. Are you really advocating a world where we change the laws to give Waymo a license to kill? That won't ever, ever happen. Also, "no negligence from the manufacturer" is very much begging the question. Read the typical software EULA, it is neg…

> If you drive a car that kills a child, you (potentially) go to jail.

If you weren't being negligent, the odds of going to jail are very low.

We can and should have the same "potential" for the people designing the car's software. But Waymo seems to be developing their code properly so it would never trigger for them.

> Are you really advocating a world where we change the laws to give Waymo a license to kill?

Everyone already has a license to kill if the activity is sufficiently sanctioned and the particular death is sufficiently unforeseeable.

> Read the typical software EULA, it is negligent by default.

What? Disclaiming liability isn't negligence.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#102

Post by imhoguy »

cwillu wrote: post #9
belltaco wrote: post #4

Aren't they operating under a lot of constraints? The comparison should be with human drivers operating under similar conditions and on similar roads, similar cars(eg. new ones), weather conditions etc. Plus they have a fleet of support folks and standby remote and dispatchable operators which cannot be cheap, we get no insight into the financials except that they're losing several billion dollars a year. If at the e…

Part of being a safe driver is knowing when it's not safe to drive and resisting pressure to drive anyway.

I think a lot of people my drive because of bad weather specifically, e.g. it is raining.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#103

Post by [deleted] »

IshKebab wrote: post #72
zw123456 wrote: post #67

Computers don't drink, don't text and don't have road rage, so their claims might be plausible in a broad statistical way. My guess is that if you excluded humans that drink, text, have anger issues etc. then the humans probably win out.

Maybe, but do you have a way to exclude those humans from life?

[deleted]

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#104

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

tsimionescu wrote: post #70
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the problem with Uber’s self-driving initiative was that they didn’t know what they were doing, except for the main guy who stole the IP from Google.

I think the Uber model they mean is the more general "sell your service at a loss today to increase market share, hoping it will become cheaper for you tomorrow".

People heard the news Uber is profitable these days, right? The plan worked.

Turns out, the fixed cost of technology has less of an impact on your margin when amortized across a larger business. So growing by losing money can make you more profitable later.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#105

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #101
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drive a car that kills a child, you (potentially) go to jail. If you are in a car that is driven by Waymo and it kills a child, the car drives away with no repercussions. Are you really advocating a world where we change the laws to give Waymo a license to kill? That won't ever, ever happen. Also, "no negligence from the manufacturer" is very much begging the question. Read the typical software EULA, it is neg…

> If you drive a car that kills a child, you (potentially) go to jail. If you weren't being negligent, the odds of going to jail are very low. We can and should have the same "potential" for the people designing the car's software. But Waymo seems to be developing their code properly so it would never trigger for them. > Are you really advocating a world where we change the laws to give Waymo a license to kill? Every…

> But Waymo seems to be developing their code properly so it would never trigger for them.

Allow me to not trust what their marketing department says. These are legal issues, "fake it till you make it" doesn't work here.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#106

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

brabel wrote: post #94
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drive a car that kills a child, you (potentially) go to jail. If you are in a car that is driven by Waymo and it kills a child, the car drives away with no repercussions. Are you really advocating a world where we change the laws to give Waymo a license to kill? That won't ever, ever happen. Also, "no negligence from the manufacturer" is very much begging the question. Read the typical software EULA, it is neg…

Your argument is so terrible it's hard to understand how someone can actually believe that. Is your main concern really who is to blame for an accident, rather than how to avoid such accidents more effectively in the first place??? OMG please try to change your mindset, what a horrible way to approach this problem.

Are you claiming we should just abandon all manslaughter laws, #yolo, in the name of "progress" and market capitalization?

Really?

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#107

Post by tfehring »

pseudosavant wrote: post #45

I'd never really thought about it, but in a capitalist society like the US, this is how you really determine how safe something is: how much does it cost to insure?

Yep, insurance is really at quantifying and transferring risk. Maybe the best thing about it is that it translates high, unlikely costs in the future into small, certain costs today, and the latter are far easier to respond to rationally and proportionately.

As a minor point, there's nothing inherently capitalist about it - the largest personal lines auto insurer in the US (like many of the smaller ones) is a mutual company, meaning that it doesn't have outside shareholders and functions more or less as a cooperative owned by its policyholders.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#108

Post by n2d4 »

harhargange wrote: post #89

To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain. I live in a place where public transport already has l…

As a European, this seems like an impossible feat at this point. It has been tried, but the cities have evolved in a way where this is just unfeasible.

EU cities have mostly been built to be dense around train & bus stations. US cities (besides NY) are extremely large, flat, and spread out. Even if you had public transportation, it would be practically impossible to get from A to B because there are no hotspots besides the downtown/city center.

The concept of a "car city" is real. It's a vicious cycle that the US entered at some point, and besides rebuilding the cities entirely there's not much hope for public transport.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#109

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

thfuran wrote: post #97
Dylan16807 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about Uber without self-driving, then the vast majority of costs are outside of Uber's hands. Even if they get their servers, payment processing, and customer support down to $0, it only helps the business model a mild amount. On the other hand Waymo is paying enormous amounts to design systems and outfit their cars, and when that gets significantly cheaper the entire service gets significantly cheap…

But probably not better than just needing drivers who you can trick into providing cars.

If you start driving for Uber with some vehicle that’s extremely expensive to operate, like a Land Rover or something, maybe you’d lose money, but that’s not the norm. It’s common for Uber drivers to finance their vehicles by driving for Uber. This obviously only works if there is a surplus of value created by driving that vehicle for Uber. It’s not like independently wealthy people are subsidizing Uber by donating the equity of their cars. The cost of cars used by drivers is ultimately paid by customers, there is not some magic trick here.
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