Live data from Hacker News

A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

waymo.com

181–190 of 497 posts

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#181
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transport cannot do everything cars can do, especially outside big cities. Better public transport can reduce the need for car ownership - I did not own a car for much of my life for that reason. However, it does not eliminate it.

Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town. Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.

> Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town.

I do not know about lazy. I find it a lot easier to use public transport myself. I would like to see numbers for "most" especially outside the US. Very few of my car trips are by myself without something to carry.

> Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.

Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.

Another problem outside big cities is that some buses and trains, especially at quieter times, also run pretty empty. There were about four or five people in the bus my daughter got into this morning (on a weekday morning!) and its close to the end of a journey between two reasonably large towns. The next bus gets very full though.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#182

I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Waymo would say "don't worry, it sees you" and maybe the numbers even show they do some percentage more than the average human driver, but that still does not reproduce the self-help aspect of you looking at a driver until you see that that driver sees you. I…

This. I'm always surprised how few people know as pedestrians to look at me, the driver and not my car. Some don't even look at the car. I developed a habit of looking for their gaze and if they don't look back, assume they're not fully aware and just am more cautious. This works because I, as a human, know this and can compensate when they just rush the crosswalk without being fully aware of their surroundings. How…

Just because a pedestrian is looking in your direction, it doesn't mean they can actually meet your gaze. I don't drive and always try to make eye contact with drivers, but tinted windows and windshield glare often make it impossible in reality.

So I will stare at where I know the driver's face ought to be, but I can't actually tell whether they have seen me. Tinted windows darken the inside of the car and that makes windshield glare all I can actually see.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it succeeds, self-driving technology is likely to be integrated into public transit systems, enhancing their reliability and overall efficiency.

With self-driving tech, buses could be made a lot smaller and more frequent. They are large and infrequent because of fixed per-vehicle costs (mostly the driver). EDIT: Small size then enables personalized routing: a multi-passenger taxi taking a set of people to similar destinations.

That makes a lot of sense, I never thought of the labor as the limiting factor on bus route (clearly I just never thought very hard about it) but boy would it be nice if there was a 9 passenger van every 5 minutes to replace a full size bus every 30.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#184

I think insurance prices will drive adoption of self driving very quickly. Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for n…

Why would insurance need to get more expensive for manual drivers as self-driving adoption increases? Ideally, insurance cost for self-driving cars would just be lower than insurance costs now (proportional to risk), and even insurance costs for manual drivers might go down because their risk decreases as well.

I think it's more about when the market is still majority manual. 20% self driving might see premiums for manual cars go up significantly because manual drivers would have more at fault accidents per mile than before (assuming the same rate of accidents, but most accidents with a self driving car are the manual driver's fault).

There will also be things like not having DWIs and even cheap parking (since the car can drive away and park) that'll net out for self driving. And feedback loops there- the same size police force only pulling over manual cars from a smaller and smaller pool.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NASA space pen story as you call it is a nice quip. It's also a complete lie. The Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets. Pencil cores are made of graphite, when you write with it, small bits of graphite break off. On land it just falls down, but in space it floats around and attaches to things. Graphite conducts electricity and it caused countless sho…

> Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets Note, too, that NASA didn't pay to develop the pen. Fisher did. > If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)

> Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)

I genuinely don't know. Do they use pencils still or switched to the space pen?

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I'm always surprised how few people know as pedestrians to look at me, the driver and not my car. Some don't even look at the car. I developed a habit of looking for their gaze and if they don't look back, assume they're not fully aware and just am more cautious. This works because I, as a human, know this and can compensate when they just rush the crosswalk without being fully aware of their surroundings. How…

It's probably equally simple for a machine (if not simpler) to figure out if a human has looked at the oncoming vehicle with sufficiently advanced cameras and computer vision. However, we use a lot more hints (change of pace, facial expressions that indicate presence and focus, nodding etc), which, while not outside the realm of AI CV, would surely need lots of training, yet it comes pretty naturally to humans.

The problem is not whether the machine can see the human, or even whether the machine knows that the human has seen the machine.

The problem is that the human currently has no way to know whether the machine has seen the human.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#187
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody says it has to be a car form factor. It can be a self driving van or shuttle or bus. Last mile is a nightmare with all public transit. With the low population density of the US we need a lot of small vehicles to feed transit hubs.

For "last mile", we already have bikes, scooters, skates, plain walking...

Really fun stuff but most people have a limited amount of time in the day so if they can afford to take a car they're going to take a car.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#188
post #108

I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Waymo would say "don't worry, it sees you" and maybe the numbers even show they do some percentage more than the average human driver, but that still does not reproduce the self-help aspect of you looking at a driver until you see that that driver sees you. I…

This makes a lot of sense, also for pedestrians and other drivers. Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat.

> Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat.

I wonder if the safety gains could be just due to people being creeped out around them, and behaving more cautiously. Perhaps results would be different if they carried mannequins simulating a real driver in the wheel.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#189
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transport cannot do everything cars can do, especially outside big cities. Better public transport can reduce the need for car ownership - I did not own a car for much of my life for that reason. However, it does not eliminate it.

Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town. Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.

Ok but hear me out. Self driving public transit.

Right now I have to walk 12 minutes to a bus stop because the one literally in front of my house was closed due to a lack of drivers. Then I wait 3-10 minutes for a bus that takes 20 minutes to get to the bus hub in my neighborhood. It takes 8 minutes to drive there. If my neighborhood bus route was replaced or supplemented with self driving shuttle busses feeding that hub then a 1 hour door-to-door trip could be 30 minutes.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself" As it should. You’re objectively higher risk, particularly if you’ve ever been at fault for a crash or gotten a ticket.

They should also ask for more money from sick people when it comes to health insurance, as they’re more prone to getting sick again and again and hence consume resources, after all how many Luigis can there be? Which is to say that naked capitalism works until it doesn’t, and when it stops working big chances are that it won’t do it gracefully, see how present-day health insurance CEOs are now scared shitless of Big…

If self-driving cars are widely available, and they can drive everywhere a normal car can go, then you're not driving manually because you need to do so, you're driving manually because you like it, and the society isn't there to pay for your hobbies.
Post reply on HN