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

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

#211

Post by [deleted] »

notahacker wrote: post #178
mulmen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then shouldn’t the comparison be to Uber instead of an ambulance?

Ambulance drivers might be a step too far unless autonomous systems are expected to drive ambulances at high speed and run red lights. But my point is that they really do need to be a lot better than the median driver given their real world operational expectations, and especially significantly better than the mean driver they're being benchmarked against here, who probably loses their license for the bodily injuries…

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by tialaramex »

Dalewyn wrote: post #170
kiba wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impressive and all, but my reaction to self driving cars are completely different. It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.

You're conflating two tangential things, automatic driving is automatic driving whether it's a car or a bus. The biggest issue that automatic driving needs to overcome is that it's sharing the road with manually driven cars. We've already had the technology for a long time to have perfect automatic driving if the environment was fully automatic; computers are unparalleled at accurately sharing and processing data wit…

GoA 4 (no trained personnel onboard) is only practical for entirely grade separated (ie it's almost impossible for anything else to be there, no cars, no bicycles, no pedestrians) routes.

Even GoA 3 is fraught without this constraint, and for GoA 2 you're still paying for a driver because although the machine does most of the work the human has to handle the inevitable deviations from the model.

GoA 4 railways exist, if you're putting a metro in tunnels or elevating it obviously this is grade separated, and in principle you can do it for long distance rail if you're willing to eliminate at grade crossings (expensive). But they are nothing like a city bus route for example.

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

#213

Post by mulmen »

eksapsy wrote: post #194
heroprotagonist wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The future is bright. Ask the 2.3 million employed drivers in the United States how the future looks. Because pretty soon, they'll all need to be doing something else. And I don't see a technology that will open up 2.3 million jobs for them to move into, or training initiatives to support them while they shift professions. The future _could_ be bright, if we approach AI right, and build the social safety net to sof…

Technology will open up new jobs. But I don't expect employed drivers to suddenly become data scientists. Its a fallacy we constantly use as an argument when we talk about technology taking people's jobs. Low specialty professions have been in my view a great way to have people employed, people who may be less fortunate, unspecialized or even students. Now that such professions start getting absorbed by tech, I don't…

> Now that such professions start getting absorbed by tech, I don't know how those people are supposed to get by.

Now? This has been going on since jobs were invented.

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

#214

Post by CalRobert »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #93

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…

I ride my bike several times a day, and I have very mixed views about Waymo, etc. I care immensely about traffic safety (so much I moved to the Netherlands).

If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now.

But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street.

NotJustBikes discusses this well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.

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

#216

Post by nextweek2 »

mstade wrote: post #105
mulmen wrote: post #56

I rode in a Waymo recently and was amazed at how good it was. It was easily in the top 5 best drivers I have ridden with. Really really impressive. It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive. It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the no…

I was just in CA for a few weeks and drove in SF quite a bit. There are Waymo cars everywhere and from the perspective of a driver I was more than a little cautious driving behind or next to one of them. I would rate their driving as quite good, but their signaling of intent was terrible. More than once did I see them use turn signals, only to never actually turn. Turn the signals on, then off again, then on again, e…

In England we call them "Indicators" as opposed to turn signals. My driving instructor said, they are call that because they are only indicating they might go that way. Never assume they will. It was some defensive driving advice.

I can understand that it's annoying that inconsistent use of turn signals is an annoyance, it isn't as bad a people that don't use them at all, but my understand is that the American road system doesn't have roundabouts like we do, which kind of require good indicator use for smooth driving.

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

#217

Post by myrmidon »

Dalewyn wrote: post #199
myrmidon wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Insurance premiums are higher for higher risk individuals/circumstances and lower for lower risk ones. If automatic driving lowers the floor of risk due to even lower risk than even the lowest risk human driver, insurance premiums will adjust to compensate and accomodate the now higher risk human driver compared to the now lower risk computer driver. And here's the kicker: Insurance premiums don't even have to increa…

I'm not disputing that insurance for full-auto cars is likely to be cheaper in the future, but I don't believe that manual driving insurance will ever get "cripplingly" expensive-- it might even go down compared to now thanks to reduced accident rates (contributed by full-auto cars).

Also compare vintage-car insurance (which are in many cases drastically less safe): Pricing is perfectly viable there and has been for decades.

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

#218

Post by palata »

khazhoux wrote: post #60
palata wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're "objectively" higher risk, based on a study by the company building the autopilot, right? How objective is that?

Like the Borg, every Waymo is the same driver. So in column A, the insurance company has a meta-driver with many millions of miles of statistics. In column B, we have slow-reaction and non-lidar-equipped you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago.

> you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago

This is factually wrong: I did not.

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

#219

Post by graemep »

mulmen wrote: post #189
shafyy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

More frequent smaller busses is a great idea. If self driving busses helps achieve that, it would be amazing.

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

#220

Post by Aeolun »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #125
Aeolun wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your population density. Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself.

> Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself Japan has .67 vehicles per person, almost 80% America's .85 [1] and above many European countries. They travel about a fifth as many miles per capita as America [2]. But again, four fifths and a fifth. Nowhere close to zero. There isn't a developed econ…

Hence why I’m talking about Tokyo. Not Japan. Living in the countryside basically requires a car by definition. People also often have a car, but don’t use it that much. Maybe you’ll get more interesting numbers if you compare miles traveled per person?

Found only for 1997, but increases the discrepancy to 1:2.5 : https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm

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