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

That might be normal in the US, but in Europe it's very common to take public transport to work every day.

I know, I'm in Europe. And yes, public transport is an option but a lot of people still own and drive cars(just on my street every single house has at least 2 cars each, even though our public transport options are excellent).

The fire service changed significantly once life and health insurance companies started calculating how expensive it was to insure fire fighters.

It turned out that being a fire fighter was extremely dangerous, so insurance premiums were costing more than equipment! Underwriters Laboratories started producing literature on how to make fire fighting safer, and now NFPA has turned that into strict guidelines that fire companies must follow or lose out on insurance claims.

For example, fire fighters now must ride inside the cab. No more hanging on the back (falling off the back was very common, causing many severe injuries). Seatbelts must be worn inside the cab. An SCBA must be worn inside any dangerous atmosphere. Turn out gear must be inspected after every burn, and replaced every ten years. The list goes on.

Finally, there is now a whole new branch of study called "fire dynamics" that is all about the science of fire fighting. UL regularly performs experiments at my local academy to test various techniques on different types of building fires. They will instrument a whole building, then start a fire a certain way, and measure what happens with different techniques. In just the last ten years they've changed a lot of former "best practices". For example, they now recommend what they call a "transitional attack" where you shoot in a few seconds of water through a window from the outside, then make entry. This is proven to greatly reduce heat in the building and allows for a better chance to put out the fire vs just running straight in. This has been a huge upset in my area, with a lot of the older folks thinking we should just always make entry ASAP. However, it is proven time and again that transitional attack is optimal in most situations. The few seconds "wasted" is proven to actually make fighting the fire safer and more effective. It is counterintuitive, but it works.

All this because insurance was accurately calculating how dangerous fire fighting really is.

Of course, there is a flip side to everything. A lot of the "fun" of fire fighting is now turning into "rules". Hanging on the back used to be an exciting reward for showing up even if it was a false alarm. Breaking all the windows at a house used to be a fun thing to do before UL found that it makes a fire significantly more dangerous. As the profession matures, we're faced with less personal agency and more checklists and paperwork. This is destroying volunteer fire fighting. Most of the US is served by volunteer fire fighters. As it becomes much harder to keep up with the rules and paperwork, volunteerism is dying. Many companies across the nation are on the verge of collapse because no one wants to volunteer. Between the rules and the cost of living crisis, almost no one has energy to show up.

So nothing comes for free, insurance made fire fighting much safer, but now it's much harder for volunteers, which are the majority of the fire service.

>Abs has been mandatory in the us since 2012

The average US vehicle's age is more than 12 years.

>and was very common long before that (my base model truck from 1999 has it)

My non-base-model car from 1995 didn't.

>we can consider cars without abs statistical noise by now.

I'm not so sure that's true. But even if it is, that doesn't mean that there are no meaningful differences in safety between an exclusively new (or at least very recent) and maintained vehicle fleet and the general population.

Waymo drove a total of 3M miles in 2022, for reference (driverless and non-driverless.) For fatalities, there's a national average of about 1.3 deaths per 100 million miles driven, so you wouldn't expect a Waymo fatality for a while yet if it was a standard human driver. Obviously this kind of thing lives and dies by the edge cases and in my opinion we're going to need a massive expansion in the fleets to really make them safe - by definition you will encounter very few edge cases if you do far less driving. Total miles driven in the US is over 3 trillion per year, so Waymo drives less than 1 millionth of the total miles in the US.

For an intuitive way to visualize this, you can think of Waymo as a fleet of 30 truck drivers, each driving 100k miles per year (which is a typical number for truck drivers.) Thirty truck drivers having good insurance rates is a great sign, but obviously if you hire a 31st guy and he causes a ten-car pileup then your statistics will be in the toilet. Thirty truck drivers is a tiny company. The Stevie Wonder Institute For Trucking has some 15-20k drivers and recently went nine days without an accident [0].

That's not meant to belittle Waymo, of course, their achievements are very impressive and they are clearly leading the pack. One argument you could make in favor of Waymo is that highway driving is simpler, less risky statistically, and makes up most US miles driven - and they do very little of that. I'm looking forward to an expansion there, that'll really get their mileage up.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkrnWS1ea8 [1]

[1] yes I did just link to "Mutha Trucka News" on HN.