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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

#261

Post by mulmen »

rglullis wrote: post #238
mulmen wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grocery store is 1.3 miles from here but it’s a 300’ climb and it’s 42f and raining right now. Even with my e-bike that’s not pleasant. On a conventional bike that’s unrealistic for all but the most hardcore cyclists. There’s a bus that serves that route but the stop is uncovered and service is unreliable because it’s immediately after a rest stop where the human drivers take care of their biological needs. A rob…

> stop is uncovered and service is reliable And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure? Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience" (at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastr…

> And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure?

It has occurred to me.

> Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience"

Not sure where you got this idea. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m still excited for self driving vehicles to compliment the existing system.

> at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure

Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages.

As I said there’s no requirement that the self driving vehicle be a car form factor. A self-driving bus could improve access and reliability.

> when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?

How?

I choose to live in a city with good (for America) transit. I vote for every transit measure available to me. I ride the bus. I commute by bike when I can. I don’t own a car.

What else should I do?

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

#262

Post by AstralStorm »

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…

Or maybe it could have a signal that says it's safe to cross.

Humans tended to use hand gestures for that around here. Or flashing front or turn lights to disambiguate it. And the person crossing would often nod or just start moving.

AI could be even more explicit about it. It can check if you're noticing the signal too, much like the driver does.

People are conditioned to respond to crossing signals, why not give the self driving car one of those.

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

#263

Post by cultofmetatron »

chollida1 wrote: post #12
wiz21c wrote: post #3

So one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself".

That's the dream. As a cyclist I would hope that day comes very soon.

yea I don't particularly trust a for profit corporation to take my safety as a cyclist more than the minimum viable consideration. I used to be really excited about self driving cars until I realized that in US culture, it would basically be used to further prioritize car dependent infrastructure at the expense of proper walkable spaces and alternative transportation.

we could have amazing and SAFE cycling infrastructure NOW if american culture wasn't so objectively trash.

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

#264

Post by rsanek »

jstummbillig wrote: post #226
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #35

Is there any possible future, where Waymo is NOT one of the major players in self driving software?

Have they solved their mapping problem? Because that, more so than the added Lidar hardware cost, seems like the lynchpin here: As soon as Tesla works, it works everywhere*. Last I heard Waymo, they have to do every city, one at a time – and there are a lot of cities.

I've been hearing that Tesla's FSD is just around the corner for a decade. so far it sounds like they're millions of miles behind Waymo

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

#265

Post by AstralStorm »

rglullis wrote: post #225
jazzyjackson wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vans to complement buses are definitely a thing in São Paulo, and the cost of labor is not a limiting factor.

Really the lack of stops and parking places is, and would be even worse for self driving vehicles deployed in numbers. Unless it's self driving motor bikes or such small personal transportation.

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

#266

Post by AstralStorm »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #244
rglullis wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice strawman. I am not saying to get rid of cars altogether. I am saying that it would be better (and cheaper) for everyone if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first. Reduce the amount of yearly trips that are done by car. Provide alternatives . The important thing about Japan or Europe is not "they don't have cars", but "people make 3-4x less trips by car…

> if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first Waymo has raised about $11bn [1]. That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3]. These things aren't competing. To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency, it's not a good look for American public transit. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10…

Try using a unit per person. It starts to look much less rosy for Waymo and also do not forget roads are still public infrastructure that has to be paid for and maintained.

What, you think Waymo will be able to weasel out of road tax or drive without roads?

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

#267

Post by rsanek »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94
michaelt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google/Waymo actually started way earlier, and had fistfuls of cash from the very start. Google hired a bunch of people who'd done well in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge [1] - including Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson who lead the winning team. Thrun is also behind Google Street View which in some regards [2] looks a lot like a self-driving-car sensor suite. So Google was having LIDAR-equipped, high-precision-GPS-eq…

> the confidence to design for L5 autonomy from the start L4. Waymo can't "drive everywhere in all conditions" [1]. (Nobody can. Not to L4 standards of never requiring "you to take over driving.") [1] https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

it can't drive everywhere now, but that doesn't mean they're not designing for that future.

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

#268

Post by zild3d »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #210

Did the paper really prove its claim? It set aside more than half of Waymo's claims history and compared only the most recent portion of its own history to the all drivers benchmark. All drivers do things that Waymo doesn't like operate outside specific city centers, drive in snow or other severe weather, real people drive more during the day in traffic but Waymo is biased toward nighttime (less traffic), and real pe…

why should DUIs be excluded? There are regular human drivers out there at various levels of intoxication.

I do want to know waymo vs all population. But yes it should be compared in the same areas during the same period.

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

#269

Post by hnaccount_rng »

necovek wrote: post #230
Reubend wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive One could argue here that it would be unfair to exclude the worst performing humans. Plenty of humans cause accidents for easily preventable reasons, but that's an honest part of our behavior. Or to rephrase, I think excluding the categories of people who drive terribly, but do still drive nonetheless, would be less representative of reality. > Did Waymo drive a…

I understand that viewpoint from an insurance perspective, but not necessarily from my own safety perspective: I wonder how well Waymo would fare in circumstances I see as a driver. Eg. humans can control whether they drive under the influence or not (eg. if you don't take your car to a bar, you ain't coming back driving it). But most notably, aggregated statistics like these focus on comparisons similar to comparing…

I get where you are coming from and you are correct. This is, up to a point, a PR piece of Waymo and we should take that into account. But they are pretty transparent about what they are doing. You just have to read the report. And for their metric, which rounds to "all distance travelled in the interesting ZIP codes", they are succeeding. What I'd take away from this is: If you give them a different metric, they can optimise for that too and they will end up being better than humans.

That doesn't answer the questions: 1) Is it worth it? (I.e. what does it cost to achieve that) and 2) Is a Waymo better in any situation? I guess they don't have the answer to either yet. I'm pretty sure their cost-per-mile is still dropping like a rock (probably though not fast enough for their accountants) and they haven't reached all situations yet either. But I wouldn't bet on "because it's too hard", but rather "because we didn't get there yet" (and yes, they will have started with the easy part, as they should)

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

#270

Post by rsanek »

schlipity wrote: post #250

Since you are completely removing at least 1 human from potential bodily injury claims, wouldn't you need a greater than 100% reduction in bodily injury claims in order for this to be better? I mean when you are literally removing 1 person from possible injury, you literally can't have the same number of bodily injury claims. It can only be less.

are you? somewhere around 60-80% of miles driven are people alone in their vehicles. aside from the car driving itself somewhere, when there's a passenger in there that's the same as your average car.
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