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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

#271

Post by Swenrekcah »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #270
Swenrekcah wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said this was the only argument people made. But it is one of the strawmen/distractions that are commonly thrown up in at least some areas. To answer the bullet points you made: >1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion. Yes, a lot of public projects are allowed to be o…

> the micro-mobility devices of recent years really do solve the problem of this for many or most I really just think you either don't know or aren't thinking about how most people live with this statement. Micro mobility is great in urban areas, but for the vast majority of americans it is a complete non starter. No one wants to use a scooter on a 4 lane road where everyone is going 50, and that's the reality for al…

Well sure, I am talking about urban areas mostly.

Similar things hold for regional transit, trains are better than cars (for reducing traffic jams and road wear) and then depending on the particular circumstances one would pick the best option for last mile.

And like I added, this is where self driving taxis could really shine.

Re scooters and snow: build bike paths and service them in the winter. Easy enough and done in many places.

It is all about adding more options for people so they are more free to organise their lives as they want and lighten the traffic load on the roads.

There are people who will only want a car and there are places where mostly only cars (and possibly bikes) make sense and that’s just fine.

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

#272

Post by lost_tourist »

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…

Because we prefer the freedom of cars. I don't like to have to spend 3x as much time on a bus I would hopping in a car and getting to my destination while also dealing with weather concerns as well. It's fine if you like public transportation, please continue to vote and advocate for that, but don't expect the rest of us to have the same position as you.

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

#273

Post by wolverine876 »

yreg wrote: post #49
wolverine876 wrote: post #44

As discussed in the other recent thread, the self-driving industry loves to frame the question this way - How safe are they compared to human drivers? Their consistency and the energy they put into it should indicate how intentional and strategic it is. To understand it, don't be swept along by their framing. Sophisticated communicators - and we can be certain that these businesses have hired some of them - as well a…

Why is it a bad framing? I would frame the question the same way.

I didn't say it was bad; I said it was intentional and strategic, and it's important to understand the intent and strategy.

> I would frame the question the same way.

As I also said, when people accept their framing, they've already won the debate.

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

#274

Post by montag »

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…

For better or worse, Americans love cars. (Happy for you, though.)

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

#275

Post by olliej »

Reubend wrote: post #42
olliej wrote: post #35

Same BS as usual, failing to control for where, when, and how crashes and incidents occur will alway make self driving look safer: they disable themselves in pretty much every situation where crash rates increase: night, rain, types of road, etc. A legitimate comparison would only compare self driving rates to human driven accidents in the same conditions. That these companies continue to repeat this kind of BS makes…

Seems like you wrote all of this out without realizing that they drive 24/7, regardless of weather, and they drive in all roads except highways (granted that's a big difference!) in the cities they're in. Which is to say that most of what you just said is really misleading. The only part that seems relevant to me is the highway driving versus city driving.

Waymo's description. Sentence one. [1]

"Waymo’s system is currently designed so each vehicle operates only within pre-mapped zones under certain conditions."

They don't drive all roads, they require roads to be fully mapped down to a full 3d map of the surface, and if the realtime surface deviates from the mapped surface they immediately reroute to a different road.

[1] https://ltad.com/about/waymo-zones.html

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

#276

Post by olliej »

huytersd wrote: post #48
olliej wrote: post #35

Same BS as usual, failing to control for where, when, and how crashes and incidents occur will alway make self driving look safer: they disable themselves in pretty much every situation where crash rates increase: night, rain, types of road, etc. A legitimate comparison would only compare self driving rates to human driven accidents in the same conditions. That these companies continue to repeat this kind of BS makes…

Almost nothing in your comment is true. Moreover you didn’t bother reading the article let alone the research data.

I did read the article, so I can see that nothing I said was wrong, given the content of the article.

Given one of the first things I said was that they don't drive in all conditions, and the first thing on Waymo's "lets hype self driving" site is that they don't operate in all conditions, I'm fairly sure I'm right here. Unless you can point to the part of the article where it talked about how they controlled for driving conditions and locations of accidents, rather than the part of the article complaining about how their data lumped together unrelated regions.

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

#277

Post by prmoustache »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #266
prmoustache wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If half of them are bad and dangerous, I am talking about bad drivers, regardless of the number. People don't need cars. This is a luxury they based their life one. They can adapt the other way too.

> I am talking about bad drivers, regardless of the number. Th number matters for whether it's feasible to implement. In a large sense everyone is a bad driver. > People don't need cars. This is a luxury they based their life one. They can adapt the other way too. People are stuck in situations that need cars. Adaptation without external help would take decades. Tens of millions would suffer badly. With enough change…

People are much more adaptable than you pretend.

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

#278

Post by Ferret7446 »

braiamp wrote: post #238
kortilla wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dozens of billions are being poured in. That’s we got the California high speed rail connecting nowhere to nothing and BART just barely making it to San Jose. None of that still fixes the last mile problem of suburbia, and buses aren’t a solution. They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.

Have you been to Switzerland? Their public transport system is a mix of busses/short trams and long trip trains. They aren't precisely a high density urban country. They have suburban sectors. The difference here is that they don't make walking a punishment. You can count that everywhere you want to go there's a walking path, even when going off-road. Yes, it's not 100%, but it doesn't need to be. If you can reach 70…

Switzerland is significantly smaller than the US, even ignoring all of the other countless differences. Why can't a startup do the same thing as Google infrastructure and be successful?

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

#279

Post by Tycho »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #153
cipheredStones wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me. I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying. Yeah, i…

It is because one of the go-to talking points for postponing and diffusing support for better transit is the promise of self driving cars that will somehow solve everything. It doesn’t make sense because the traffic jam problem with cars comes not from human drivers but the physics of the car itself, but it is a persistent talking point nevertheless.

I wonder if fully automated traffic could be optimised to remove most congestion problems, if a system was able to coordinate the movements of the driverless vehicles. Theoretical maximum throughout may be much higher than typically realised.

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

#280

Post by withinboredom »

xnx wrote: post #263
withinboredom wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable. Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster? I spend the last 15 minutes of my commute on a bus. Driving vs. bus + train = 3 minutes. I can drive, probably get stuck in traffic, get pissed at angry drivers ... or just chill on a bus and train for 45 minutes. The only time it is worth driving is when I need to-the-minute exactness of when to ar…

> Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster? This is a spot-on description of self-driving cars.

I’m not convinced that self-driving cars is faster than a bus with a dedicated lane.
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