> 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.
People can't make cost-effective options appear by sheer willpower.
They can bike short distances, but longer trips would depend on access to vehicles they don't own, whether transit or other people's cars.
If you give them enough warning they can adapt. But for a change like this the only solution for many people is "don't live there, good luck moving".
Those news should be carefully regulated. After working for 2 years in the field as an engineering manager directly responsible in getting good numbers, none of the claims of the time were genuine, but were just framed in a way that provided the best outlook. I wonder if it’s still the case.
You forgot the number came from the insurance industry directly, who will bear the blunt cost if their calculations are wrong. So alone due to their self-interest, I believe those numbers are solid.
« Waymo says data shows ». The insurer never said anything, it’s just Waymo saying that some of their own reasoning based on those numbers reached the conclusions they want to see - and they paid some press release company to articulate this narrative.
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…
Do you know the density of Switzerland? People in the US like owning homes.
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 don't think this is true at all. There are at least 5 talking points that are much more common and frankly more persuasive than the promise of self driving cars. 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. 2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in con…
Point 5 is often false. Having to park my car at B, and then again at A when I get home, can be a significant hassle. Far easier to simply arrive and have no vehicle to worry about.
Driving also takes effort and can be stressful in traffic. Not to mention gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.
The goal here is not to see who is the best under imaginary conditions, it's to determine whether driverless cars are safe in real life as currently deployed. The question you're asking is irrelevant because a world in which all humans don't drink, text or have anger issues is not real.
I think the question would be better framed as “would I, someone who doesn’t do dumb things while driving, be safer in a driverless car?” Despite the universality of what you cite, driving accidents are likely an 80:20 issue where a small fraction of people cause most of the harm.
"Would I" is the wrong question entirely.
Almost everyone thinks they're better than average, which is statistically impossible, of course.
No one caring about public safety will ever ask "would i", but "would the average person" because while they cannot avoid one specific accident, they're not trying to, they're trying to reduce the average: hence only average matters. To be completely honest, that's not completely true either, but it's the starting point... other things they must definitely consider is "would this AI cause fatal accidents by doing extremely dumb things, even if very rarely?" - because imagine that deaths are reduced by 90% when most vehicles are self-driving... but that every accident that happens is due to some extremely dumb bug, like "every 2 million parkings, the car will just reverse too fast without checking for obstacles and runover a child". That kind of thing would make for very bad PR and people are very sensitive to that kind of thing - even though that's not the most rational behaviour (as countless other children would've been saved in the grand scheme of things).
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…
I love public transport, however what driverless enable is very different: point-to-point personal transportation is something buses cannot achieve yet.
If the accident data for humans contains information about weather, location, additional complications, then it should be possible to only filter out accidents that are within Waymo's restriction. You'll similarly need to filter the human-driven miles, but a statistical approach doesn't seem to hard. So ... possible, but TFA doesn't say, of course.
Of course insurance data doesn't contain that. Have you worked in the real world?
You've unfortunately gotten back in the habit of breaking the site guidelines regularly - not just in this comment but in many others. Examples:
I had the impression that you'd largely fixed this for quite a long time, which was great, but this is not acceptable. We have to rate-limit and eventually ban accounts that post like this. I don't want to ban you so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick properly to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Aren't they operating under a lot of constraints? The comparison should be with human drivers operating under similar conditions and on similar roads, similar cars(eg. new ones), weather conditions etc. Plus they have a fleet of support folks and standby remote and dispatchable operators which cannot be cheap, we get no insight into the financials except that they're losing several billion dollars a year. If at the e…
"The comparison should be with human drivers operating under similar conditions and on similar roads, similar cars(eg. new ones), weather conditions etc." It is my guess only, but a significant difference would be that robots cannot get drunk, don't drive in a sleep-deprived state and don't get distracted by texting at the wheel.