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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

#391

Post by tim333 »

CalRobert wrote: post #214
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 cou…

>removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute

The roads only have so much capacity which is not going to change much whether the cars are self driven or not.

In London they have deliberately reduced road capacity to reduce traffic by blocking off lanes, side streets and the like. I could see a future where the normal way to get around is a self driving cab to the station at each end with a train for the main journey. I know you can do that now but the human cabs driven are kind of expensive.

Maybe something a bit like Zermatt where there is a train station and then it's pedestrianized apart from electric golf cart like taxis. It all works quite well really apart from being expensive. But property being like £1m+ is kind of a symptom of people wanting to be there.

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

#392

Post by arnaudsm »

These results are meaningless, Waymo only drives in controlled, good weather, urban streets, while the human control group does not. This is not science, this is PR. We need independent investigations.

And remember that currently, self-driving cars in California are exempt from traffic tickets : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/self-driv...

We learned that the hard way with Boeing, you cannot trust a company to self-regulate their safety standards. But with Musk in power, the legislation might encourage them to do so.

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

#393

Post by bryanlarsen »

bhouston wrote: post #285

Pretty cool. I wonder if this will ever make it to Canada's winter wonderland where there is ice and snow on the road for 4 months of the year (more or less in other areas.)

They've done some testing in Buffalo NY, which gets more snow than pretty much anywhere in Canada.

The hard part about self-driving is dealing with / predicting the behaviour of humans. That's something that humans are good at and robots are bad at. And SF has more weird human behaviour than anywhere in Canada.

Predicting the behaviour of vehicles in snow is something computers are much better at than humans. Solving the sensor problem for driving in rain/snow also seems like a standard tech problem where vehicles can quickly become much better at than humans who are limited to mark 1 eyeball.

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

#394

Post by foobarqux »

Reubend wrote: post #175
necovek wrote: post #146

This sounds quite a bit like massaging statistics until you get the numbers you like. A few things that pop to mind: did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive (under the influence, no valid driving permit, cars with issues [braking broken]...)? (This mostly matters for evaluating the average performance compared to average non-impaired human — a drunk person might mess up with self-driving vehicle sensors…

> 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…

> No, they didn't. Their methodology didn't adjust for things like highway vs city street miles, although it did adjust for city and state.

Doesn't Waymo only drive in the city? And damage/injury is much greater on highways? If so that pretty much makes the study worthless.

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

#395

Post by necovek »

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #274
necovek wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the guarantee we'll have only fully up-to-date, safety-checked self-driving vehicles in the future with no messed up sensors or controls (there'll be impaired people doing the checks, right? :))? This is simple with a small, experimental fleet — so we are looking at the best case scenario for these vehicles, but the question is what does it fall down to in a realistic commercial application? That would also be…

I think you should open the PDF and look into that xD Really they discussed this. I'm still skeptical that they measure what we are interested in. But _your_ points they discuss

I went through the report, and they reference other studies that consider my points, but they end up only measuring incident numbers, don't specifically say how comparable were the driving conditions (iow whether they are representative). If anything, they could have removed incidents by human drivers which did not happen within their operating constraints, but I did not see that mentioned.

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

#396

Post by yencabulator »

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…

> use more subtle and inadvertent signals like the slight movement to the line telling me they're likely about to switch lanes

For what it's worth, this was explicitly taught in Northern European driving classes, especially in the context of turns. It would literally translate as "grouping" or "making a formation". You "group right" to make a right turn (think aligning text left/center/right). You can look at a line of cars and immediately know which ones are preparing to turn, even from an angle where turn signals aren't noticeable.

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

#397

Post by tommiegannert »

returningfory2 wrote: post #334
mstade wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Waymo failure mode of false positives (signals but doesn't turn) seems much better than the human failure mode of false negatives (doesn't signal but turns)!

Human drivers also sometimes forget to turn their signals off, to the same effect as the described Waymo behavior: uncertainty of intent.

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

#398

Post by creer »

rglullis wrote: post #86
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…

The whole thing with self-driving cars is that it feels like the story of NASA's space pen. All this money being poured into a technology that would not be needed if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.

> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply

- There is nothing simple about it.

- There is nothing inevitable to this appearance of "not enough money". For example very little of self-driving cars development has been on public funds. For example, there is plenty of money in California govt. And plenty of money in US federal govt.

- One doesn't prevent the other. You can't seriously argue that better transit would remove all needs for automated driving.

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

#399

Post by yencabulator »

mulmen wrote: post #235
rglullis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still own a car because in many cases you can't beat convenience What about the places where people own cars not because it is the better choice, but the only choice?

Then self driving vehicles will be a new choice.

Self driving vehicles, with current technology, are unrealistic outside major cities. Major cities are the places where you least need a personal car.

Google Maps still thinks the speed limit on a nearby highway is 35 mph. We spent several months without lane markers on the highway. Any vehicle driving around here based on the current self-driving architecture, requiring central mapping/planning and good infrastructure, would be ridiculously unsafe.

Not to mention how lost they would be the moment they turned off the highway.

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

#400

Post by tim333 »

arnaudsm wrote: post #392

These results are meaningless, Waymo only drives in controlled, good weather, urban streets, while the human control group does not. This is not science, this is PR. We need independent investigations. And remember that currently, self-driving cars in California are exempt from traffic tickets : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/self-driv... We learned that the hard way with Boeing, you cannot trust…

Google says

>Waymo One, is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the following cities:

>Los Angeles Waymo One is available across nearly 80 square miles of LA County, including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Downtown LA.

>San Francisco Waymo One is available across 55 square miles of the Bay Area...

24/7 across those areas sounds different to what you mention.

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