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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

#481

Post by mulmen »

rsynnott wrote: post #451
mulmen wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the last mile is walked. That’s the problem. It’s not practical to put a train station or bus stop at every corner. This is why cars exist everywhere. If those cars can be automated they can be shared even more efficiently than Ubers and allow more efficient bus and train routes.

> It’s not practical to put a train station or bus stop at every corner. Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km. There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem,…

> Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km.

Sounds impractical.

> There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.

We have a solution to this. It’s called a taxi.

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

#482

Post by mulmen »

kmarc wrote: post #478
mulmen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they banned horses yet? My money is on never. This technology doesn’t need a ban to succeed. It just needs to be allowed.

Change the question to "highways" then. (at least in most European countries, AFAIK horses are banned from them)

That’s a completely different question though. Horses were banned from railroads too.

You tried to establish self driving cars as a threat to human driven cars using horses as an example.

Highways were invented for cars. Horses were never allowed there.

There’s no comparable proposal for self driving cars.

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

#483

Post by lopkeny12ko »

I'm surprised that no one has yet commented on the inherent reporting bias here. Waymo commissioned a study, conducted by Waymo employees, for Waymo to study Waymo's own safety record, and found that Waymo is safer than human drivers. Has this finding ever been independently verified?

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

#484

Post by mulmen »

shafyy wrote: post #360
mulmen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but hear me out. Self driving public transit. Right now I have to walk 12 minutes to a bus stop because the one literally in front of my house was closed due to a lack of drivers. Then I wait 3-10 minutes for a bus that takes 20 minutes to get to the bus hub in my neighborhood. It takes 8 minutes to drive there. If my neighborhood bus route was replaced or supplemented with self driving shuttle busses feeding that…

Sure. I'm not saying that there no use cases. But I don't see the US turning into a public transportation utopia just because there are self-driving buses available. Because the reason public transportation sucks in countries where it sucks is not because drivers are expensive.

But it does suck because drivers are expensive. Seattle is struggling to find drivers. It's a constant battle to identify the most used routes and keep them staffed but that's why there's not a critical mass of riders to pay enough fares to hire drivers.

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

#485

Post by mulmen »

notahacker wrote: post #375
mulmen wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Uber drivers don’t have any special qualifications. That’s kinda the point of Uber. Is there any reason to expect them to be safer than the average driver?

Not being super nervous about being behind the wheel, not showing off their speed to their friends and probably being sober is a starting point

I think we both agree Uber drivers aren't the worst drivers on the road but your assertion is that Uber drivers are professionals and so somehow better drivers than the average. But they aren't. They're actually average drivers. So a self-driving car actually has a very low bar to clear.

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

#486

Post by Brian_K_White »

usrusr wrote: post #147
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…

As a cyclist I avoid eye contact like the plague: it's only a small minority of drivers, but that small minority is dangerous enough to outweigh all benefits eye contact might have with others. Some drivers will inevitably read eye contact as "the cyclist has seen me and understood that my big and dangerous car will crush them without taking harm so they will yield no matter what traffic rules might say, so I will go…

I already responded but really I got tricked into missing the actual point and arguing about an implimentation detail.

So you don't make eye contact. That's nice. But the issue isn't actually about eye contact. It's about the human having less control over their own well being.

Whether you personally ever look at a driver, it doesn't change the fact that it's a thing that a person can normally do to determine if it is a good idea to proceed or not. It is never wrong to be aware of your surroundings and look ahead into whatever you are about to do next.

If you look at a driver and that driver takes that as some sort of challenge like a monkey, well A: I've never seen that but whatever, anything is possible. B: It doesn't change anything. You still attained the goal of determining what to do. You now know to stay clear of that particular car.

With no driver, and no other form of feedback driven by you, the humans outside of the driverless car are more powerless than they already were. They are reduced to trusting and hoping.

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

#487

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rglullis wrote: post #480
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regardless of situation, the cost of labor has nothing to do with it Sort of. The cost of labor is the cost floor of the competition. So long as Waymo et al are smaller than the competition, i.e. so long as they don’t need to compete on price, they should tack under their direction. They aren’t setting the market price. The moment they need to compete, they can tank the price or increase service quality. (They coul…

> They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition. And believing that this is likely to happen is the problem I have with the whole proposition. I don't see any real player with capital, data and tech know-how to get into this in a way to turn it into a proper competition.

You advocate blowing everything up because you don’t see a way to your favoured state?

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

#488

Post by kmarc »

mulmen wrote: post #482
kmarc wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change the question to "highways" then. (at least in most European countries, AFAIK horses are banned from them)

That’s a completely different question though. Horses were banned from railroads too. You tried to establish self driving cars as a threat to human driven cars using horses as an example. Highways were invented for cars. Horses were never allowed there. There’s no comparable proposal for self driving cars.

This comment shows exactly why I like this question.

Lot of related topics to branch out to! I actually wasn't ever interested in the "cut off date", but all these side topics, and why some people think differently about what the trajectory looks like today.

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

#489

Post by rglullis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #487
rglullis wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition. And believing that this is likely to happen is the problem I have with the whole proposition. I don't see any real player with capital, data and tech know-how to get into this in a way to turn it into a proper competition.

You advocate blowing everything up because you don’t see a way to your favoured state?

I'm saying that we shouldn't be so enthusiastic about the idea of giving more power to one of the largest corporations in the world, and that the idea is only worth pursuing if we have better ways to put them under check. To call this "advocating for blowing everything up" is just weasel wording and really disgusting rhetoric.

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

#490

Post by likpok »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #379
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself" As it should. You’re objectively higher risk, particularly if you’ve ever been at fault for a crash or gotten a ticket.

"More" is the critical word here. I don't see any reason why insurance premiums should increase. Insurance premiums aren't sin taxes or some governmental incentive, they are offered by private firms. I would expect premium levels to continue to be driven by liability pool payouts plus a profit margin. Autonomous vehicles don't increase driver risk or liability pool payouts. IF anything, they reduce them due to safer…

Insurance always balances between cost pooling and making people pay for their increased risk. Car insurance has always been more expensive for riskier drivers: young men pay more, driving “high risk” cars pay more.

If the overall liability pool goes down but the human drivers become an outsized part of it, the insurance company will likely shift that cost to them. If they don’t, someone could set up an autonomous-only insurance company (or google could just insure itself) to take advantage of the lower risk, making the human insurance more expensive (even more so that the liability since the overall pool will be much smaller).

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