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Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#521

Post by causalscience »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #507
belorn wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed. One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time. For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7k…

It's a runaway process of prioritizing safety over convenience -- and it's wrecking their road base just before self-driving cars would allow them to have both.

If they're actually self-driving they should be able to drive around the obstacles just as well or better than human.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#522

Post by recursive »

aembleton wrote: post #487
recursive wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is close to a particular peeve I have. Occasionally I see signs on the street that say "Slow Down". I'm not talking about the electronic ones connected to radar detectors. Just metal and paint. Here's my problem. If you follow the instructions on the sign, it still says to slow down. There's no threshold for slow enough. No matter how slow you're going, the sign says "Slow Down". So once you become ensnared in t…

You learn how to put those signs into context during your driving lessons, and fail your test if you don't apply that correctly.

I apologize if I gave the impression that I did not understand how to put them into context. Although I don't think my driving lessons ever mentioned it.

This is idle XKCD-style musing.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#523

Post by smarnach »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #470
smarnach wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should default to the calculation of 2-4x the rate. No we should not. We should accept that we don't have any statistically meaningful number at all, since we only have a single incident. Let's assume we roll a standard die once and it shows a six. Statistically, we only expect a six in one sixth of the cases. But we already got one on a single roll! Concluding Waymo vehicles hit 2 to 4 times as many children as…

More data would certainly be better, but it's not as bad as you suggest -- the large number of miles driven till first incident does tell us something statistically meaningful about the incident rate per mile driven. If we view the data as a large sample of miles driven, each with some observed number of incidents, then what we have is "merely" an extremely skewed distribution. I can confidently say that, if you pick…

We get a statistically meaningful result about an upper bound of the incident rate. We get no statistically meaningful lower bound.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#524

Post by tmostak »

loeg wrote: post #460
insane_dreamer wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is generally the problem with self-driving cars, at least in my experience (Tesla FSD). They don't look far enough ahead to anticipate what might happen and already put themselves in a position to prepare for that possibility. I'm not sure they benefit from accumulated knowledge? (Maybe Waymo does, that's an interesting question.) I.e., I know that my son's elementary school is around the corner so as I turn I'm…

Tesla FSD is leagues behind Waymo; generalizing based on your Tesla experience doesn't make sense.

Evidence of this? I own a Tesla (HW4, latest FSD) as well as have taken many Waymo rides, and have found both to react well to unpredictable situations (i.e. a car unexpectedly turning in front of you), far more quickly than I would expect most human drivers to react.

This certainly may have been true of older Teslas with HW3 and older FSD builds (I had one, and yes you couldn't trust it).

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#525

Post by aanet »

aanet wrote: post #494
mmooss wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your experience, where do we find a credible source of info? Do we need to wait for the government's investigation to finish? > I would say that Waymo's response, per their blog post [2] has been textbook compliance. Remember Tesla's blog posts? Of course Waymo knows textbook compliance just like you do, and of course that's what they would claim.

> In your experience, where do we find a credible source of info? Do we need to wait for the government's investigation to finish? Most likely, yes, the NHTSA investigation will be credible source of info for this case. HOWEVER, Waymo will likely fight it tooth-and-nail from letting it be public. They will likely cite "proprietary algorithms / design", etc. to protect it from being released publicly. So, net-net, I d…

There is already widespread discussion on LinkedIn about this thread... but usefully, here [1] is the NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation report. Nothing much new there, tbh.

As I did suspect, legal scholars are already calling for "voluntary disclosure" from Waymo re: its annotated videos of the collision [2]. FWIW, my skepticism about Waymo actually releasing it remains...

[1] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2026/INOA-PE26001-10005.pdf

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthew-wansley-62b5b9126_a-w...

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#526

Post by mattlondon »

jjav wrote: post #154
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And to add > Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.

> It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. We'd have to see video of the full scene to have a better judgement, but I wouldn't call it likely. The car reacted quickly once it saw the child. Is that enough? But most humans would have been aware of the big picture scenario much earlier. Are there muliple kids milling around on the sidewalk? Near a school? Is there a big truck/SUV parked th…

Have you been in a waymo? It knows when there are pedestrians around (it can often see over the top of parked cars) and it is very cautious when there are people near the road and it frequently slows down.

I have no idea what happened here but in my experience of taking waymos in SF, they are very cautious and I'd struggle to imagine them speeding through an area with lots of pedestrians milling around. The fact that it was going 17mph at the time makes me think it was already in "caution mode". Sounds like this was something of a "worst case" scenario and another meter or 2 and it would have stopped in time.

I think with humans, even if the driver is 100% paying attention and eyes were looking in exactly the right place where the child emerged at the right time, there is still reaction times - both in cognition but also physically moving the leg to press the pedal. I suspect that a waymo will out-react a human basically 100% of the time, and apply full braking force within a few 10s of milliseconds and well before a human has even begun to move their leg.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#527

Post by tmostak »

alex1138 wrote: post #447
Petersipoi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just invented a hypothetical situation in your head then drew conclusions from it. In my version, the other car misses the kid entirely.

Yeah, but Tesla has a proven bad safety record. Waymo doesn't and the GP comment is alluding to that

Evidence (preferably with recent Teslas/HW4)?

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#528

Post by jasonfarnon »

belorn wrote: post #469
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And to add > Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.

If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed. One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time. For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7k…

why not just put in speedbumps if all you're trying to do is slow people down? Are you sure this was the purpose of these designs? sounds a little too freakonomics to me.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#529

Post by Aloisius »

mlyle wrote: post #465
Aloisius wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hey, I'd agree with this-- and it's worth noting that 17^2 - 5^2 > 16^2, so even 1MPH slower would likely have resulted in no contact in this scenario. Only with instant reaction time and linear deceleration. Neither of those are the case. It takes time for even a Waymo to recognize a dangerous situation and apply the brake and deceleration of vehicles is not actually linear.

> It takes time for even a Waymo to recognize a dangerous situation Reaction time makes the math even better here. You travel v1 * reaction_time no matter what, before entering the deceleration regime. So if v1 gets smaller, you get to spend a greater proportion of time in the deceleration regime. > linear deceleration. After reaction time, stopping distance is pretty close to n^2. There's weird effects at high speed…

I was thinking more that how hard the brakes are applied likely varies based on uncertainty of a collision.

Without that these vehicles could only start braking when certainty crossed some arbitrary threshold.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#530

Post by anthonyrstevens »

WheatMillington wrote: post #216
fennecbutt wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can spot someone's feet under the width of a bus when they're on the opposite side of the bus and you're sitting in a vehicle at a much higher position on the opposite side that the bus is on? That's physically impossible.

I think you're missing something though, which I've observed from reading these comments - HN commenters aren't ordinary humans, they're super-humans with cosmic powers of awareness, visibility, reactions and judgement.

Or they hate cars/waymo/etc and will come up with any chain of reasoning that puts those things in a bad light.
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