Live data from Hacker News

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

waymo.com

61–70 of 497 posts

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

#61
post #16

How did Waymo do this? As far as I know, replacing drivers with an AI was the goal of ever-money-losing Uber and Lyft, however, Waymo managed to get to this much sooner while having less funds.

I think the most obvious drivers were:

* Time - Waymo started work on this in 2009 and are now getting a faster adoption in 2024. Uber started in 2015 and sold it off by 2020. Time has given Waymo the advantage of slowly ramping up and starting with toe-dips.

* Funding - Waymo has spent more money to get where they are now (probably 2-3x what Uber spent in total). Google also has deeper pockets than Uber, which means that there is less pressure on quickly ramping up Go To Market or immediately getting profitability.

* Culture - Waymo was much more cautious (likely because of funding structure) which is now paying dividends in terms of regulatory approval and consumer trust ('sometimes you have to go slow to go fast').

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

#62
post #33
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're "objectively" higher risk, based on a study by the company building the autopilot, right? How objective is that?

Obviously the assumption is that "one day" we have systems that outperform human drivers + reliable data on said systems.

[deleted]

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

#63
post #32

I can't trust that number if it comes from Waymo.com. I'd need to see it from an independant third party who has no interest having their finger on the scale

The authors are from: a Swiss Reinsurance Company, Ltd, Switzerland b Zardini Lab (research affiliate), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA c Autonomous Systems Laboratory (research affiliate), Stanford University, USA d Waymo LLC, USA e Casualty Actuarial Society, USA

So you can't really trust it due to the obvious conflict of interest.

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

#64
post #3

So one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself".

Yes. That’s exactly how insurance works. Another way to phrase this is I will save a fortune on insurance by taking advantage of self driving cars.

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

#65
post #32

I can't trust that number if it comes from Waymo.com. I'd need to see it from an independant third party who has no interest having their finger on the scale

The authors are from: a Swiss Reinsurance Company, Ltd, Switzerland b Zardini Lab (research affiliate), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA c Autonomous Systems Laboratory (research affiliate), Stanford University, USA d Waymo LLC, USA e Casualty Actuarial Society, USA

Swiss Re is the actual thing when it comes to actuarial tables and statistics.

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

#66
post #3

So one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself".

It's already borderline happening with the satellite supervision. Here in Italy insurance is 20% more expensive at the very least and the gap is widening if you don't put a tracking device on your car which checks position, speed, etc. I have a hard time justifying why one would not want it (besides privacy), all people that complain about it are people that regularly drive above the speed limit or pull dangerous ove…

Ah yes. The old anti-privacy mantra: you have nothing to worry about, if you have nothing to hide.

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

#67
post #40
post #3

So one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself".

My favorite brain picker question: What year would the EU* ban human driven cars on public roads? That's it. Million different opinions ranging from "never" to "within a couple decades for sure", weak, strong opinions, and of course many interesting topics to branch out into. *: sometimes I ask with US, or particular countries, it doesn't really matter for the sake of conversation. Fun fact: people working in automot…

It's not a particularly interesting question as it's just random guesswork and gutfeeling until self-driving cars see actual widespread availability and rollout.

If at some point all new cars have full self-driving capabilities with widely accepted performance, then it's not impossible that after a decade of that as status quo, cars end up shipping with manual driving only being an override for specific maneuvering, and eventually having regular licenses lose rights to manual driving on public roads.

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

#68
post #34
post #25

It seems like they compared apples to apples. Which make that an exciting result! “The benchmark was calibrated using both mileage (driving exposure) and residence zip-code (geographic region). Specifically, only the claims associated with vehicles registered to addresses (i.e., where the insured resides) within Waymo’s operating zip codes in San Francisco, the Phoenix metropolitan region, Los Angeles, and Austin wer…

> It seems like they compared apples to apples. Which make that an exciting result! I'd want to compare to our best drivers (e.g. ambulance drivers), not average drivers.

You just need to know the injury claims of those drivers vs the average to compare. But I agree, if I were to trust such a system, I'd want it to be a better driver than me, not than average. (And like everyone, I believe I'm significantly above average...)

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

#69
post #16

How did Waymo do this? As far as I know, replacing drivers with an AI was the goal of ever-money-losing Uber and Lyft, however, Waymo managed to get to this much sooner while having less funds.

They are faking their way through using a Lidar-heavy approach. When it works it's great, but when it fails it's dog level pathetic.

Do you think the future is behind depth analysis from 2D pictures rather than in lidar scanning? I know lidars are quite pricey, but I haven’t heard of regular camera breakthroughs in the domain.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already borderline happening with the satellite supervision. Here in Italy insurance is 20% more expensive at the very least and the gap is widening if you don't put a tracking device on your car which checks position, speed, etc. I have a hard time justifying why one would not want it (besides privacy), all people that complain about it are people that regularly drive above the speed limit or pull dangerous ove…

Ah yes. The old anti-privacy mantra: you have nothing to worry about, if you have nothing to hide.

It's a question if you put people's individual "privacy" (quotes because you're driving in public, on public roads paid for by the public, under public laws, and under the public's view - there's not really privacy as to how you're driving, everyone out there can see it) over people's collective right to live?

Road deaths are among the leading causes of death in multiple developed countries.

Post reply on HN