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Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

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Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#91

Post by Broken_Hippo »

cwillu wrote: post #9
belltaco wrote: post #4

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…

Part of being a safe driver is knowing when it's not safe to drive and resisting pressure to drive anyway.

Sure.

But honestly, you have to have enough money to be able to lose your job to do that. It isn't always possible for you to miss work. All it takes to have bad attendance is a strict policy and a child that needs numerous doctor appointments. Or low pay and no paid time off when you can't get to work.

It is easy to resist pressure when you are talking a fun night out, but not so easy when the outcome could be utilities shutting off, less food, and so on.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#92

Post by thfuran »

ra7 wrote: post #32
lolinder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All of that" is not encompassed in the human driver's home zip code. OP is talking about more than just the zip code, they're also talking about restrictions on the times of day Waymo operates, the types of vehicles they use, whether Waymo shuts down in adverse weather, etc. I'm not sure what all the current and past restrictions are, but those have to be controlled for. The study you linked only discusses one uncon…

Fair enough. Maybe not “all of it”, but most of it is covered. Waymo has always operated 24/7 since the beginning and had 99.4% fleet uptime [1] during the past winter season (SF had record rains). They used to shut down during inclement weather in Phoenix years ago, but their SF rain operations have scaled up with the mileage. Waymo vehicles use its own set of sensors and don’t rely on the vehicle’s safety features,…

>so I’m not sure how types of vehicles is relevant for the comparison.

Surely "car with ABS and good tires" vs "car without ABS and with bald tires" makes a difference. And presumably waymo operates exclusively the former while some people drive the latter.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#93

Post by thereisnospork »

prmoustache wrote: post #75
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not bullish on self driving cars, but that's a bit unfair. If their car performs better than 50% of the population, then that sounds like a success.

The thing is that 50% (even more) of the population should not be allowed to drive to begin with and we shouldn't wait for any technology to be ready to remove them from the road. That is the real elephant in the room that nobody wants to mention, especially political representatives who would be afraid to lose votes.

Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth though?

Petty little things like political ramifications have a funny way of not being so petty,by definition 51% of people in a democracy can decide they will not be stopped from driving.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#94

Post by brabel »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #78
greiskul wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Who goes to jail if a child trips and falls down stairs? Should we ban stairs? If there were no negligence from the owner in maintaining the car, and no negligence in the manufacturer, why do you care if anyone goes to jail? It won't bring the child back. If self driving cars reduce the number of fatalities, and specially if they reduce them significantly, would you really be against them just because there won'…

If you drive a car that kills a child, you (potentially) go to jail. If you are in a car that is driven by Waymo and it kills a child, the car drives away with no repercussions. Are you really advocating a world where we change the laws to give Waymo a license to kill? That won't ever, ever happen. Also, "no negligence from the manufacturer" is very much begging the question. Read the typical software EULA, it is neg…

Your argument is so terrible it's hard to understand how someone can actually believe that. Is your main concern really who is to blame for an accident, rather than how to avoid such accidents more effectively in the first place??? OMG please try to change your mindset, what a horrible way to approach this problem.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#95

Post by karamanolev »

RandomLensman wrote: post #73
sinuhe69 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe for the insurance purposes, this difference is irrelevant. The point is under the current condition, Waymo driverless cars are safer than human controlled cars, thus the question of liability and permit to operate should be cleared. The question whether humans are truly inferior to robots in term of controlling cars is rather a question of ego than a practical one.

Not sure that can be concluded easily as you would need to synthetically create a human driver profile with the same restrictions as Waymo. It does not say that in the linked article.

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.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#96

Post by n2d4 »

acchow wrote: post #60
sinuhe69 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe for the insurance purposes, this difference is irrelevant. The point is under the current condition, Waymo driverless cars are safer than human controlled cars, thus the question of liability and permit to operate should be cleared. The question whether humans are truly inferior to robots in term of controlling cars is rather a question of ego than a practical one.

If you had insurance for a human whose vehicle could only operate between 9pm to 6am, would it still be more expensive than Waymo's?

Fatalities are significantly more likely if you're driving at night than during the day, so probably yes.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#97

Post by thfuran »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #84
tsimionescu wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Uber model they mean is the more general "sell your service at a loss today to increase market share, hoping it will become cheaper for you tomorrow".

If we're talking about Uber without self-driving, then the vast majority of costs are outside of Uber's hands. Even if they get their servers, payment processing, and customer support down to $0, it only helps the business model a mild amount. On the other hand Waymo is paying enormous amounts to design systems and outfit their cars, and when that gets significantly cheaper the entire service gets significantly cheap…

But probably not better than just needing drivers who you can trick into providing cars.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#98

Post by DoingIsLearning »

harhargange wrote: post #89

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…

For completion. You actually have real driverless public transport systems functioning for many years now with autonomous metro and rail systems across the world.

It is obviously a much easier problem to solve due to its constraints.

What is interesting to me is that we have completely altered our transport networks to fit the new paradigm of cars +100 years ago, widening roads, asphalting roads, building motorways, parking lots, etc.

But somehow anything that comes after must be backwards compatible with this 1950's US Detroit vision of the car centric world.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#99

Post by johnfn »

zw123456 wrote: post #67

Computers don't drink, don't text and don't have road rage, so their claims might be plausible in a broad statistical way. My guess is that if you excluded humans that drink, text, have anger issues etc. then the humans probably win out.

As someone who spends a lot of time biking and scootering on roads, I would rather you do not exclude those people.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#100

Post by thfuran »

harhargange wrote: post #89

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…

>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.

That doesn't create enough value for shareholders.

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