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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

#91

Post by InDubioProRubio »

mindvirus wrote: post #79

I think insurance prices will drive adoption of self driving very quickly. Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for n…

This. The boomer generation can not be outvoted of rights, even when they will crawl the streets being traffic hazzards with dementia. So they will be pushed howling and screaming towards automated driving.

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

#92

Post by mulmen »

meiraleal wrote: post #80
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 future is bright. We have been there. The internet and then Google, Facebook were the same. Big Tech can't be trusted.

I think the Internet is pretty great. It’s not perfect but I’m not ready to throw out the frictionless communication baby with the cynical bathwater.

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

#93

Post by Brian_K_White »

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 think that is a pretty significant thing. It needs some sort of better answer than "don't worry about it"

Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects. IE, you can't make eye contact with jersey barrier, but you don't need to, you know what it will do (nothing). And you can't make eye contact with say, a motorized railroad crossing barrier, but you don't need to. It moves, but only in an absolutely predictable way. You can be a cyclist around the railroad crossing barrier no problem.

Maybe Waymo and others will be that consistent that you can treat them like "moving inanimate objects" safely.

I don't know if they are right now. They may be better than humans on avaerage, but that is a long way from predictable and safe.

Maybe They can build in some way for the car to signal back to the surrounding people what all it has taken note of, or not. Some way for a cyclist or pedestrian to look at a Waymo and see that it sees you. That should be possible.

Maybe it can go both ways, maybe we can develop some kind of standard where if you need to get a cars attention there is some gesture you can do that it will be especially watching for. So even if it doesn't see you, it will see you if you wave your hand a certain way or something. Only problem with that is you have to be able to do the thing, and some of the times you need a car to see you the most will be the same times when you are incapacitated, ie lying on the road after some accident or something.

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

#94

Post by JumpCrisscross »

michaelt wrote: post #53
impoppy wrote: 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.

Google/Waymo actually started way earlier, and had fistfuls of cash from the very start. Google hired a bunch of people who'd done well in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge [1] - including Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson who lead the winning team. Thrun is also behind Google Street View which in some regards [2] looks a lot like a self-driving-car sensor suite. So Google was having LIDAR-equipped, high-precision-GPS-eq…

> the confidence to design for L5 autonomy from the start

L4. Waymo can't "drive everywhere in all conditions" [1]. (Nobody can. Not to L4 standards of never requiring "you to take over driving.")

[1] https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

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

#95

Post by meiraleal »

khazhoux wrote: post #60
palata wrote: 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?

Like the Borg, every Waymo is the same driver. So in column A, the insurance company has a meta-driver with many millions of miles of statistics. In column B, we have slow-reaction and non-lidar-equipped you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago.

Column A might have a few kills in their numbers.

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

#96

Post by viraptor »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #74
zurfer wrote: 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…

I don't think this is apples-to-apples. You need to somehow filter to people who are not speeding or otherwise breaking traffic laws. My problem with studies like these is "human-operated" is an enormous catch-all that blends together too many causes for accidents. 1) Not filtering out drunk drivers is downright misleading. I am less interested in "is mandatory self-driving safer than human drivers?" than "is mandato…

It depends what you want to know. "Are autonomous cars better than good drivers?", or "am I safer in Waymo than a random human driven taxi?". Both are very valid questions.

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

#97

Post by fragmede »

cma wrote: post #18
tsss wrote: post #9

Does Waymo even drive on the highway? No surprise that there's a reduction in grave injuries if they drive 30 kph max in the inner city.

In SF they drive on the freeway, way more than 30kph. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...

That link is for Phoenix. They're not yet driving on the freeway in SF.

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

#98

Post by nmca »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #74
zurfer wrote: 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…

I don't think this is apples-to-apples. You need to somehow filter to people who are not speeding or otherwise breaking traffic laws. My problem with studies like these is "human-operated" is an enormous catch-all that blends together too many causes for accidents. 1) Not filtering out drunk drivers is downright misleading. I am less interested in "is mandatory self-driving safer than human drivers?" than "is mandato…

You’re trying to to characterise personal risk and they were tying to characterise societal risk; both are valid.

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

#99

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> the story of NASA's space pen

As an example of an urban legend/facile pop science take being treated as fact [1]?

> 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

Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and...

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

#100

Post by epolanski »

thiagocsf wrote: post #66
epolanski wrote: post #31

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.

I did write "besides privacy" because it is a valid concern indeed.

But considering that most people don't give two damns about their privacy (or at least act like it, keeping 24/7 a tracking device on them and sharing all of their lives non stop) what would be their valid reason to not have a tracking device for insurance purposes on their cars?

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