Worth repeating the same comment I've left on every variant of this article for the last 10 years.
Being better than "average" is a laughably low bar for self-driving cars. Average drivers include people who drive while drunk and on drugs. It includes teenagers and those who otherwise have very little experience on the road. It includes people who are too old to be driving safely. It includes people who are habitually speed and are reckless. It includes cars that are mechanically faulty or otherwise cannot be driven safely. If you compile accident statistics the vast majority will fall into one of these categories.
For self driving to be widely adopted the bare minimum bar needs to be – is it better than the average sensible and experienced driver?
Otherwise if you replace all 80% of the good drivers with waymos and the remaining 20% stay behind the wheel, accident rates are going to go up not down.
Waymo (at this time) is an alternative to taxis and ride hailing services. I've lived in SF for 30+ years and used all modes of transit here. Some of my most frightening moments on the road have been in taxis with drivers who are reckless, in badly maintained vehicles, sometimes smelling of booze. There are certainly other ways that taxis could have been improved, but given the way things have evolved (or devolved with taxis), I feel much safer in a Waymo.
Any comparison of Waymo's safety should be done against taxis/Uber/Lyft/etc. A comparison with the general driving public could also be interesting, or other commercial drivers, but those are not the most relevant cohorts. I don't know the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if taxis/Uber/Lyft are worse per mile than general drivers since they are likely under more stress, and often work for long hours. A Waymo is no less safe at 4am, but a Lyft driver who's been up all night is a lot less safe. I would also guess that they are less likely than the general (auto) driving population to own their vehicle. Depending on who owns a vehicle, how long they've been driving (years), there's going to be a lot of interesting correlations.
> Being better than "average" is a laughably low bar for self-driving cars. Average drivers include people who drive while drunk and on drugs. It includes teenagers and those who otherwise have very little experience on the road. It includes people who are too old to be driving safely. It includes people who are habitually speed and are reckless... (etc)
But... that's the reality. If we replace human drivers with self-driving cars at random, or specifically the bad drivers above, then we've improved things.
We are not going to easily improve the average human driver.
>If we replace human drivers with self-driving cars at random
But that's the OPs point, we aren't. Waymo crashing less than human drivers is a tautological result because Waymo is only letting the cars drive on roads where they're confident they can drive as well as humans to begin with.
If you actually ran the (very unethical) experiment of replacing a million people at random on random streets tomorrow with waymo cars you're going to cause some carnage, they only operate in parts of four American cities.
I think if you swap a million humans into other humans at random you're going to get some road carnage as well, to be fair. If someone suddenly puts me on some icy road in Minnesota I'm gonna have a bad time.
Why wouldn't alcoholics and the elderly be early adopters of self-driving vehicles. Or what can we do to encourage them to be early adopters? You get a DUI, and you are forced to pay for FSD? Get a reduce rate on booze taxes if you "drive" an AV? Have to take a driving test every 2 years after you turn 75, unless you have an AV?
"XYZ demographic should be forced to use self driving cars" is a fantasy that the tech crowd continues to believe but will never happen. Everyone is able to drive and will continue to be able to drive. In fact you should assume that the worse someone is at driving the more likely they are to want to drive for themselves, because that's how the world usually works.
I think it's the inverse. The people who are left lane camping in their Fiat 500 because the right lane has merging and that's scary will be the early adopters. The people who really "get it" will keep driving themselves because they can do better.
This is basically the same adoption path as every other labor saving tech.
Even in self-driving, Telsa's behavior proves there is a market for cars that are programmed to speed and roll through stop signs. Waymos are safer than the average human, but the average human also intentionally chooses a strategy that trades risk for speed. Indeed, Waymo trips on average take about 2x as long as Ubers: https://futurism.com/the-byte/waymo-expensive-slower-taxis
What happens if an upstart self-driving competitor promises human-level ETAs? Is a speeding Waymo safer than a speeding human?
I can imagine that wide adoption of AVs could increase the speed limits (at least for them if not all vehicles). Also I believe that high saturation of AVs will finally shorten ETAs naturally as stable, predictable driving without cutting in, forcing others to stop suddenly etc. reduces traffic jams. (Can't find the study that opened my eyes on that right now).
Over the next decade or two, insurance will solve a chunk of this problem (it'll be way more expensive to drive yourself), regulations will solve another chunk, but the biggest thing that will solve it: we're lazy.
We might drive every now and then, but come on, do you really think once this is ubiquitous and you can get in a (or your) car and then play a video game, take a nap, text on your phone, or doomscroll, that we're still going to want to drive all the time?
Accident statistics are not dominated by drunks or anything else.
They're dominated by normal drivers who had a momentary lapse in judgment or attention. This is why running a police state that goes hard on DUI and vehicle inspections doesn't make the roads as much safer as its proponents would leave you to believe.
>You say that and yet many places have an order of magnitude less car "accidents" per population than the US currently.
Nice Freudian slip there.
Rich western europe has less car accidents because they, broadly speaking, don't let poor people drive and work harder to cultivate a law abiding populace.
I don't understand, what are you calling a Freudian slip here? I put accident in quotes because it's generally understood nowadays that the term isn't quite the correct one.
If a collision occurs because of bad road/intersection design then it wasn't all that accidental after all - it was a statistical inevitability.
Great points. My own "have to say this every time" is that Waymo only operates within the boundaries of a few cities. Most people's experience of self-driving cars is not with Waymo. It's with vastly inferior technologies, most especially Tesla's. Waymo might be great, but I get really tired of fans dismissing others' misgivings as some sort of Luddite thing when it's entirely justified by experiences people have had where they live. If people want to say that autonomous vehicles are already better, they need to stop sneering long enough to show how that works at a freeway interchange with multiple high-speed merges and lane drops back to back, at a grocery store parking lot when it's busiest, near any suburban school at pickup time. Without that data, "safer than humans" is mere cherry picking.
There’s no statistics for how much a sensible and experienced driver crashes.
Sorting people by past behavior runs into survivorship bias when looking back and people who stop being sensible going forward. I’m personally a poor driver, but I don’t drive much so my statistics still look good.
There’s _no_ statistics? Surely those statistics are precisely what all car insurance premiums are based upon. They might be proprietary but I am certain such statistics exist.
The best bucket insurance companies can use is based on age, car choices, and past behavior etc. Yet, a percentage of such people still end up in deadly accidents because they drove drunk, or while looking at their phones and such.
Insurance companies can’t know your future behavior so must hedge for a percentage of future idiots being in any bucket. On the flip side some people in the multiple DUI bucket end up driving sensibly over the next 6 months.
What kind of dataset do we have to determine the subset of accidents caused by sensible and experienced drivers?
I personally have doubts as to whether this dataset exists. Whenever there's an accident, and one party is determined to be at fault, would that party be automatically considered not to be a sensible driver?
If we don't have such a dataset, perhaps it would be impossible to measure self-driving vehicles against this benchmark?
This is already much better than average, enough that it's going to take over. No one cares about car accidents in this country enough to stop this, even if it was only slightly better than average. For proof: Tesla.
Self-driving being the dominant form of driving is now a done deal, thanks to Waymo (and probably Tesla, though that's a policy failure imo), it's just a question of how long it takes.
> Otherwise if you replace all 80% of the good drivers with waymos and the remaining 20% stay behind the wheel, accident rates are going to go up not down.
That's a ridiculous scenario. If anything, impaired drivers should be more likely to choose an automated driving option. But no need to to even assume that. The standard that matters is replacing the average.
> Average drivers include people who drive while drunk and on drugs
I hadn't thought of it until just now, but I guess that means the average driver is a little drunk and a little high. Kinda like how the average person has less than 2 arms.
Being better than "average" is a laughably low bar for self-driving cars. Average drivers include people who drive while drunk and on drugs. It includes teenagers and those who otherwise have very little experience on the road. It includes people who are too old to be driving safely. It includes people who are habitually speed and are reckless. It includes cars that are mechanically faulty or otherwise cannot be driven safely. If you compile accident statistics the vast majority will fall into one of these categories.
For self driving to be widely adopted the bare minimum bar needs to be – is it better than the average sensible and experienced driver?
Otherwise if you replace all 80% of the good drivers with waymos and the remaining 20% stay behind the wheel, accident rates are going to go up not down.