> In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup.
> In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV.
> In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind.
It’s worth noting that all 3 of these incidents involve a Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver’s fault even if the Waymo acted “unexpectedly”. This is very very good news for them.
Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not on the Safety Research team.
The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that. (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple diagram in the blog post, too.
Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer, and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not believe will be solved anytime soon.
That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains—which have regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds—I think we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize land use that could be more productive otherwise. More idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density transportation options available.
I know Waymo are the investing a lot into the PR that makes them seem successful, but they are the only company I actually see on track to delivering autonomous cars (on existing infrastructure).
I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing once you consider all the second and third order effects (even more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult problem.
As others have noted, autonomous vehicles may actually lead to less car use. Currently, many people must own cars for certain use cases. Because of this, for any given trip the decision to take car vs. other means is based on the marginal cost of car usage. In contrast, if people no longer need to own cars because of autonomous taxis, the decision of car vs. other reflects the ammortized cost of car use, which will be far higher than the marginal cost. Put another way, there are plenty of trips being taken by car now simply because people have a car for other reasons, but if they didn't own a car they'd far sooner take another option vs. renting/Uber/Waymo.
It's far cheaper to live in an autonomous motorhome that drives around all day and happens to arrive at work just as you need to be there each morning than to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Driving about is probably cheaper than paying for parking too, especially if you deliberately head for the busiest traffic.
The US has so much sunk cost in car centric urban design that all discussion of self driving cars taking investment away from public transit is all wasted words. It’s not just the roads and the number of people absolutely committed to driving on them. It’s urban design that is so sparse that we’ll be locked into personal transit for hundreds of years. Compared to Europe where Romans laid down street plans thousands of years ago, people will still be walking around in another thousand years.
Must as well have the cars in the US drive themselves so we can all get a nap at least.
I would note a lot of research shows coordinated autonomous vehicles using basic control theory can dramatically improve traffic flow with even a small percentage of vehicles coordinating (I think it was around 10%). They found they all but eliminate most human behavior caused traffic jams (I.e., most traffic except caused by emergencies or accidents). In fact if most vehicles are AV then it becomes more of a dynamic convoy model where all vehicles cooperate to maximize flow. This would require a much smaller road infrastructure to achieve the same flow as today. Rather than contributing to the problem autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the impact of transit, while maintaining individual carriage.
> even more cars on the streets, .. , and traffic will get a lot worse
I strongly believe it will go the other way, i.e. the 'robo-taxi' vision. Once cars can pick us up, take us where we want and then disappear, very few people will want to own their own car. I honestly think the vast majority of people already don't want to own one, but we don't have a better option. Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.
Cars will just show up, take us places then go away to get someone else. We won't need nearly as many of them, and we won't need to dedicate so much of our cities to them, and especially not to parking them. We will be able to reclaim our cities.
NOTE: Old School automakers who can't/won't/don't adapt are going to push back on this HARD. But I still think it will happen.
For the record, I'm a car guy. I love cars. I will likely always have one for the weekends. If I was going into a city or commuting, I would take the robi-taxi every time.
You're being overly pessimistic. I can see the opposite occuring on each of your points.
- less traffic due to more efficient driving: once automated driving is pervasive it's natural that cars and traffic as a whole will coordinate and optimise use of the road. You should be able to predict traffic accurately and choose the optimal time to travel. Car speeds will coordinate to maximise flow through roads. Improved public transport will increase the number of passengers per vehicle and reduce personal vehicles.
- more investment into better modes of transport due to lowered costs: the cost structure of buses (and trains) lends itself to larger vehicles with less stops. Without having to pay someone to drive you can remake public transport into something that takes less people at a time to more places, without requiring expensive infrastructure. Think small automated busses that serve a web of points instead of routes, so people can request to get from A to B and the system delivers from as close to A and to as close to B as possible as soon as possible at the lowest cost.
- less car ownership: most people don't want to own cars, so it's very likely that car ownership will drop significantly. With new privately and publicly owned forms of public transport, the need to own a car will disappear in many cases.
I feel that almost all technology is positive (not sure about social media), since it generally gives people more choices and abilities. Automated cars have very few downsides.
> and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix
This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually improve once autonomous driving is the standard.
I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over, that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people still maintain the ability to move independently of each other but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.
Another big negative I think is underconsidered is that a Google owned self driving car fleet will be absolutely plastered with video ads and physical user tracking if they dominate the market enough to get away with it.
Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.
You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
> less investment into better modes of transport
I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic
You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?
I don't know why you think Cruise isn't on track. Their numbers are also good, although probably not as good as Waymo, but they are also much younger than Waymo. Cruise is being punished by the state of California right now because they tried to cover up their vehicle's worsening of a particular human-caused accident, not because of some problem with their overall numbers.
EDIT: If you disagree, please link to the quantitative data that suggests Cruise isn't on track.
I can believe it. I rode in a Waymo for the first time a couple days ago and it was incredible. No problems with the rain or bad San Francisco drivers. It was a really smooth ride and I felt extremely safe.
Like others said. Waymo One in San Francisco is great. Smooth / confident drive. Good situation awareness (several times when it made unexpected action, only later I realized there is a person or a car it tried to avoid).
Looking forward to expand its coverage to SFO, that will be a game-changer.
Still not sure of it economics though. Its current price is on-par with Uber Comfort / a little bit over Uber X. How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion?
Arizona maybe, but I wouldn't say San Francisco is straight lines. I've seen a few of these videos pop up on YouTube. This one I watched recently is full of construction, double-parked trucks, pedestrians, complicated traffic, etc.
It makes a mistake in that one, around 5 minutes in, due to not understanding a construction worker's gesture, but I presume it phones home for advice and someone gets it moving again. Everything else seemed to be handled rather impressively.
Disclaimer: Google employee. My job has nothing to do with cars. But I do love technology and hate driving, so I'd love to see this problem solved. I'm actually quite skeptical that I'll ever have a truly self-driving car, as I also live in a place with weather.
I don't understand the point of comments like this, and I see them all the time when it comes to autonomous vehicles.
First, as all the other respondents have pointed out, your characterization of San Francisco as "straight lines and 365 days of sun" is way, way off. But more importantly, as a consumer, I'd be thrilled to own an autonomous vehicle even if it didn't work in bad weather. There's easily enough data to have a car say "there is a storm coming in your area, can't drive autonomously" long before it would become a safety issue.
And, of course, wouldn't one expect an autonomous vehicle to start in places with better conditions vs yolo'ing it in a blizzard whiteout?
SF is a fairly tricky place to drive. I mean it’s no Boston but it’s no mean feat.
Nevertheless I do believe it might be easier to deploy self driving cars in more “feral” places where anything goes as traffic rules go. In those places, what I’ve observed, is that you can at any point actually come to a complete standstill and everyone will just navigate around you (within cities that is). This actually can work in the favor of these cars to be honest.
Have you actually driven in SF? There’s plenty of rain in the winter and the roads can get quite interesting. Right turns that are actually 170 degrees and a 15% incline. Red lights that are way off to the side and obscured (one on market right after you turn right exiting 101). It’s honestly a pretty good stress test as far as American cities go.
Have you seen the streets of SF? Sometimes you can’t even see what’s ahead because you’re going from a 15% up to a 15% down and all you see is the horizon
Obviously you roll out a safety critical system like this in the simplest scenarios first as you build confidence.
Also, frankly, humans drive in situations where they just shouldn't. There are times where the conditions are so bad that the only correct decision is to just say it is not possible to safely drive today. Personally, I don't drive in dense fog because your options are basically drive too fast and risk hitting something you can't see, or drive at a sensible slow speed and risk being hit from behind - which isn't your fault but might still kill you. Even the most advanced aeroplanes with all the latest and greatest sensors still have defined limits where they won't fly.
Also, that Arc de Triomphe example should just be replaced with a safe priority system. Priorité à droite is a silly rule, and it's especially silly on a roundabout. In my opinion, crashes there are the fault of the road, not the driver.
It was raining yesterday and the Waymos were out but it doesn't matter that much. You won't get self-driving cars in your streets in Europe and that's okay.
It's just like how iPhones are wildly popular in the US. I'm sure there's someone who's like "Yeah, try to sell a $1k device to a Romanian and see how it goes" and Apple only gets 25% market share there but they're one of the most successful companies in the world, without Romania.
I read comments along this vein every time an article on Waymo (or self driving cars) comes out, and my question is who cares? Even if it is just the sunny easy locations that get this advance, that’s hundreds of deaths and injuries avoided every year. I understand being pragmatic and practical but we should celebrate this news IMO.
people love to say this like it's some sort of "gotcha" claim, and waymo is cheating at safety by only rolling out their service in places where they're certain they can operate safely.
how about no, let's not send waymo cars into vastly more challenging conditions. i want them to keep being cautious and responsible.
They did try in the upper midwest, and they failed completely. When the sensors are covered by rain, ice, snow, salt, and other road grime, the cars are basically useless.
An autonomous system doesn't just put together classifications of what it sees in the environment.
It also gets quantitative measures of how confident it should be in what it just classified. And if your confidence measures decline, for any reason, it can just slow down. Small European towns should be doable.
Getting commercial robotaxis working in even just one city is an amazing achievement. It's important to note that Uber currently operates in more than 10,000 cities, though. Even if Waymo were to launch one new city each week, it would be more than 192 years before they catch up to Uber.
Waymo drives better in San Francisco than I do, and I live here. And it drives an order of magnitude better than I did during my first few months in the city. I have friends who live in the South Bay who are still reluctant to drive when they visit SF.
I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population. The majority of people are driving most of their miles during rush hour when chances of a crash are the highest, while Waymo cars operate all day/night. Plus I'm sure that first-time drivers, drunk drivers, people out on illegal joyrides and other such extremes drag the numbers down enough that saying "I'm in the top 40%" really isn't all that meaningful anymore.
What I'm interested in knowing is how these cars drive compared to the average competent driver in the exact same environment.
The only way this has an impact on road accident/injury/fatality rates at any meaningful scale is if millions of people switch from routine personal-car based transportation to shared transportation, even single-occupancy shared transportation like Waymo.
I don't see millions running out and buying a real self-driving car kitted with a spinning lidar "hat" and visible radar transmitters sticking out everywhere, even if doing so meant safer roads for everyone.
What people in the market actually want is what Tesla has been selling (however fraudulently): a car that looks/performs very nice and claims full-self-driving capability, not a goofy looking car that self-drives very well in particular locations and use cases. Cars are about personal identity and power at least as much as they are about functional transportation.
I'd like to be wrong about all that, and would like a future where swarms of electric self-driving buses that route-optimize based on demand pick up people very close to where they are. But I also realize that the reptilian brains of consumers tend to decide how these things eventually pan out, and not the solutions that are optimized for efficiency and safety.
As someone that has taken quite a few Waymo trips now since October 2023, I am continually impressed with how it handles the crazy here in San Francisco from odd/narrow streets, bad drivers doing stupid things, and overall safety with pedestrians doing all sorts of non-standard behaviors from crossing randomly to pausing at odd points in crosswalks, etc. Also, I've been in a bunch of situations in a Waymo where other drivers are messing with position to try and freak the Waymo out, and every time, it did a great job. I've never been in a Cruise, but I can't deny Waymo has been a great experience for me in SF and up around 20 or so trips.
Here is a video of Waymo going through the Broadway Tunnel in SF back in Oct 2023 to give you a sense of it. >> https://mer.gy/broadwaytunnelwaymo
>The new data comes at a crucial time for the self-driving industry.
Which is by the way, a good reason to be skeptical of it. I remember talking to someone who worked with BMW on their self driving a long time ago and their take on Tesla's self driving effort was (a) It's fine for Tesla to have a bad reputation for safey but BMW simply can't choose to get a bad reputation for safety they sell far too many non-autonomous cars and (b) It's actually not fine for Tesla (and others) to be rushing ahead with self-driving because they will kill people and they're just as likely to kill the whole self-driving industry at the same time.
I have no doubt that even if the data looked terrible, Waymo would find a way to spin it to look safe. I also have no doubt that even if the data is good, it's not indicative of self-driving being safer in the average situation.
As a single anecdote, I’ve taken 12 Waymo rides over the past 3 months, and I’d put them at ~90th percentile with respect to human Uber/Lyft drivers in terms of smoothness/quality of reaction to the various hazards of SF streets.
(Over ~4 Cruise rides, I’d put them closer to median)
FWIW, I've used them quite a few times here in Phoenix --- overall a very positive experience. The Waymo car used to be too cautious and would take weird routes but now they drive appropriately aggressive and the route selection is much better.
To me safety is mostly about the risk of injury and death to me. And mostly about death.
Humans die from driving only once every 100 million miles on average.
So until there is a comparison at this scale, to me it’s a very incomplete picture of safety to say that you are outperforming humans.
If driving my own car means colliding 100x as often but I expect to die 2x less often, I would consider self driving to be much much much more unsafe. There is really no way for me to understand the risk of fatalities from a sample of only 7 million miles, since either humans or a system with 2x the fatality rate of humans would both be expected to have 0 fatalities at this scale.
Given we are at 7m miles, hopefully this comparison is coming soon and I will be much more convinced.
I think this is a useful and impressive study - I haven't read all 40 pages, neither have you :) I did do some good-faith skimming. Assuming Waymo didn't falsify their data (they didn't), this makes me feel comfortable having Waymo in SF and Phoenix. I think it's clearly safer than an Uber. But some caveats:
- The major caveat is that Waymo is not being directly compared against sober humans driving lawfully.[1] The reason why this caveat is so important is that technology which makes it impossible for humans to exceed a posted speed limit might be overall much safer than replacing human drivers with autonomous drivers. Uber isn't more dangerous than Waymo because humans are incompetent, it's because humans obey orders from impatient drivers and Waymo currently does not. This is a UI choice, not an AI advancement.
- More specifically, lawful driving is an important caveat because Tesla Autopilot had two different settings for driving unlawfully, according to the users' own sense of personal risk. An AV manufacturer who advertises "AI-assisted speeding" will almost certainly find a lot of customers, even if it's under the table. People don't speed and run red lights because they're too stupid to understand why it's dangerous: they do it because they're reckless and selfish. AI won't stop that, only regulation will.
- Another caveat is that Waymo was trained on human-dominated streets. Waymo being safer in a sea of human vehicles does not actually translate to Waymo being safer in a sea of Waymos. I think this is a low-probability risk but it's hardly a simple question: I believe Waymo has had issues where several AVs occupied the same street after an event and blocked traffic because they couldn't decide what to do - they were waiting on each other to behave like a human. But again, the risk seems like gridlock, not property damage or injury.
- And a minor but still important caveat is that SF and Phoenix have modern linear grids which have been mapped to death by AV manufacturers. As a Boston resident I am still holding my breath about their performance here :)
[1] Not because of anything insidious, it's just a granularity that both the analysis and the data struggle to capture.
IMHO we need a standardised benchmark for this stuff.
You can't claim better than human when humans are driving under different conditions.
I looked around to try to find the actual data but it's just marketing materials. Are these miles on the same roads under the same traffic and weather conditions?
These measurements should be standardized and independent, there is a large incentive for these companies to get creative with their record keeping and methodology.
[+] [-] nlh|2 years ago|reply
> In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV.
> In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind.
It’s worth noting that all 3 of these incidents involve a Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver’s fault even if the Waymo acted “unexpectedly”. This is very very good news for them.
[+] [-] boulos|2 years ago|reply
The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that. (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple diagram in the blog post, too.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...
[2] https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...
[+] [-] ttfkam|2 years ago|reply
Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer, and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not believe will be solved anytime soon.
That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains—which have regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds—I think we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize land use that could be more productive otherwise. More idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density transportation options available.
[+] [-] wongarsu|2 years ago|reply
I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing once you consider all the second and third order effects (even more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult problem.
[+] [-] ericpauley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|2 years ago|reply
It's far cheaper to live in an autonomous motorhome that drives around all day and happens to arrive at work just as you need to be there each morning than to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Driving about is probably cheaper than paying for parking too, especially if you deliberately head for the busiest traffic.
[+] [-] dougmwne|2 years ago|reply
Must as well have the cars in the US drive themselves so we can all get a nap at least.
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|2 years ago|reply
I strongly believe it will go the other way, i.e. the 'robo-taxi' vision. Once cars can pick us up, take us where we want and then disappear, very few people will want to own their own car. I honestly think the vast majority of people already don't want to own one, but we don't have a better option. Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.
Cars will just show up, take us places then go away to get someone else. We won't need nearly as many of them, and we won't need to dedicate so much of our cities to them, and especially not to parking them. We will be able to reclaim our cities.
NOTE: Old School automakers who can't/won't/don't adapt are going to push back on this HARD. But I still think it will happen.
For the record, I'm a car guy. I love cars. I will likely always have one for the weekends. If I was going into a city or commuting, I would take the robi-taxi every time.
[+] [-] supercheetah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkjaudyeqooe|2 years ago|reply
You're being overly pessimistic. I can see the opposite occuring on each of your points.
- less traffic due to more efficient driving: once automated driving is pervasive it's natural that cars and traffic as a whole will coordinate and optimise use of the road. You should be able to predict traffic accurately and choose the optimal time to travel. Car speeds will coordinate to maximise flow through roads. Improved public transport will increase the number of passengers per vehicle and reduce personal vehicles.
- more investment into better modes of transport due to lowered costs: the cost structure of buses (and trains) lends itself to larger vehicles with less stops. Without having to pay someone to drive you can remake public transport into something that takes less people at a time to more places, without requiring expensive infrastructure. Think small automated busses that serve a web of points instead of routes, so people can request to get from A to B and the system delivers from as close to A and to as close to B as possible as soon as possible at the lowest cost.
- less car ownership: most people don't want to own cars, so it's very likely that car ownership will drop significantly. With new privately and publicly owned forms of public transport, the need to own a car will disappear in many cases.
I feel that almost all technology is positive (not sure about social media), since it generally gives people more choices and abilities. Automated cars have very few downsides.
[+] [-] whoisthemachine|2 years ago|reply
This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually improve once autonomous driving is the standard.
I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over, that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people still maintain the ability to move independently of each other but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.
[+] [-] rurp|2 years ago|reply
Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.
[+] [-] baron816|2 years ago|reply
> even more cars on the streets
You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
> less investment into better modes of transport
I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic
You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?
[+] [-] jessriedel|2 years ago|reply
EDIT: If you disagree, please link to the quantitative data that suggests Cruise isn't on track.
[+] [-] doppio19|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liuliu|2 years ago|reply
Looking forward to expand its coverage to SFO, that will be a game-changer.
Still not sure of it economics though. Its current price is on-par with Uber Comfort / a little bit over Uber X. How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion?
[+] [-] lm28469|2 years ago|reply
Basically straight lines and 365 days of sun, now send them to Europe small towns/mountain roads/&c.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyEg35Stbo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7wphiL3vbo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZaoRu7okU
[+] [-] masto|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/5wXO05s-pLc?si=5W-SW5zGXIwgnQpG
It makes a mistake in that one, around 5 minutes in, due to not understanding a construction worker's gesture, but I presume it phones home for advice and someone gets it moving again. Everything else seemed to be handled rather impressively.
Disclaimer: Google employee. My job has nothing to do with cars. But I do love technology and hate driving, so I'd love to see this problem solved. I'm actually quite skeptical that I'll ever have a truly self-driving car, as I also live in a place with weather.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago|reply
First, as all the other respondents have pointed out, your characterization of San Francisco as "straight lines and 365 days of sun" is way, way off. But more importantly, as a consumer, I'd be thrilled to own an autonomous vehicle even if it didn't work in bad weather. There's easily enough data to have a car say "there is a storm coming in your area, can't drive autonomously" long before it would become a safety issue.
And, of course, wouldn't one expect an autonomous vehicle to start in places with better conditions vs yolo'ing it in a blizzard whiteout?
[+] [-] ramraj07|2 years ago|reply
Nevertheless I do believe it might be easier to deploy self driving cars in more “feral” places where anything goes as traffic rules go. In those places, what I’ve observed, is that you can at any point actually come to a complete standstill and everyone will just navigate around you (within cities that is). This actually can work in the favor of these cars to be honest.
[+] [-] teaearlgraycold|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culopatin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LightBug1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronh90|2 years ago|reply
Also, frankly, humans drive in situations where they just shouldn't. There are times where the conditions are so bad that the only correct decision is to just say it is not possible to safely drive today. Personally, I don't drive in dense fog because your options are basically drive too fast and risk hitting something you can't see, or drive at a sensible slow speed and risk being hit from behind - which isn't your fault but might still kill you. Even the most advanced aeroplanes with all the latest and greatest sensors still have defined limits where they won't fly.
Also, that Arc de Triomphe example should just be replaced with a safe priority system. Priorité à droite is a silly rule, and it's especially silly on a roundabout. In my opinion, crashes there are the fault of the road, not the driver.
[+] [-] fooblaster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
It's just like how iPhones are wildly popular in the US. I'm sure there's someone who's like "Yeah, try to sell a $1k device to a Romanian and see how it goes" and Apple only gets 25% market share there but they're one of the most successful companies in the world, without Romania.
Some markets can be irrelevant.
[+] [-] Rebuff5007|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajup|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|2 years ago|reply
how about no, let's not send waymo cars into vastly more challenging conditions. i want them to keep being cautious and responsible.
[+] [-] askonomm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmitc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocschwar|2 years ago|reply
It also gets quantitative measures of how confident it should be in what it just classified. And if your confidence measures decline, for any reason, it can just slow down. Small European towns should be doable.
[+] [-] jfoster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minwcnt5|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sib|2 years ago|reply
Not straight lines, lots of traffic, cars parked on both sides of roads, plenty of human drivers seemingly unable to cope.
(Admittedly, mostly sunny weather.)
[+] [-] cagenut|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
What I'm interested in knowing is how these cars drive compared to the average competent driver in the exact same environment.
[+] [-] danans|2 years ago|reply
I don't see millions running out and buying a real self-driving car kitted with a spinning lidar "hat" and visible radar transmitters sticking out everywhere, even if doing so meant safer roads for everyone.
What people in the market actually want is what Tesla has been selling (however fraudulently): a car that looks/performs very nice and claims full-self-driving capability, not a goofy looking car that self-drives very well in particular locations and use cases. Cars are about personal identity and power at least as much as they are about functional transportation.
I'd like to be wrong about all that, and would like a future where swarms of electric self-driving buses that route-optimize based on demand pick up people very close to where they are. But I also realize that the reptilian brains of consumers tend to decide how these things eventually pan out, and not the solutions that are optimized for efficiency and safety.
[+] [-] mergy|2 years ago|reply
Here is a video of Waymo going through the Broadway Tunnel in SF back in Oct 2023 to give you a sense of it. >> https://mer.gy/broadwaytunnelwaymo
[+] [-] SilverBirch|2 years ago|reply
Which is by the way, a good reason to be skeptical of it. I remember talking to someone who worked with BMW on their self driving a long time ago and their take on Tesla's self driving effort was (a) It's fine for Tesla to have a bad reputation for safey but BMW simply can't choose to get a bad reputation for safety they sell far too many non-autonomous cars and (b) It's actually not fine for Tesla (and others) to be rushing ahead with self-driving because they will kill people and they're just as likely to kill the whole self-driving industry at the same time.
I have no doubt that even if the data looked terrible, Waymo would find a way to spin it to look safe. I also have no doubt that even if the data is good, it's not indicative of self-driving being safer in the average situation.
[+] [-] passwordoops|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akavi|2 years ago|reply
(Over ~4 Cruise rides, I’d put them closer to median)
[+] [-] cowmix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dontreact|2 years ago|reply
Humans die from driving only once every 100 million miles on average.
So until there is a comparison at this scale, to me it’s a very incomplete picture of safety to say that you are outperforming humans.
If driving my own car means colliding 100x as often but I expect to die 2x less often, I would consider self driving to be much much much more unsafe. There is really no way for me to understand the risk of fatalities from a sample of only 7 million miles, since either humans or a system with 2x the fatality rate of humans would both be expected to have 0 fatalities at this scale.
Given we are at 7m miles, hopefully this comparison is coming soon and I will be much more convinced.
[+] [-] nicklecompte|2 years ago|reply
- The major caveat is that Waymo is not being directly compared against sober humans driving lawfully.[1] The reason why this caveat is so important is that technology which makes it impossible for humans to exceed a posted speed limit might be overall much safer than replacing human drivers with autonomous drivers. Uber isn't more dangerous than Waymo because humans are incompetent, it's because humans obey orders from impatient drivers and Waymo currently does not. This is a UI choice, not an AI advancement.
- More specifically, lawful driving is an important caveat because Tesla Autopilot had two different settings for driving unlawfully, according to the users' own sense of personal risk. An AV manufacturer who advertises "AI-assisted speeding" will almost certainly find a lot of customers, even if it's under the table. People don't speed and run red lights because they're too stupid to understand why it's dangerous: they do it because they're reckless and selfish. AI won't stop that, only regulation will.
- Another caveat is that Waymo was trained on human-dominated streets. Waymo being safer in a sea of human vehicles does not actually translate to Waymo being safer in a sea of Waymos. I think this is a low-probability risk but it's hardly a simple question: I believe Waymo has had issues where several AVs occupied the same street after an event and blocked traffic because they couldn't decide what to do - they were waiting on each other to behave like a human. But again, the risk seems like gridlock, not property damage or injury.
- And a minor but still important caveat is that SF and Phoenix have modern linear grids which have been mapped to death by AV manufacturers. As a Boston resident I am still holding my breath about their performance here :)
[1] Not because of anything insidious, it's just a granularity that both the analysis and the data struggle to capture.
[+] [-] mrtksn|2 years ago|reply
You can't claim better than human when humans are driving under different conditions.
I looked around to try to find the actual data but it's just marketing materials. Are these miles on the same roads under the same traffic and weather conditions?
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lawlessone|2 years ago|reply
Unlike, Uber , Tesla and Cruise.
[+] [-] siliconc0w|2 years ago|reply