[lordofmoria]

I’d like to see a comparison of Waymo to the top 10% of drivers, rather than average.

I’d consider my dad a good driver - he’s driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without a crash in probably 30 years. Does such data exist?

[fragmede]

The raw data is available for download and you can compare not getting into any accidents to their number of accidents per however many hundreds of thousands of miles.

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/#downloads

There isn't much to the data available for download, but it looks like 0.00001207261588 accidents per mile, or ~1.2 accidents per 100,000 miles (268/22199000). Figuring your father drives 15k miles per year, times 30 years and rounding up to 500k miles, Waymo has a recorded 6 accidents to your father's 0.

Not sure why that's an interesting comparison, however.

Assuming your dad is good at not driving when he shouldn't (tired/drunk/angry), he's not on the road when it's worrisome. I don't worry about getting into accidents with drivers who aren't on the road, I worry about the tired/drunk/angry drivers I do have to share the road with. Waymo at 2:15am after the bars let out is much less worrisome than any other car at that time, because I have no idea who's in that other car. Your father could be the safest driver ever, but I have no idea if it's him in the other car, or if that driver is totally blacked out and shouldn't be driving.

[lordofmoria]

Thanks for doing the math and making this concrete!

I think it’s interesting because:

1) it gives Waymo a higher target to shoot for - it hasn’t “solved” self-driving because its safer than the average driver. I am so impressed by Waymo, but I feel like some of this article smacked of premature “mission accomplished” vibes. The fact that it just accepted the comparison to average without caveat is an example of that. 2) As a matter of policy, everyone can agree that a Waymo ride home for the tipsy is good, but where policy will have issues is convincing good drivers such as my dad to take Waymos everywhere. Not to mention most drivers irrationally think they’re way better than average - that will affect policy in a real way.

[lordofmoria]

I think it’s Waymo 6 accidents, not .6 if Waymo has ~1.2 accidents per 100k miles.

[yial]

I think that would be a fascinating comparison.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a top x% of drivers would outperform Waymo at this current juncture. (Especially perhaps in things like heavy rain).

However, I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve driven over 1.2 million miles over the last 17 years. (It may be closer to 1.5 million but I’m only counting miles on vehicles I’ve owned as that’s easier for me to calculate quickly ). Without an accident.

I know that I get tired and my driving skills drop[1]. I have to sneeze or cough and they drop. I’m on a long continuously straight road, stressed about xyz and they drop.

Self driving cars won’t necessarily have the same short comings.

Even the self driving features that my car has (very limited, 2023 Infiniti Q50 Red Sport 400) are better at times then I am. (Though it often will wait far too long to brake in my opinion when using the auto cruise even at maximum distance).

However, I do think humans have advantages too in some situations. (If you can on average track what’s around you and try to think as close as possible to 12 seconds ahead…. If you haven’t try it sometime on the highway. )

[1] perhaps luckily, I have a tendency to drive slower when fatigued. However at times I’ve pushed it, realized I’m going 15 mph below the speed limit, and realized I needed to not be driving. I also know that when not fatigued my lane assist will usually trigger 0 times on a normal 20-30 mile drive. When fatigued, it may begin to trigger once every 10 minutes. To clarify, I’m not out of my lane, but I’m moving out of center.

[roenxi]

Why? We have a major problem right now; cars are deathtraps and roads are murder weapons. We haven't been able to do anything about that historically without taking unacceptable economic damage, but we're right on the cusp of massive improvements to the situation.

How the top 10% of drivers are going in amongst all that isn't really a factor as far as I can see. They'll probably end up banned from taking the wheel at some point for consistencies sake but they are ultimately not really a factor. Besides, automated cars will overtake (hehe) their skills at some point whether we track it specifically or not; in the long term humans can't compete against an engineered process.

[lordofmoria]

Because if Waymo is clearly a better driver than average, but not better than me, it might affect my decision to use one.

[karlgkk]

I’d support such a comparison if 100% of drivers were the top 10% of drivers