[actinium226]

70 active on average at any given time per the article, which then lists total fleet size, as opposed to number of active cars on average, so it's not a fair comparison.

Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical).

So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.

[oceliker]

I think anyone who goes for a drive in Los Angeles can attest that there are way mo than 70 cars active at any point. It's not unusual to see multiple Waymos at intersections.

Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.

[hawaiianbrah]

I see what you did there…

[toddmorey]

Yeah that sentence struck me as very carefully worded. They also don't mention how often RA is needed or invoked. We'll encounter a lot of these autonomous systems (cars, robots, equipment) that escalate decisions and edge cases to human employees until they are trained enough that reliability goes up.

[AlotOfReading]

It's tricky to give a number for "RA required" that isn't wildly misleading, or contextualize one you're given. The common case for most AV RAs is confirmation of what the vehicle already has planned. Does that count as "required"?

An AV company can also tune how proactive vehicles are in reaching out to RA for confirmation, which is a balancing act between incident rate, stoppages, RA availability, and rider metrics. There's other ways to tune RA rate by also adjusting when and where the vehicles operate, which comes down to standard taxi fleet management tools (e.g. price and availability).

Waymo chooses a target that they're comfortable with and probably changes it every so often, but those numbers aren't the only possible targets and they're not necessarily well-correlated to the system's "true" capabilities (which are themselves difficult to understand).

[wheelerwj]

One point. This isn’t an article, it’s a blog.