Comment by NiloCK
2 days ago
It's about many things, including reaction speed, visual awareness, specific expertise and informed decision making wrt braking or acceleration power. All of these are better in a modern self-driving car (I do not know whether Tesla falls into this category) than in a human.
https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes.
Reaction speed does not matter if the driver can anticipate things before they happen. Actually I think what makes a good driver is ones ability to anticipate.
I don't think computers are anywhere near a human in that regard.
>visual awareness
A point cloud and some computer vision is not "visual awareness". Your statistics is also biased is of its source.
But in very controlled environments and for sedentary pace of driving, yes, self driving cars could be better than average drivers.
80-90% reduction, over the course of 170 million miles driven on the famously very controlled city streets of LA, SF, Austin and Phoenix.
On average, I wouldn't expect the regulatory agencies to be very friendly toward outright fraudulent reporting from Waymo. On the very outside, maybe these 80-90% reductions are optimistic roundups from 50-65% reductions. Or do you believe that Waymo is secretly running people down and scooping corpses into their trunks?
What is a sedentary pace of driving?
Can you tell me if this 80% reduction is comparing waymo with human taxi drivers?