Comment by giantg2

> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)

I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them.

In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the car behind it was rear-ended by an SUV traveling at high speed. Both that car and the SUV then struck the Waymo. The SUV hit a total of 6 cars and someone in one of the other cars died. According to the police, the SUV may also have been involved in "multiple hit-and-run accidents reported just minutes before" [2].

In the second [3], the Waymo was yielding to a pedestrian when a motorcyclist made contact with the left rear corner of the Waymo. The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.

If you drive on urban streets, no matter how good of a driver you are, there's a chance you're going to be involved in some sort of incident that's completely out of your control -- that seems to be what both of these are.

[1] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-9724

[2] https://archive.ph/5M05h

[3] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-11713

As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.

If you make the wrong decision about which car to buy, your insurance can cost hundreds of dollars a month. Cutting that substantially is as good as banning non-automated driving. Cars that aren't automated will plummet in value.

The thing is, the automated cars can't afford to have obvious and readily understandable faults like being blinded by the sun.

> rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.

Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers.

Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconfident. I would be very surprised to find out they are above average drivers.

In my circle, everyone who's tried Waymo never wants to use Uber/Lyft with a human driver again. And, many of them wish they could own one or at least use one for much longer drives (100s of miles).

I would visit my mom (2hrs by car) more often if that 2hrs (each way) wasn't so stressful and exhausting and I could just be chauffeured by a self driving car while I browse the net, play a game, watch a movie, or talk to friends.

AFAIK there isn't data about fatality rate for rideshare services (I'm sure Uber has this data but I don't think they make it public). Without this data I wouldn't automatically jump to the conclusion that rideshare services are safer than the average driver, anecdotally at least I don't see any reason to assume this.

It's also extremely important to normalize this data per geo and driving type (urban vs freeway miles), which Waymo does do and you seem to ignore.

Enforcement, too, including the little things that "don't really matter". Letting people get away with minor infringements like parking where it's forbidden, idling with the engine running, close passes etc means the window of what's acceptable driving behaviour shifts.

We should return to the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right.

> It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.

You already have it, people want this.

> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.

And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?

A horrifying number of people flagrantly use their phones while driving. Im not talking about peaking at a text or google maps, but straight up scrolling tik tok while driving. At the end of the day there is going to be a lowest common denominator of selfish morons on the road, and the two practical solutions I see are 1) aggressive surveillance state grade distracted driving enforcement 2) self driving cars.

I used to bike to work in Chicago and it was surreal being able to look right into someone's car and see hardly anyone is paying attention.

I'll also never forget the first time getting hit by a car (car did left turn when I was biking straight through a green light) and right before impact seeing the driver's face illuminated by their phone while looking straight down driving into me.

National Safety Council says passenger vehicles are 0.46 per 100M miles, trains are 0.01 and busses 0.009.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

Not sure if you meant to imply it, but you don't need to remove driver liability to incentivize the inebriated to use autonomous mode. That's a calculation even someone who's blackout drunk can easily make.

Removing liability might incentivize more people to, e.g., drive their car to a bar. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Maybe great for bars and restaurants, or possibly quality of life, but removing liability probably has other unintended consequences.

It's maybe too early tell whether criminal liability should be changed, or at least how it should be changed. If criminal liability had been removed when Tesla started making their extravagant self-driving claims, surely you'd agree it would have been too soon, and potentially resulted in more accidents. Few if any consumer autonomous driving modes are as reliable as Waymo

Absent statutory changes, common law tort will probably evolve in some states to take into consideration new incentives and norms, and that might help point the way for changes in criminal law. Those policy changes are typically driven by courts wrestling with real world cases, whereas de novo legislative changes are often driven by imaginations and lobbying.

Aren't the route restrictions that this data was collected on a large confounder? They are specifically placed to avoid difficult or dangerous areas. For example in the bay area only recently were they allowed to go on the freeway, and only in certain areas.

> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol.

The biggest thing would be safer road/street design, but Americans are kind of allergic to that. Talk about traffic calming or road diets and a lot of folks get absolutely furious.

Good point. Waymo is not comparing apples to apples here

"At-fault" Waymo crashes on 35mph city roads driven only in good weather vs. all crashes regardless of fault for on all roads including highways driven in all weather conditions

And those CDL drivers go at speed limit because they have to cover as much distance as possible, meanwhile Waymo and similar driverless tech frequently go 10km/h below speed limit. I believe there would be much less incidents by humans if they too were to drive at those speeds.

> If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability.

Liability is the biggest issue holding back widespread adoption, IMO. The tech is pretty good already. Yet accidents are still going to happen. The question is m who pays when they do? The “driver”? The taxi operator? The car manufacturer? It’s all unclear at best right now.

> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)

fault absolutely matters. and with two fatal accidents, it should be trivial to find out if waymo is at fault.

it is bad faith, otherwise.

Sorry, why would the baseline be their rideshare drivers instead of the average population? That seems like an arbitrary segment given that when talking about safety baselines, the average driver is what someone would reference. And why would waymo want to publish their own ride share driver safety data, especially if it is presumably not supporting their point, and what would anyone gain from them doing that? If they did do that, the counter argument would quickly be "they published ride share driver data because they know it makes them look better, why not compare to the average driver?" (Its equivalent because we do not have stats on waymo drivers vs the average driver and both statements are built off assumptions)

> So would banning alcohol.

As in a full on country wide prohibition? Whatever amount of road deaths that would prevent would be offset by idiots dying via drinking industrial spirits.

These are great points. I would add that part of societal buy-in might involve driving the cost of hiring cars down by automating them, though I realize at the moment Waymo can charge a premium because people prefer to not have a human driver. Over the long term autocars should be cheaper than either Uber or owning a car yourself.

But there is lots of money to be made by requiring FSD. No money to be made by banning alcohol. We know what the current administration cares about

> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data

You can't subsidise "better driver education" (to a meaningful sense, to my knowledge) or "banning alcohol." You literally can't do the latter. We tried, and I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.

You can use direct poicy action to save lives through AVs.

So at the end of the day, we're deflecting from harm reduction to preserve a parochial mode of transport or not.

Insurance underwriters may make societal buy-in easier when rates are vastly different but that may take quite a while to hit critical mass so both drivers are self driven

That observed fatality rate, 2, is too low to give a precise estimate of the mean. If we assume fatalities follow a Poisson process, then it's plausible (at 5% significance level) that the true expectation is only 0.36 deaths, not 2.

So it's more useful to look at serious injury statistics as a proxy. For those, Waymo says that there is a significant reduction.

The CDL comparison seems misleading. Those are very large and safe vehicles that are mostly on the highway. Being close to that number is impressive to me.

Banning drugs like alcohol imo is not a solution for any drug, people have their own reasons to consume them and the underlying cause should be resolved first

Does n=2 give any statistical significance? Or does that come from the miles?

So would reducing car dependency altogether...

> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.

Superman: I want to get rid of guns.

Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale. Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.

Superman: But most. You know we could.

Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.

Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check.

Mr. Terrific: Some would fight.

Superman: Let them come then, with sticks. Think of the lives we’d save. Check.

Mr. Terrific: Smoking.

Superman: What?

Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more. People keep smoking even though they know it’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die.

Superman: And?

Mr. Terrific: You want to save lives? Jail every smoker. Check. And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check. Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check. Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.

Superman: You’re not going to help me, are you?

Mr. Terrific: No, sir, I am not.

Aside from the fact that I don’t see how you can calculate a rate off two data points (without really wide error bars), I also don’t understand how fault doesn’t matter. If neither of these were Waymo’s fault, then Waymo has never caused a fatal accident, whereas we can assume that nearly all of the fatal accidents that make up the rate you’re comparing it with were caused by a human, right? Well, at least the ones that were someone’s fault as opposed to random chance or something.

>you also have to have societal buy-in.

Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.

Worse human driving improves the number of lives autonomous driving saves

Waymo is better than it was last year. And next year it will be better than it is now. And every year after that it will continue to improve. Meanwhile, a thousand years from now humans will still be humans.

I don't know why you come across as so antagonistic to self driving cars. But even if they're only as good as humans today, then you have completely and flat out lost the argument already.

What we have going on here is a false dichotomy, with one car-dependent tribe wanting one type of car whilst another car-dependent tribe wants another type of car.

Across Europe they have 2030 targets to get half the journeys in urban areas made with 'active travel', which means walking or cycling. Even the UK has such absurd targets that are no longer so absurd.

Europe is out of hydrocarbons and Hormuz is closed. The global south will experience the pain of this initially, however, there may come a time when people in Europe can no longer afford to run a car. It won't matter if that car is an EV that can drive itself and warm the seats for you, that future will be gone, for all but the higher status members of society. This will be a big club, but you know you won't be in it.

The levels of active travel sought by the European authorities (including the UK), takes us back to 1930s levels of cycling, when very few owned a car in Europe. Of course, the USA was different, with an abundance of cars, which Europe only saw in the post-war years.

Recently I saw a woman, somewhat large for her size, stuffing her face full of junk food, whilst she waited in her SUV in a supermarket car park to pick up her children from the nearby school. Her posture was not great and I did not think she had a 'good look'.

This particular woman could adapt to a 'Buy and Large' self-driving vehicle, however, Hormuz is closed, with an expected financial challenge expected next year. She might not be able to adapt to 'active travel', to walk or cycle to the school, to escort them back the 'active way', with no heated steering wheel, no A/C, no vanity mirror, no cup holders, no Apple Car Play and pedals that have to be well and truly pushed.

If she is able to make this transition, then she will become part of the community, able to say hello to neighbours because she won't be stuck in a tin box. Nature might return to her street without her there to run over anything that moves.

For longer journeys she might have to get the train rather than sit in those foul sweaty seats in her SUV, that have never been cleaned.

Once free from car dependency, much of the car-dependent world no longer makes sense. Drive-thru fast food is not for 'active travel', neither is the out-of-town retail park. A decent sit-down cafe in town centre or even a pub makes much more sense, as do the smaller shops in town centre, even if they cost more.

Car dependency is up there with drug and alcohol dependency, or even breathing, the car dependent are not going to give up their cars, whatever tribe they are in. However, for one reason or another, much of the world's supply of hydrocarbons is being taken offline at the moment and only the asset owning class are going to be afford any type of car, FSD EV or not. The working man is going to have to get in shape for 'active travel'.

America will be safe from this for a while, however, we will be going back to 1930s, with just the USA as a viable market for cars, FSD or otherwise.

In time Hormuz will reopen and everyone will go back to their gas-guzzling ways, as per previous oil shocks, however, we need to open our eyes to the opportunity to escape car dependency, to create a new era of peace, prosperity and active travel.

Don't forget the elderly. They are responsible for a crash in roughly $age% of the cases. So a 66 yo person is the reason for a crash in 2/3 of the cases... I hear Greece has a mandatory doctor visit after 65 of so every 2 years. Since that is hard to politically get through in other countries apparently, AVs might save some lives here if made mandatory of the elderly.

>It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.

The lower auto liability and umbrella insurance premiums alone would drive buy-in.

It’s literally the riskiest thing people do with the costliest consequences.

If the most advanced ie FSD by Tesla still does not come with gurantee and the human has to babysit it ie stay alert at all time so they can take over in a moments notice or less , then shouldn’t the positive results be also attributable to the humans that drive those autonomous vehicles?

>Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace

"Interesting" is doing so much heavy lifting here.

Fully agreeing with your other points as well.

> The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.

Citation definitely needed.

The last couple of human rideshare drivers I have had were AWFUL. One was so awful that I gave them a one star with "Actively dangerous remove from road, please." I never give one star reviews.

> Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person... Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.

LOL, we have a machine that can now drive much more safely than average humans, and comparable to professional drivers. Yeah, this is not impressive at all. C'mon people, wake me up when we actually make some real technological progress, will ya?