Just got my inaugural Waymo rides and access.
Comparing to all drivers is one thing, but comparing to ride shares is another and yeah, Uber and Lyft are done.
The market is definitely going to choose Waymo.
The new reservations of a driverless car arent going to be big enough to trump the distrust and negative experience of other humans, given the option. The pricing is comparable, and the rest of the experience is better. The driverless part also seems trained on the driving customs of the area, here in LA it was assertive when it needed to be and overall impressive. LA has some sketchy left turn customs and the car did it fine.
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?
I think the statistics they use to compare to human drivers are slightly misleading. They compare to the average human driver. I'm not sure I would entrust my life to a random driver, who could be a teenager who just got their driver's license, a 90-year-old grandma, or someone with prior reckless driving citations. For comparison, here are the requirements to become a taxi driver in San Francisco: [San Francisco Taxi Driver Requirements](https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/taxi/become-taxi-driver).
In conclusion, Waymo, being a taxi service, should compare their safety record to that of human taxi drivers.
Humans are bad at driving and in the last 5 years the behavior of the most extreme drivers way out on the tail of the bad driver bell curve has become much worse. Waymo is just acting as a recording device to quantify how bad these bozos are.
This is great news for people who want to buckle themselves into an uncontrollable 70 mph thin-metaled panopticon : P
I remember reading that these Waymo cars haven't been allowed onto highways until now. If thats true I wonder how that will change these statistics since that dramatically increases the need for the vehicle to think and perform...
Just got a scooter in SF, friend told me to ride alongside Waymo where possible, as they're less likely to crash into you.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511987
If only they would deploy faster. I really doubt their crash rate would spike up to human levels if they expanded 2x or 10x faster.
Living in Silicon Valley I've been passing those cars for a decade without the opportunity to ride. Now they even have regulatory approval for this area, but still no service and no timeline for service.
AI systems should be able to do better. I don't think saying "yeah, we're done here" is acceptable.
The next step is to start building models of human minds (as is modeling human behavior, not literal mind uploads), as well as models of every self driving car model, and do full on global (-ish, limited to the general area) optimization of outcomes according to a publicly available and audited decision theory and utility function.
It's the only way to enable superhuman avoidance actions without making things worse by confusing others. This is why the models of humans and other robotic cars are needed.
Can't wait for the moment when the majority of cars on the road will be self-driving. I assume that safety will only increase as the proportion rises. The sheer amount of victims from driving is insane - we'll look back on it as we now look to infectious diseases of the past.