Note that in one of Perla's linked articles, he argues that Tesla's approach to testing autonomous vehicles is better than Waymo's because unpaid safety drivers

Note that in one of Perla's linked articles, he argues that Tesla's approach to testing autonomous vehicles is better than Waymo's because unpaid safety drivers are cheaper than paid safety drivers. "Moreover, Waymo cannot get the requisite number of miles to either prove safety or truly get all the edge case long-tail test data to make it safer than humans. It’s too expensive to pay trained safety drivers, since you need more data and more miles to get edge case data as you get safer and safer. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars or more to drive the billions of needed miles. It’s not even close to possible to get enough paid rides in remote Arizona to drive billions of miles. The unsupervised rides save them a bit of money, but risk lives, so at what cost to the population, to us? "As a comparison, Tesla gathers test data cheaply. Tesla had at least 10 billion miles of data driven this year worldwide in every condition, and customers paid them for the privilege to drive them as (unpaid, non-professional) supervising safety drivers." I believe he's right about the data, although I'm not entirely sure about the quality of the data. I am also not sure I'm happy with his, and Tesla's, solution. (In order to discover edge cases, you have to put the vehicle in potentially dangerous situations and hope that the unpaid safety driver can extricate it without killing anyone.)