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Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- superkuh 3y agoIt's important to remember they're only testing and using these cars in areas that don't have winters. The results don't extrapolate to driving in non-cherry picked areas. This article should only be considered re: the context of local SF politics and the recent Cruise revocation.
- SmarsJerry 3y agoIf you are comparing insurance rates then you are already comparing a similar area. If insurance companies would give you a discount if your car had self driving enabled that seems like a pretty sure fire guarantee that self driving is better.
- choppaface 3y agoExcept humans drive all the time and AVs are usually turned off during extreme weather. Additionally, heavy rain days can cause a lot of people to dump Amazon delivery and do Uber for the day because rideshare demand spikes. Even if the AVs are left on, the relative population of the human drivers increases substantially (and the humans are also now also driving in less safe conditions).
- cheeselip420 3y agoCheaper != safer or better... But at least it's observable
- yreg 3y agoIn case of insurance it does mean 'expected to be safer'.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoActuaries are cold and calculating, cheaper is safer all things being equal.
- superkuh 3y agoI guess I didn't get my meaning across very well. I am not saying anything about the relative safety of driving in cherry-picked environments like SF. The data can talk about that and in this case is supports autonomous cars as being safer in SF. I am saying that you can't extrapolate that data and say that autonomous vehicles will be safer than human drivers in, say, NYC or Minneapolis. They won't be. The environmental challenges that exist in most roads in the USA do not exist in the SF test environment. That's part of the reason why tests are always done in SF or Arizona, etc. They have much easier and unchanging road conditions and visibility. So the takeaways from this article only really apply and make sense as responses to the current local SF politics. They do not show autonomous cars are better drivers in general.
- xnx 3y agoGood video from Waymo covering these same points here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g
- belltaco 3y agoAren't they operating under a lot of constraints? The comparison should be with human drivers operating under similar conditions and on similar roads, similar cars(eg. new ones), weather conditions etc. Plus they have a fleet of support folks and standby remote and dispatchable operators which cannot be cheap, we get no insight into the financials except that they're losing several billion dollars a year. If at the end you end up paying more than for a Uber for the service to be sustainable then what's the point.
- freetime2 3y ago> Plus they have a fleet of support folks and standby remote and dispatchable operators which cannot be cheap, we get no insight into the financials except that they're losing several billion dollars a year. If at the end you end up paying more than for a Uber for the service to be sustainable then what's the point. I think they are banking on the technology continuing to improve, the number of manual interventions decreasing, and costs coming down.
- afavour 3y agoGreat to hear someone is still pursuing the Uber model long after Uber themselves gave up on it!
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoI thought the problem with Uber’s self-driving initiative was that they didn’t know what they were doing, except for the main guy who stole the IP from Google.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI think the Uber model they mean is the more general "sell your service at a loss today to increase market share, hoping it will become cheaper for you tomorrow".
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- scott00 3y agoBeen a flurry of self driving car safety news lately. Both Cruise and Waymo are reaching for more sophisticated comparison samples than nationwide stats to demonstrate the safety of their systems. But the obvious way to prove this, to me anyway, is to run a randomized controlled trial. Put them in a dispatch system with human driven cars, randomize whether any given assignment goes to a human or a robot, and you've got the statistical gold standard. Anybody understand why they're not doing this?
- s1artibartfast 3y agoOut of curiosity, what would you measure? Accidents? Injuries? The power might be too low to get good data on rare events.
- scott00 3y agoThe existing studies have decent metrics given the sample sizes, IMO, I would use something similar. For the Cruise study that was recently released it was collisions, with sub-analyses for collisions with stationary objects, low speed collisions, and high speed collisions. I believe that you are correct that scale is too low for analyzing injuries or deaths.
- crazygringo 3y agoBecause accidents are rare and drivers are expensive so that might be the world's most expensive study to get to a statistically meaningful number. It's easy enough to simply compare with existing Uber in the same city along the same roads and get something nearly as accurate for virtually none of the cost.
- scott00 3y agoDrivers doing nothing productive are expensive, but drivers working ride hail are somewhere in the range of cheap to slightly profitable. The comparison with Uber depends strongly on how similar the dispatch profiles are, and I would not be quick to assume that they are similar. If they are limiting the self-driving cars due to weather, or time of day, or any property of trip type it could easily have a substantial impact.
- ChatGTP 3y agoBan human drivers and lobby to have Waymo be the only legal way to drive. \s
- gpm 3y agoBan human drivers eventually. First ban the development of new self driving systems because it's too dangerous, and merge with any competitors. Make sure you're the only game in town. With how they're developing self driving as AI heavy black boxes there isn't a more natural monopoly in the world.
- RockRobotRock 3y agocomma.ai is a sustainable and realistic business and it kicks ass
- hedora 3y agoThat dovetails nicely with their proposal to make it illegal to offer websites to adults that are browsing without a google-issued cryptographic identity. I wish I was making the above up.
- batmansmk 3y agoThose news should be carefully regulated. After working for 2 years in the field as an engineering manager directly responsible in getting good numbers, none of the claims of the time were genuine, but were just framed in a way that provided the best outlook. I wonder if it’s still the case.
- sinuhe69 3y agoYou forgot the number came from the insurance industry directly, who will bear the blunt cost if their calculations are wrong. So alone due to their self-interest, I believe those numbers are solid.
- batmansmk 3y ago« Waymo says data shows ». The insurer never said anything, it’s just Waymo saying that some of their own reasoning based on those numbers reached the conclusions they want to see - and they paid some press release company to articulate this narrative.
- tjmc 3y agoThe comparison against all human drivers is too broad. Typically insurance companies will apply higher premiums to new drivers due to inexperience and a higher likelihood of accidents. It would be better to see comparisons against the safest, most experienced cohort of human drivers.
- hetman 3y agoWhat's the utility of that? Self driving cars are meant to replace all humans, not just the safest ones.
- tjmc 3y agoA couple of reasons. First, you could compare a self driving car's safety against your own record. I've had a licence since 1988 and never had an accident. I want to compare against that standard. Second, you could get a better idea of the insurance premium against your own. I suspect there will come a day when the premiums are much lower for self driving cars but right now I suspect they'd be higher due to all the added self driving equipment you're insuring as well.
- alberth 3y agoI could imagine a situation where the # of minor fender benders is lower, but # of critical/fatal type of accidents is higher.
- olliej 3y agoSame BS as usual, failing to control for where, when, and how crashes and incidents occur will alway make self driving look safer: they disable themselves in pretty much every situation where crash rates increase: night, rain, types of road, etc. A legitimate comparison would only compare self driving rates to human driven accidents in the same conditions. That these companies continue to repeat this kind of BS makes me think that the benefits, if any, are much smaller than anything they’re claiming.
- Reubend 3y agoSeems like you wrote all of this out without realizing that they drive 24/7, regardless of weather, and they drive in all roads except highways (granted that's a big difference!) in the cities they're in. Which is to say that most of what you just said is really misleading. The only part that seems relevant to me is the highway driving versus city driving.
- olliej 3y agoWaymo's description. Sentence one. [1] "Waymo’s system is currently designed so each vehicle operates only within pre-mapped zones under certain conditions." They don't drive all roads, they require roads to be fully mapped down to a full 3d map of the surface, and if the realtime surface deviates from the mapped surface they immediately reroute to a different road. [1] https://ltad.com/about/waymo-zones.html https://ltad.com/about/waymo-zones.html
- huytersd 3y agoAlmost nothing in your comment is true. Moreover you didn’t bother reading the article let alone the research data.
- olliej 3y agoI did read the article, so I can see that nothing I said was wrong, given the content of the article. Given one of the first things I said was that they don't drive in all conditions, and the first thing on Waymo's "lets hype self driving" site is that they don't operate in all conditions, I'm fairly sure I'm right here. Unless you can point to the part of the article where it talked about how they controlled for driving conditions and locations of accidents, rather than the part of the article complaining about how their data lumped together unrelated regions.
- afavour 3y ago[duh]
- theLiminator 3y agoYou mean Cruise?
- phinnaeus 3y agoThe current top story is about Cruise, not Waymo? Am I missing something?
- pseudosavant 3y agoI'd never really thought about it, but in a capitalist society like the US, this is how you really determine how safe something is: how much does it cost to insure?
- jeffbee 3y agoI don’t see why not. You are outsourcing the question to an organization dedicated to judging risks.
- tfehring 3y agoYep, insurance is really at quantifying and transferring risk. Maybe the best thing about it is that it translates high, unlikely costs in the future into small, certain costs today, and the latter are far easier to respond to rationally and proportionately. As a minor point, there's nothing inherently capitalist about it - the largest personal lines auto insurer in the US (like many of the smaller ones) is a mutual company, meaning that it doesn't have outside shareholders and functions more or less as a cooperative owned by its policyholders.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoIt's a better way than gut feelings, confirmation bias, magical thinking, and other ways arm chair experts tend to casually assert or dismiss stuff. Insurers are on the spot financially. If they get it wrong, it comes out of their margins. Ultimately, you need insurance to be on the road. If you cause an accident, the other side will want to see some money. That's why insurance is mandatory: to make sure that money is there. The price of the insurance is directly correlated to how likely you are to cause an accident. Insurers use all sorts of criteria, including how young or old you are and how much claims you've made before. Insurers noticing that they get a lot less claims for self driving cars is going to pretty soon lead to price differences for people who still choose to drive themselves. Cars without self driving features are going to be more expensive to insure. Liability with self driving cars vs. manual drivers is also going to be different.
- JackMorgan 3y agoThe fire service changed significantly once life and health insurance companies started calculating how expensive it was to insure fire fighters. It turned out that being a fire fighter was extremely dangerous, so insurance premiums were costing more than equipment! Underwriters Laboratories started producing literature on how to make fire fighting safer, and now NFPA has turned that into strict guidelines that fire companies must follow or lose out on insurance claims. For example, fire fighters now must ride inside the cab. No more hanging on the back (falling off the back was very common, causing many severe injuries). Seatbelts must be worn inside the cab. An SCBA must be worn inside any dangerous atmosphere. Turn out gear must be inspected after every burn, and replaced every ten years. The list goes on. Finally, there is now a whole new branch of study called "fire dynamics" that is all about the science of fire fighting. UL regularly performs experiments at my local academy to test various techniques on different types of building fires. They will instrument a whole building, then start a fire a certain way, and measure what happens with different techniques. In just the last ten years they've changed a lot of former "best practices". For example, they now recommend what they call a "transitional attack" where you shoot in a few seconds of water through a window from the outside, then make entry. This is proven to greatly reduce heat in the building and allows for a better chance to put out the fire vs just running straight in. This has been a huge upset in my area, with a lot of the older folks thinking we should just always make entry ASAP. However, it is proven time and again that transitional attack is optimal in most situations. The few seconds "wasted" is proven to actually make fighting the fire safer and more effective. It is counterintuitive, but it works. All this because insurance was accurately calculating how dangerous fire fighting really is. Of course, there is a flip side to everything. A lot of the "fun" of fire fighting is now turning into "rules". Hanging on the back used to be an exciting reward for showing up even if it was a false alarm. Breaking all the windows at a house used to be a fun thing to do before UL found that it makes a fire significantly more dangerous. As the profession matures, we're faced with less personal agency and more checklists and paperwork. This is destroying volunteer fire fighting. Most of the US is served by volunteer fire fighters. As it becomes much harder to keep up with the rules and paperwork, volunteerism is dying. Many companies across the nation are on the verge of collapse because no one wants to volunteer. Between the rules and the cost of living crisis, almost no one has energy to show up. So nothing comes for free, insurance made fire fighting much safer, but now it's much harder for volunteers, which are the majority of the fire service.
- wolverine876 3y agoAs discussed in the other recent thread, the self-driving industry loves to frame the question this way - How safe are they compared to human drivers? Their consistency and the energy they put into it should indicate how intentional and strategic it is. To understand it, don't be swept along by their framing. Sophisticated communicators - and we can be certain that these businesses have hired some of them - as well as researchers know that framing the discussion is 75% of the battle. Once people accept your framing, you've won. The questions to ask are: Why do they like this framing? What other ways are there to frame the questions? How do professionals (e.g., highway safety regulators) frame the safety issues?
- yreg 3y agoWhy is it a bad framing? I would frame the question the same way.
- wolverine876 3y agoI didn't say it was bad; I said it was intentional and strategic, and it's important to understand the intent and strategy. > I would frame the question the same way. As I also said, when people accept their framing, they've already won the debate.
- Daz1 3y agoWhy did you type three paragraphs of nothing? What is the 'correct' way to frame this question?
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoThe correct way is "who goes to jail if a driverless car kills a child?"
- greiskul 3y agoWhy? Who goes to jail if a child trips and falls down stairs? Should we ban stairs? If there were no negligence from the owner in maintaining the car, and no negligence in the manufacturer, why do you care if anyone goes to jail? It won't bring the child back. If self driving cars reduce the number of fatalities, and specially if they reduce them significantly, would you really be against them just because there won't be an easy target to put in jail if an accident happens?
- swhalen 3y agoThere are considerations beyond just comparing the number of collisions. If a human driver causes an accident, they can be held to account through a legal process. If a self-driving car hurts or kills someone, who is held accountable?
- aembleton 3y ago> If a self-driving car hurts or kills someone, who is held accountable? Whoever is paying for the insurance.
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoFox claims it's a better henhouse guard than humans. But of course. Their insurance company isn't an unbiased source. I'll believe this when there's independent evidence. Also, I want to see evidence to see data for all pilot AI driving products: traffic collisions, injuries per collision, arrive sooner or later than humans, and pedestrian injuries rate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 3y ago> Their insurance company isn't an unbiased source. The insurance company would like to keep Waymo as a customer, but only if the rates are accurate. If they give Waymo an incorrect discount, they lose piles of money.
- yk 3y agoAll that shows is, that Google is as happy spouting bullshit about safety as they are at bullshitting about privacy. Seriously, the longer I think about this, the worse it gets. Thing is the structure of the data for traffic accidents is, that we have a lot of data were we don't care much and very little about the accidents we care about a lot. We care more about fatalities than severe injuries, more about severe injuries than about light injuries and more about bodily harm than about fender benders. However, the number of events is precisely the opposite, which makes it easy to just swamp the signal we care about with events we don't care about as much. > For example, Waymo’s driverless cars have traveled roughly 4 million miles, but traffic-related fatalities are routinely measured per 100 million miles. Across America's roadways last year, there were 1.37 fatalities for every 100 million miles traveled, totaling 42,795 lives lost in vehicle traffic crashes That is, the expected number of fatalities at this point of data taking assuming Waymo's self driving cars are comparable to humans is 0. If we assume that rate is ten times the human rate, then the expected number of fatalities observed is still 0. If we assume that they kill people at a 100 times the rate of human drivers, then there is still a decent chance, something slightly worse than 50/50, that we didn't observe a fatality yet. > “It’s interesting that we were able to show statistical significance with so little data,” Victor said. “That has to do with two things: one is that we have very robust baselines from Swiss Re, and the other is that we have incredible safety performance.” Now this claim is probably true, in the sense of conflating all accidents with accidents we care about. And actually I think that there is a type of accident, low speed collisions when one tries to squeeze past a badly parked car, that is probably a very large part of all insurance claims where computers just should be really good. Computers have a engineered very precise world model and distance sensors all around and don't rely on human intuition guided by human impatience to just hope that squeezing past that will just fit.
- nielsbot 3y agoI can imagine this is true--But I'd be curious to know how Waymo's robots compare with the safest human drivers (under similar conditions), not the average of all humans.
- zw123456 3y agoComputers don't drink, don't text and don't have road rage, so their claims might be plausible in a broad statistical way. My guess is that if you excluded humans that drink, text, have anger issues etc. then the humans probably win out.
- IshKebab 3y agoMaybe, but do you have a way to exclude those humans from life?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zw123456 3y agoActually, the idea would be to NOT exclude them from life. Just the opposite. Say a person is convicted of drunk driving. Maybe they need to travel to work where mass transit is not an option but we want them to continue to be employed, support their family, pay taxes and so forth. If they were to have the option of using a self driving car or car service at a reasonable price, then such people can continue to be productive members of society and maybe even that might allow them to afford to address their underlying issue. Maybe I am being a Pollyanna but we begin by imagining.
- sfn42 3y agoWhy would you exclude them? They're relevant.
- 8organicbits 3y agoWe're approaching a time when people get to choose to drive themselves vs use a self-driving car, and that decision is personal. There's a lot of nuance hidden in these statistics. If a self-driving car is slightly safer than drink driving, but otherwise slightly worse than the average sober driver, that's relevant to people who never drink. Using a self-driving car would, statistically, lower their personal safety given those assumptions. From another angle, imagine if we could aggressively ban drink drivers from the road, enforce regular eye exams, suspend the licenses of speeders, etc. Currently the lack of alternate transportation options makes these policies unpopular. Banning a driver could make it difficult for someone to commute to work, for example. Banning poor eye-sight could isolate the elderly. It's "too harsh". If affordable self-driving cars were an option (or damn it... public transit...) then these policies would likely have public support. So there could be a future where the bottom x% of drivers aren't allowed to drive.
- mjburgess 3y agoCan we get an insurance quote on human drivers operating a taxi service only in those postcodes?
- bullen 3y agoOf course it is, safer than drunk humans at least. The problem is not safety, it is what happens after many get killed by machines. And what happens to those inside the machine as it kills someone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- harhargange 3y agoTo the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain. I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.
- dagw 3y agoI live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity As do I, but if driverless taxis at even close to the price of public transport became a thing, I would never take a bus ever again.
- dathinab 3y agobut if you live in an area with a nicely sustainable population density and there are no subventions (e.g. for cars/roads) involved this seems quite impossible to ever be the case Which means it's probably will be the case for the US as most of the us is either has a less sustainable, too low (e.g. "typical" US metro area, and well the endless rural areas(1)) or too high (e.g. city center) density. (1): Through very rural areas might not be substainable for any self driving car service either, so people there will most most likely still have their own car. And for reasons of serviceability much more likely a non self driving car.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoI love public transport, however what driverless enable is very different: point-to-point personal transportation is something buses cannot achieve yet.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoFor completion. You actually have real driverless public transport systems functioning for many years now with autonomous metro and rail systems across the world. It is obviously a much easier problem to solve due to its constraints. What is interesting to me is that we have completely altered our transport networks to fit the new paradigm of cars +100 years ago, widening roads, asphalting roads, building motorways, parking lots, etc. But somehow anything that comes after must be backwards compatible with this 1950's US Detroit vision of the car centric world.
- bigbacaloa 3y ago[dead]
- octocop 3y agosafer than humans in a limited set of driving scenarios*
- komali2 3y agoEveryone's been crowing about driverless cars today but when I visited SF a month ago and finally witnessed them in action, I was surprised at their poor performance. In the span of just three days I watched them get confused and stop in the middle of 4 way stop sign intersections twice, and at one point as I was crossing an intersection with one waiting at a stop sign, a Cruise vehicle began to slowly inch forward right when I got in front of it. I was curious so I stopped moving to see what it would do, and it suddenly accelerated, swerving around me with maybe a meter to spare as I skipped out of the way (I doubt it would have hit me if I hadn't moved, but I wasn't going to take the chance). I know I only have anecdotal data but I'm really interested in returning to SF and fucking with these cars more to see just how "good" they really are. I find when you actually stand up for your rights as a pedestrian and bicyclists, vehicles tend to fall into chaotic behavior. At least a self driving car won't actively try to run me off the road on purpose (former Houstonian bicyclist), but at the very least they should know to just stop and wait if there's some crazy dude standing around in the middle of the pedestrian crosswalk. Maybe beep or something, but not accelerate suddenly and cross within a meter at alarming speed. I did email cruise about the incident with a timestamp and the "name" of the car (I think... it was plastered on the door with "bruschetta"), they emailed back saying: > I'm sorry to hear you experienced this. At Cruise we take safety very seriously and this is not the experience we’d like you to have. This issue is being escalated to the appropriate team to be looked into further. Your input is greatly appreciated as we grow our ride-hail service, We appreciate your assistance. Never heard back from them after that. Wish I had recorded it. Next time I come to SF, I'm bringing my gopro.
- Guthur 3y agoCan we be sure waymo don't settle some claims outside insurance company processes.
- _xivi 3y ago"Data shows that my kid is the best player in the world. He has scored 3x as the top professional player, while playing in my backyard. The data can't lie." Pretty much.
- okoma 3y agoIf the inference is drawn from the number of claims the first question that comes to mind is, how easy is it to file a claim with Waymo? Also, do people behave differently when involved in an accident with a driverless car? For example, at McDonalds, the automatic checkouts don’t simply substitute expensive workforce but actually boost sales of addons because people are less inhibited by a screen than by a human. So, do people just drive off if it was a minor bump? Finally, does Waymo initiate claims? If it were me, I wouldn’t. Id simply partner with a mechanic and fix issues internally as part of a fleet maintenance system. If that’s the case, I’d roughly half the stats before doing any additional inference.
- 6stringmerc 3y agoThey drive less. They drive fewer routes. Your shit car can’t navigate the high five here in Dallas so it’s not a fair comparison. Kiss my ass with that cherry picking.
- pb7 3y agoYou’re right, Dallas is the final boss of terrible infrastructure design but if Texans can figure it out, anyone can, especially Waymo.
- djoldman 3y agoThe key finding: "Waymo’s driverless vehicles, which currently operate in San Francisco and Phoenix, experienced 76% fewer accidents involving property damage compared to human-driven cars, according to the study. For every million miles traveled, human drivers filed 3.26 property damage claims compared to 0.78 for Waymo's driverless cars."
- owenversteeg 3y agoWaymo drove a total of 3M miles in 2022, for reference (driverless and non-driverless.) For fatalities, there's a national average of about 1.3 deaths per 100 million miles driven, so you wouldn't expect a Waymo fatality for a while yet if it was a standard human driver. Obviously this kind of thing lives and dies by the edge cases and in my opinion we're going to need a massive expansion in the fleets to really make them safe - by definition you will encounter very few edge cases if you do far less driving. Total miles driven in the US is over 3 trillion per year, so Waymo drives less than 1 millionth of the total miles in the US. For an intuitive way to visualize this, you can think of Waymo as a fleet of 30 truck drivers, each driving 100k miles per year (which is a typical number for truck drivers.) Thirty truck drivers having good insurance rates is a great sign, but obviously if you hire a 31st guy and he causes a ten-car pileup then your statistics will be in the toilet. Thirty truck drivers is a tiny company. The Stevie Wonder Institute For Trucking has some 15-20k drivers and recently went nine days without an accident [0]. That's not meant to belittle Waymo, of course, their achievements are very impressive and they are clearly leading the pack. One argument you could make in favor of Waymo is that highway driving is simpler, less risky statistically, and makes up most US miles driven - and they do very little of that. I'm looking forward to an expansion there, that'll really get their mileage up. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkrnWS1ea8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkrnWS1ea8 [1] [1] yes I did just link to "Mutha Trucka News" on HN.