86 ms·

Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles

• unixhero 3y ago
  Benchmark against Tesla not humans.
  • ra7 3y ago
    Tesla has humans supervising when in FSD, so they're included here too.
  • buro9 3y ago
    Tesla are free to benchmark against Waymo. Or even against humans... not as a claim that is unverified, but to work to verify the claim with a third party.
• doppio19 3y ago
  I can believe it. I rode in a Waymo for the first time a couple days ago and it was incredible. No problems with the rain or bad San Francisco drivers. It was a really smooth ride and I felt extremely safe.
  • dabeeeenster 3y ago
    I was under the impression the LIDAR approach was compromised by rain? Did something change or did I not understand it right?
    • ra7 3y ago
      That's just some good old Musk/Tesla propaganda. Waymo has developed a really high resolution lidar + some software magic means rain is no longer an issue for them.
      • jessriedel 3y ago
        Thanks. Any recommended reading links on this?
        • ra7 3y ago
          Their 5th gen Lidar point clouds compared it to previous gen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COgEQuqTAug&t=11601s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COgEQuqTAug&t=11601s They have a ton of literature at https://waymo.com/research/ https://waymo.com/research/ and tech talks on YouTube (search talks by Drago Anguelov). They make heavy use of simulators [1] where they simulate weather events and create their own weather maps [2]. It's a very sophisticated stack. [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2021/06/SimulationCity.html https://waymo.com/blog/2021/06/SimulationCity.html [2] https://waymo.com/blog/2022/11/using-cutting-edge-weather-research-to-advance-the-Waymo-Driver.html https://waymo.com/blog/2022/11/using-cutting-edge-weather-re...
          • jessriedel 3y ago
            Thanks!
          • guiomie 3y ago
            The kind of comment I expect from hacker news, thanks! Its impressive how the lidar resolution evolved as per the youtube video. The color added, i wonder if its post-processing.
    • gumballindie 3y ago
      Probably using remote human operators to make numbers look better.
    • itslennysfault 3y ago
      I thought the opposite. I thought this was one of the main reasons in favor of LIDAR vs regular cameras.
    • altgoogler 3y ago
      The current Waymo driver uses cameras, RADAR and LIDAR, which are meant to compliment each other's capabilities. https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-the-future-of-driving-is-autonomous-with-dmitri-dolgov-of-waymo/ https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-the...
    • WawaFin 3y ago
      there are many video showing waymo trips during rain or even (heavy) fog few examples : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aBNYcBoLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aBNYcBoLI ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8TGFA6SfAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8TGFA6SfAo
• billy99k 3y ago
  The problem is that it's not a person driving, it's a vehicle that's property of a company. If that vehicle kills someone, the company is responsible. Who goes to prison? The company owners? CEO? Vehicle engineer(s)? update: I see we have some Waymo engineers in the house!!!!!!! (which is why I'm getting downvoted)
  • sebzim4500 3y ago
    Surely this is settled law? I would have thought cars crash due to mechanical fault quite often.
  • sickofparadox 3y ago
    Probably the human behind the wheel that failed to properly act as a line of defense against faulty computer decision making. We don't send Boeing engineers to jail when autopilot crashes a plane. Edit: I am wrong Ill take the L
    • ibbih 3y ago
      It...is a driverless car.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • billy99k 3y ago
      "Probably the human behind the wheel that failed to properly act as a line of defense against faulty computer decision making. We don't send Boeing engineers to jail when autopilot crashes a plane" But most airplanes still have pilots. We are talking about cars with no drivers.
    • MattGaiser 3y ago
      In most plane crashes, nobody is sent to jail.
      • 3y ago
• passwordoops 3y ago
  Nice... Does the NHTSA have independent data to support the claim? Because if not, I'm taking this as PR masquerading as a data project
  • webel0 3y ago
    Better NHTSA testing/benchmarks/regulations would help the entire industry at this point. After the cruise debacle, we need more than just, “our internal metrics show.”
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • happytiger 3y ago
    You should imo. With cruise taking a nose dive, it’s clearly a priority to establish themselves as the “remaining alternative” in the marketplace. Especially given the problematic data that has emerged in this industry over the last few years. Consider that the entire article starts with, “Safety leads everything we do at Waymo.” A clear and almost painfully direct PR to what took down Cruise last week. You could almost add “unlike our competitors” to the headlines haha
  • bryanlarsen 3y ago
    If they're lying and you can prove it, you can make a lot of money. Lying in a press release is securities fraud, and there are some nice whistleblower statutes that can give you a big payout.
    • acdha 3y ago
      There’s a gap between outright fraud and analysis not making a completely accurate comparison. In this topic it’s tricky to make sure you’re comparing representative trips: for example, one study earlier this year found that Tesla's reported safety improvement disappeared after accounting for disparities in the age of the drivers, the type of driving, age of the vehicle, etc. – teenagers making bad choices cause a lot of crashes but the kind of people who buy a high-end car tend to be much older and are less likely to drive like that in any vehicle. Waymo is definitely saying things which look like they’re trying to compare apples to apples but it’s not hard to trip over data like this even if your intentions are fully honest. The fact that they’re publishing data and encouraging independent review is a good sign.
• buryat 3y ago
  i only recently realized that it’s “way more”
  • avarun 3y ago
    Huh?
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      The name, I presume. "Waymo" = "way mo", that is, "way more".
      • avarun 3y ago
        That’s not at all where it comes from though. It’s referring to a “way” forward in “mo”bility.
  • xnx 3y ago
    "a new WAY forward in MObility" (emphasis mine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo
• wongarsu 3y ago
  I know Waymo are the investing a lot into the PR that makes them seem successful, but they are the only company I actually see on track to delivering autonomous cars (on existing infrastructure). I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing once you consider all the second and third order effects (even more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult problem.
  • whoisthemachine 3y ago
    > and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually improve once autonomous driving is the standard. I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over, that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people still maintain the ability to move independently of each other but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.
    • techterrier 3y ago
      Like crappy little trains with no capacity?
      • xnx 3y ago
        Magic little trains that can take you from and to anywhere.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • ortusdux 3y ago
      I can't find the report, but IIRC there was a study that calculated that autonomous driving could triple the carrying capacity of highways because they could safely reduce following distance. They also estimated fuel/energy savings due to them being able to collectively draft of each other.
• akavi 3y ago
  As a single anecdote, I’ve taken 12 Waymo rides over the past 3 months, and I’d put them at ~90th percentile with respect to human Uber/Lyft drivers in terms of smoothness/quality of reaction to the various hazards of SF streets. (Over ~4 Cruise rides, I’d put them closer to median)
• liuliu 3y ago
  Like others said. Waymo One in San Francisco is great. Smooth / confident drive. Good situation awareness (several times when it made unexpected action, only later I realized there is a person or a car it tried to avoid). Looking forward to expand its coverage to SFO, that will be a game-changer. Still not sure of it economics though. Its current price is on-par with Uber Comfort / a little bit over Uber X. How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion?
  • TotempaaltJ 3y ago
    > How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion? I guess if it's showing enough promise to be profitable on its own (workout R&D and expansion costs), Google can probably spare a few more billions.
  • mgfist 3y ago
    Removing the driver frees up a lot of money to be used towards all of that.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    People keep getting more expensive, the tech keeps getting cheaper, the economics will eventually work out.
  • skywhopper 3y ago
    I’m extremely skeptical of the economics of scaling Waymo up to a viable, profitable service. At least, not at a large scale. But the R&D that’s gone into it will require a large scale rollout to pay off.
  • jessriedel 3y ago
    I don't think the price they charge for Waymo is related almost at all to their operating cost. Operating cost is undoubtedly much higher. I suspect Waymo has set fleet size based on how many cars they want operating for gathering the best amount of data and testing improvements, and then prices are set by demand (i.e., price that keeps the cars busy while minimizing wait time).
• cowmix 3y ago
  FWIW, I've used them quite a few times here in Phoenix --- overall a very positive experience. The Waymo car used to be too cautious and would take weird routes but now they drive appropriately aggressive and the route selection is much better.
• MBCook 3y ago
  Is this meaningful? OK they have a lower crash rate compared to humans. They also just stop in the middle of the street when they get confused and do nothing until someone remotes in to drive them. I’m sure humans would do a lot better if every time they got unsure they just stopped and never moved again. Waymo is clearly out in front by a few hundred miles, but touting this seems a little disingenuous to me.
  • HALtheWise 3y ago
    In my experience, getting stuck in the middle of the street is >90% a Cruise problem and <10% Waymo.
    • MBCook 3y ago
      Oh I may be mixing them up. Thanks.
• iancmceachern 3y ago
  I wonder how much each of their Jags plus the equipment costs?
• keep320909 3y ago
  "Comparable" human benchmarks may be a bit misleading. Waymo drives far safer and less assertive, on turns it does not push itself into traffic and waits longer... It is still pretty impressive, but we should compare average speed and such.
  • sdenton4 3y ago
    Safer but slightly slower is totally fine. It's even more fine when there's no human attention being wasted on the act of driving itself.
• huytersd 3y ago
  I’ve done two dozen trips and I can vouch for this. It seemed completely safe and in control, with crisp decisive moves throughout all those rides. I’m not sure what they’re doing on the backend but this is it.
• superkuh 3y ago
  That's great. I'm glad they're good enough to drive in the southwest. But Waymo cars performance in SF cannot be implicitly extrapolated to non-SF environments. Try the same thing in a place with winter on a normal suburban city road. The road edges and evolving swarm-defined lanes have little to do with the absolute GPS position of the unobscured lanes and edges. An all the road makings are often obscured for weeks at at time (or longer). The road surface snow looks just like the road edge snow. And it's a semi-permanent slippery surface. There are a lot of challenges left in non-cherry picked regions before autonomous driving can be said to "outperform comparable human benchmarks" without this qualifier.
• skywhopper 3y ago
  Obviously an announcement like this from a company with plenty on the line is going to be as positive. Report as is possible. That said, kudos to them for acknowledging several possible sources of bias in the writeup. However, while differing vehicle types were mentioned as a source of variation, there was almost no indication that this factor was applied to the numbers. Also, my understanding is that this service does limit its coverage area, so I’m curious what sort of impact that has on the numbers. One other interesting fact. They claim 7+ million miles on 700,000 trips. So the average trip is over 10 miles, which I found surprising, but perhaps I shouldn’t since most of the data is probably from the Phoenix area.
• paxys 3y ago
  I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population. The majority of people are driving most of their miles during rush hour when chances of a crash are the highest, while Waymo cars operate all day/night. Plus I'm sure that first-time drivers, drunk drivers, people out on illegal joyrides and other such extremes drag the numbers down enough that saying "I'm in the top 40%" really isn't all that meaningful anymore. What I'm interested in knowing is how these cars drive compared to the average competent driver in the exact same environment.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • gruez 3y ago
    >I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population This depends on what type of drivers waymo is displacing. If it's displacing mostly professional drivers, then that substitution would be reasonable, because the choices we have are either professional drivers or waymo. However, if it's displacing "normal" drivers, including "first-time drivers, drunk drivers", then the substitution wouldn't be reasonable because banning waymo would mean those rides would be replaced with "normal" drivers, not super-safe professional drivers.
    • paxys 3y ago
      Well at the moment Waymo operates a taxi service, and the only way to use it is as a substitute for Uber/Lyft, so that question answers itself. Even otherwise though, if at some point in the future I have the option of trading my car in for a fully autonomous one, the only thing I'm really interested in knowing is how my personal accident risk in getting from point A to point B changes compared to if I was driving myself. These benchmarks are meaningless in that regard. I'm not driving drunk, I'm not driving in bad weather conditions, I'm not being needlessly arrogant or reckless on the road. Can this car drive better than me?
• danans 3y ago
  The only way this has an impact on road accident/injury/fatality rates at any meaningful scale is if millions of people switch from routine personal-car based transportation to shared transportation, even single-occupancy shared transportation like Waymo. I don't see millions running out and buying a real self-driving car kitted with a spinning lidar "hat" and visible radar transmitters sticking out everywhere, even if doing so meant safer roads for everyone. What people in the market actually want is what Tesla has been selling (however fraudulently): a car that looks/performs very nice and claims full-self-driving capability, not a goofy looking car that self-drives very well in particular locations and use cases. Cars are about personal identity and power at least as much as they are about functional transportation. I'd like to be wrong about all that, and would like a future where swarms of electric self-driving buses that route-optimize based on demand pick up people very close to where they are. But I also realize that the reptilian brains of consumers tend to decide how these things eventually pan out, and not the solutions that are optimized for efficiency and safety.
  • madars 3y ago
    Why don't you see millions buying a real self-driving car? You can work (or read or watch movies or whatever) during a commute and buy a bigger house where land is cheap. I doubt there are fundamental reasons why sensors couldn't be made more appealing for people who value aesthetics above saving a literal hour+ every day.
    • danans 3y ago
      > You can work (or read or watch movies or whatever) during a commute and buy a bigger house where land is cheap > saving a literal hour+ every day. Hyper-commuting isn't really an aspiration for most people. The aspiration is usually either having the big house where land is expensive, or having the even bigger house where land is cheap plus not having to commute. More abstractly, there are 2 location luxuries: 1) proximity to opportunity, and 2) not needing the proximity to opportunity because you are wealthy enough not to care. Furthermore, time spent in a car isn't time spent with family - which is presumably most peoples' reason for wanting a big house. Being stuck in a self-driving car for hours commuting doesn't give you that kind of time back. > I doubt there are fundamental reasons why sensors couldn't be made more appealing for people who value aesthetics My take is that making them more appealing means making them nearly invisible. To the best of my knowledge, in the case of lasers and other visible-light spectrum sensors, making them more invisible inhibits their function. That's probably a big reason Tesla dismissed lidar. Also, if there's one thing Elon has taught us, it's that you sell more people on new car ideas by appealing to their base instincts, not their higher selves.
• Bjorkbat 3y ago
  Pretty neat! Worth keeping in mind though that a lot of that data came from Phoenix, a city that only gets 8 inches of rain a year and has fairly pristine, well-marked roads to match. In a way, Phoenix is the perfect initial testing ground for self-driving cars before you put them in an environment that more closely resembles the typical US city. But a lot of that data also seems to come from San Francisco, so I have to admit I'm impressed.
  • Powdering7082 3y ago
    They break it down by SF & also attempt to control for location
  • hosh 3y ago
    Phoenix also has a lot of jerk drivers. There's a law here against displays of road rage, but it doesn't stop people from doing some really weird and dangerous stuff just to show their displeasure. (In constrast to say, Albuquerque. Drivers are a lot nicer and polite. They just have traffic signals that are confusing, and the regulations on signs and lines placement sets you up for failure).
    • Grazester 3y ago
      I am surprised that law has not been challenged by someone stating it violates their first amendment rights.
      • hosh 3y ago
        Interesting, and I'll keep that in mind. I'm not sure that law keeps people from using other means to express their road rage in a more dangerous manner (for example, cutting in front and then slowing down is something I have encountered before).
• stickfigure 3y ago
  The folks that get indignant about even the marginal self-driving cars (Cruise, Tesla) vastly overestimate the abilities of human drivers. Spend an hour watching this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DashcamLessons https://www.youtube.com/@DashcamLessons If you have a strong stomach, search youtube for "brutal and fatal". Humans are shit drivers. Remember that when you hand the car keys over to your teenager.
  • xnx 3y ago
    My [least] favorite genre of this type of video if of snow pileups where drivers blindly drive 40mph on slick roads and whiteout conditions ... and straight into dozens of other vehicles.
• joshe 3y ago
  A quote from Tyler Cowen I read this morning... Tyler Cowen: Uncertainty should not paralyse you. Try to do your best, pursue maximum expected value, and just avoid the moral nervousness. Be a little Straussian about it. Like here's a rule, on average it's a good rule, we're all gonna follow it. Bravo, go on to the next thing. Be a builder. Joe Walker: Get on with it? Tyler Cowen: Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.
• mergy 3y ago
  As someone that has taken quite a few Waymo trips now since October 2023, I am continually impressed with how it handles the crazy here in San Francisco from odd/narrow streets, bad drivers doing stupid things, and overall safety with pedestrians doing all sorts of non-standard behaviors from crossing randomly to pausing at odd points in crosswalks, etc. Also, I've been in a bunch of situations in a Waymo where other drivers are messing with position to try and freak the Waymo out, and every time, it did a great job. I've never been in a Cruise, but I can't deny Waymo has been a great experience for me in SF and up around 20 or so trips. Here is a video of Waymo going through the Broadway Tunnel in SF back in Oct 2023 to give you a sense of it. >> https://mer.gy/broadwaytunnelwaymo https://mer.gy/broadwaytunnelwaymo
• pvsteve 3y ago
  When autonomous vehicles become super safe, will the size of the vehicles more accurately reflect how many people are in the vehicle? Cars that can carry 5 people when the average occupancy is 1.5 in the US seems wasteful just because people feel safer in big cars. It seems like we should have a lot more small single occupant vehicles that are effectively caged motorcycles, but actually safe.
  • jessriedel 3y ago
    I think this is where we get to eventually when there are no more human drivers and so the roads become extremely safe. Until then, you need a certain amount of mass to protect you from idiots, no matter how safe the computer is driving. Given that mass, adding three extra seats is little additional cost, and gives you additional flexibility in dispatch (reducing wait times). But to your point, they will probably have a "large" size pretty soon, a la Uber XL (although it will only come after the first no-steering-wheel vehicle is widely deployed).
    • xnx 3y ago
      Exactly. It's interesting to think about a distant future where Waymo vehicles are more like "people movers" and don't need impact resistance, seatbelts, airbags, etc. because the risk of collision is so low.
  • acover 3y ago
    Can you build a small but safe car? Mass, height, etc are key variables in a crash.
• hangonhn 3y ago
  > this study includes all Waymo crashes, regardless of the Waymo vehicle’s role in the crash, and with any amount of property damage I really like this because I think this happens a lot with human drivers. There are many instances where there was a potential crash that was avoided by me or the other drivers. I think that's crucial to autonomous driving. Not only should they have the ability to make mistake but to also compensate for other drivers' mistakes. It's all very good to say "we did everything we were supposed to" after an incident but it's even better to never have the incident at all. An AI that can react well to the unexpected would be a huge milestone.
• kazinator 3y ago
  A more fair comparison would be against human drivers who are constantly texting about where they are and what they are doing and seeing, since that's what the Waymo drivers are doing. :)
• nicklecompte 3y ago
  I think this is a useful and impressive study - I haven't read all 40 pages, neither have you :) I did do some good-faith skimming. Assuming Waymo didn't falsify their data (they didn't), this makes me feel comfortable having Waymo in SF and Phoenix. I think it's clearly safer than an Uber. But some caveats: - The major caveat is that Waymo is not being directly compared against sober humans driving lawfully.[1] The reason why this caveat is so important is that technology which makes it impossible for humans to exceed a posted speed limit might be overall much safer than replacing human drivers with autonomous drivers. Uber isn't more dangerous than Waymo because humans are incompetent, it's because humans obey orders from impatient drivers and Waymo currently does not. This is a UI choice, not an AI advancement. - More specifically, lawful driving is an important caveat because Tesla Autopilot had two different settings for driving unlawfully, according to the users' own sense of personal risk. An AV manufacturer who advertises "AI-assisted speeding" will almost certainly find a lot of customers, even if it's under the table. People don't speed and run red lights because they're too stupid to understand why it's dangerous: they do it because they're reckless and selfish. AI won't stop that, only regulation will. - Another caveat is that Waymo was trained on human-dominated streets. Waymo being safer in a sea of human vehicles does not actually translate to Waymo being safer in a sea of Waymos. I think this is a low-probability risk but it's hardly a simple question: I believe Waymo has had issues where several AVs occupied the same street after an event and blocked traffic because they couldn't decide what to do - they were waiting on each other to behave like a human. But again, the risk seems like gridlock, not property damage or injury. - And a minor but still important caveat is that SF and Phoenix have modern linear grids which have been mapped to death by AV manufacturers. As a Boston resident I am still holding my breath about their performance here :) [1] Not because of anything insidious, it's just a granularity that both the analysis and the data struggle to capture.
  • wongarsu 3y ago
    Once automated cars make up a significant fraction of cars on the road I would expect some communication scheme to emerge to make them coordinate with each other, maybe even sharing observed positions of other road participants. There is the risk that they will misbehave or deadlock around each other, but also a great opportunity for them to communicate intent to each other at a level human drivers just can't do from a sound-insulated cabin.
• ttfkam 3y ago
  About ten years ago I made a prediction: Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer, and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not believe will be solved anytime soon. That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains—which have regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds—I think we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize land use that could be more productive otherwise. More idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density transportation options available.
  • hasty_pudding 3y ago
    We need private rich people to buy up large tracts of land and build techno test bed cities for this stuff.
    • vikramkr 3y ago
      If you're building a new city just do public transit instead of all this inefficient nonsense. Either way it's not a naturally growing city so if you're going to plan one plan one that makes sense
  • dcow 3y ago
    We could legislate around this very irrational/human fear. Personally I’d feel much safer if the roads were primarily filled with drivers that don’t get emotional and are objectively safer. Even if a few accidents confuse me and seem avoidable. I think what your analysis is missing is that most human accidents are also 100% avoidable. Why aren’t we looking at the incredibly dumb things humans do and asking the same hard questions? Why doesn’t it spook us when a human doesn't see a red light and t-bones cross traffic? Or when a multi-car pileup happens because a large pickup truck with a big car complex is tailgating someone at 85 mph and a sudden stop is required?
• judge2020 3y ago
  I wonder why this got buried so deep - the comments seem civil; maybe it's the comment to score ratio?
• tharmas 3y ago
  What would happen if the only vehicles on the road were all self-driving? Wouldn't it be easier if all self-driving vehicles are only having to deal with other self-driving vehicles and hence less accidents? Of course other objects such as pedestrians etc will always make things more complicated.
• jmpman 3y ago
  I’ve taken a Waymo a half dozen times. It tends to go through residential neighborhoods instead of making a left across traffic. It felt like it went miles through the neighborhood at 15mph instead of on the main street at 45mph. Somehow I expect they failed to mention these types of “optimizations” in their report. Sure these neighborhood routes are safer and 1/3 the speed, but we don’t want to encourage an exponential increase in intra neighborhood traffic. Certainly not when my kids are playing in the road.
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    Are we talking about Phoenix?
    • jmpman 3y ago
      Yes
• more_corn 3y ago
  Except when you consider stopping in the road and preventing emergency vehicles from reaching emergency sites. And failing to respond to other emergency responder commands such as “move your tire off that that pedestrian’s head”
• 7e 3y ago
  Credit to Waymo, but it bears mentioning that Waymo also drives much more slowly than the comparable human driver. That helps a lot.
• devinprater 3y ago
  Yay! Maybe in a good Five years(TM), I, a blind person, will finally be able to drive! Um, be driven? Ride? Anyway, whatever they'll call it when one isn't actually driving a self-driving car.
• cyanydeez 3y ago
  but won't be culpable in 99.999999% of fatalities. tell us who on the programming team will act as tribute and you can have your mostly autonomous wealth consumption device. remember, it's driving itself, by itself, that's wasting resources when public transportation would eliminate orders of magnitude more issues.
• 1-6 3y ago
  How many 9's would that be? Should it be miles/interventions or miles/incidents? I would think a better scoring system should be based upon human interventions.
• lawlessone 3y ago
  They seem to be doing it the right way. Unlike, Uber , Tesla and Cruise.
  • yinser 3y ago
    I think I see your argument is economic for Uber, human-intervention for Cruise, but what is the wrong way for Tesla?
    • LightBug1 3y ago
      Vapourware.
      • thepasswordis 3y ago
        It’s so crazy how my vaporware does like 99% of my driving for me every day. I guess I am living in a vapor world where I happily pay $200/mo for vapor.
        • LightBug1 3y ago
          No insult intended, but you're literally beta ... good luck with that, honestly. But if you cannot see the issue with what has been promised, and what has been delivered, you're not living in vapour world, you're living in kool-aid world. You should be insulted, but instead you drink it up. Again, no offense, you make your choices, everyone else makes theres, and the world moves on ... but the FSD saga has been an absolute sh1tshow by any reasonable definition.
          • gfodor 3y ago
            You should try thinking about why the term vaporware has the word “vapor” in it, and what it’s intended to describe.
            • LightBug1 3y ago
• lm28469 3y ago
  > Waymo currently operates commercial robotaxi services in Phoenix, Arizona and San Francisco, Basically straight lines and 365 days of sun, now send them to Europe small towns/mountain roads/&c. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyEg35Stbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyEg35Stbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7wphiL3vbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7wphiL3vbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZaoRu7okU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZaoRu7okU
  • LightBug1 3y ago
    Even in those scenarioes, I'd still trust Waymo far more than the current substandard, falsely-advertised, snake-oil alternative offerings ...
    • gfodor 3y ago
      It’s funny that you’ve got several teams of thousands of engineers working on this and you label the one as “snake-oil” that has deployed their beta to hundreds of thousands of cars. Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
      • kotaKat 3y ago
        Cruise and Uber were equally snake oil, too, and have spilled more blood than Waymo or Tesla.
      • kranke155 3y ago
        Tesla Self Drive seems to have peaked? I follow the forums and subreddits on this topic, and no one has been talking about major improvements for a while now.
      • LightBug1 3y ago
        I see no evidence of a reliable, working product delivered as promised/advertised. For years now. What do you want me to do? Pretend? Perhaps MDS is real ...
        • 3y ago
• yinser 3y ago
  As optimistic as I am about self-driving it seems like the “9s” model of reliability isn’t the right model here because one “outage” could be someone being killed. The aftershock of the Cruise car dragging someone shows how far one accident can sully a company. The other issue I see is that I believe Waymo doesn’t live map the terrain in SF and Arizona right? They are using intricately created maps and so my question is what’s the leap for Waymo to operate with this success in say Pittsburgh?
  • agloe_dreams 3y ago
    As much as I hate Elon, I do think that a proven 'better than a human by [X]times.' is a fair metric...as long as it is independently verified in ALL situations AND the company takes responsibility for the outcome.
    • x86x87 3y ago
      Good luck with getting ALL situations. My theory is that as we face climate change more and more and as the economy goes out of whack owning a car will be a privilege for the rich and super rich. Sort of like it's already the case in parts of Europe. At that point this self-driving crap is going to look ridiculous. Even without it it's ridiculous testing this technology on public roads and gambling with everyone's life.
      • agloe_dreams 3y ago
        I think in urban areas that is exceptionally true. Here in the US there are places you can drive for 200 miles and not see a single human.
        • x86x87 3y ago
          Highway self-driving is mostly a solve problem (except maybe Tesla which will occasionally fuck it up). Urban areas are where the problems are at nowadays.
  • ceejayoz 3y ago
• mrtksn 3y ago
  IMHO we need a standardised benchmark for this stuff. You can't claim better than human when humans are driving under different conditions. I looked around to try to find the actual data but it's just marketing materials. Are these miles on the same roads under the same traffic and weather conditions?
  • x86x87 3y ago
    C'mon man. Everyone knows these stats are doctored to create the illusion that somehow self driving cars are better than humans (spoiler: they are not if you consider all road and weather conditions). I will say this though: at least with waymo the car is not actively trying to kill you and is dumb af when it comes to egde cases like other "self-driving" cars
    • choppaface 3y ago
      I’ve been hit by two Ubers while I was in the crosswalk. Any self-driving taxi co would have held data and assumed liability while the Uber drivers run away and Uber says they’re not employees so.
  • renewiltord 3y ago
    AFAICT the cars are everywhere I'd go. They're just on normal streets and when you take them they're just like normal drivers (except they don't run reds and are politer).
    • flutas 3y ago
      They don't go on the freeway for public rides currently iirc.
      • renewiltord 3y ago
        Ah sorry. I thought he meant on city roads. You are right. I've seen them on the freeways but never fully autonomous.
    • 3y ago
• SilverBirch 3y ago
  >The new data comes at a crucial time for the self-driving industry. Which is by the way, a good reason to be skeptical of it. I remember talking to someone who worked with BMW on their self driving a long time ago and their take on Tesla's self driving effort was (a) It's fine for Tesla to have a bad reputation for safey but BMW simply can't choose to get a bad reputation for safety they sell far too many non-autonomous cars and (b) It's actually not fine for Tesla (and others) to be rushing ahead with self-driving because they will kill people and they're just as likely to kill the whole self-driving industry at the same time. I have no doubt that even if the data looked terrible, Waymo would find a way to spin it to look safe. I also have no doubt that even if the data is good, it's not indicative of self-driving being safer in the average situation.
  • kevindamm 3y ago
    Wouldn't that claim of "only 3 minor injuries" be relatively easy to refute? Sure, I'm not so naive to think there's no corporate spin, and especially with Alphabet's marketing and media resources and the need for positive sentiment towards Waymo, but I think if Waymo's safety record were anywhere near Tesla's (or Cruise's) it would be very hard to spin this well and not be refuted, they would be better off not giving an update in that case.
    • SilverBirch 3y ago
      Absolutely not. Firstly, a huge number of these miles are either being done directly under test conditions or with employees as the passenger, and secondly any actual passengers have probably signed significant wiavers. Secondly, when accidents do happen I bet you that some legal department at Google is highly motivated to step in and "investigate" - ie, get everyone involved to sign NDAs and then conclude their investigation with some conclusion that doesn't impact their stats. I'm not saying this is happening - but it would be entirely unsurprising to me if it were. And I think actually there are some rumours of Tesla engaging in that kind of behaviour - classifying crashes as being unrelated to Autopilot because Autopilot disengages in the moments leading up to the crash. How would anyone refute that? And if they tried, do you think they'd face significant legal jeopardy from Tesla.
• siliconc0w 3y ago
  These measurements should be standardized and independent, there is a large incentive for these companies to get creative with their record keeping and methodology.
• nlh 3y ago
  > In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup. > In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV. > In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind. It’s worth noting that all 3 of these incidents involve a Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver’s fault even if the Waymo acted “unexpectedly”. This is very very good news for them.
  • jmckib 3y ago
    That last one is impressive, most humans probably wouldn’t pull it off. And just imagine when all the cars on the road are self-driving, probably none of these accidents would’ve happened.
    • x86x87 3y ago
      Not if we have teslas!!!
      • shepherdjerred 3y ago
        Why not? Has Tesla had similar incidents?
        • JoshCole 3y ago
          I've been in a self-driving Tesla vehicle. After hours on the interstate, the person ahead of me slammed on their brakes suddenly. I was caught off guard, not expecting it, and may have crashed by not reacting in time. The Tesla braked. So I have anecdotal experience that the person you're asking for an answer isn't well informed on how Tesla's respond to this type of accident. Of course, anecdotal evidence isn't a very high standard. Thankfully, statistics on this sort of thing are tracked. Statistically, the Tesla self-driving features reduce accidents per mile. They have for years now and as the tech has progressed the reduction has grown as the technology has matured. So statistical evidence also indicates that the person you are asking the question to is also uninformed. What is probably happening is that it makes for good clickbait to involve Elon and Tesla into discussions. Moreover, successful content online often provokes emotion. The resulting preponderance of negativity, especially about each driving accident Teslas were involved in or caused, probably tricked them into misunderstanding the reality of the Tesla safety record.
• skepticATX 3y ago
  Comparing autonomous vehicles to the average driver is always going to be misleading. It’s not fair to compare it to drunk drivers, or to the small portion of people (likely causing an oversized portion of accidents) who shouldn’t have a license. I’d like to see these comparisons made against a typical good driver, who never drivers impaired and obeys the law.
  • kranke155 3y ago
    What? How would you get that data? Look Waymo vs top 10% of drivers?
    • olooney 3y ago
      Benchmark against Taxi/Uber drivers?
    • skepticATX 3y ago
      Taking the top 10% of drivers would also be unfair, this time against AVs. I’m simply saying that factors unrelated to driving skill should be excluded. Things like being inebriated, purposely breaking driving laws, looking at a cell phone. The problem is that studies like these are used to imply that AVs are more skilled than humans at driving, but it’s not a conclusion that can be drawn, because the AVs are operating optimally and some percentage of humans are operating suboptimally. What results like this actually show are that replacing all human drivers with AVs would likely result in less accidents (because by definition you’re excluding people who are malicious), which is not the same thing as saying that AVs are more skilled at driving.
      • ctoth 3y ago
        > I’m simply saying that factors unrelated to driving skill should be excluded. Things like being inebriated, purposely breaking driving laws, looking at a cell phone. What is driving skill if not knowing not to do these things?
      • kranke155 3y ago
        I don’t think that would be a fair comparison because the whole idea behind these things is that humans operate suboptimally a LOT. Removing the mistakes from the human data makes the whole exercise futile. The whole idea is people fuck up. A lot.
• ajb 3y ago
  So, how are they doing this when the public results for recognising pedestrians from images seem to be so rubbish? (Or at least, don't seem to have a sufficient number of nines precision for this purpose). Is it easier to recognise a pedestrian from LiDAR, or is everything just very precautionary?
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    I see this sentiment but I think there's a flawed, tacit assumption underlying it. Image classifiers might not be very good at calling out a presentation in a static photograph, but an AV doesn't need to classify objects to avoid striking them. For AV purposes, uncertainty about part of a scene is also a useful input.
  • xnx 3y ago
    Recognition is important for predicting future state. Detection is important (critical) avoiding hitting anything. Short of edge cases like a plastic bag blowing in the wind, self-driving cars really don't want to come in contact with anything they detect, even if they can't recognize what it is.
• impulser_ 3y ago
  A year ago, Elon Musk was saying Tesla was going to have a million robotaxis on the road by now. It wasn't even just him. Investors also were predicting this. But it looks like Google/Waymo is the only one with reliable self driving technology. If they don't give up like Google typically does. This could actually be a huge business for them. Everyone I know who has used the Waymo service had good things to say about it and we are just at the beginning. The FSD problem will become easily as you scale up due to the fact that these AI can easily communicate with all the cars around them unlike human drivers.
  • danrl 3y ago
    Have driven in Waymo and Cruise quite a hit. Don’t wanna beat a dead horse, so let’s talk about Waymo only: It improved every time from when I first got access to today, where a lot of people can use it now. I even had my visiting parents riding in Waymo cars a couple of times and they felt saved and loved it, and they are not really early adopters of anything :) When in SF I always prefer Waymo over any other form of ride service or ride share. Disclaimer: Google LLC employee. No relations to Waymo, just a fan of self driving in general.
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    > AI can easily communicate with all the cars around them As a long time anti-abuse engineer, I cannot agree. The game theoretic aspect of trusting data acquired from outside parties cannot be overcome. Cooperative AVs will never exist.
    • kirubakaran 3y ago
      Even if the data is signed by a key in the secure enclave of the source?
    • impulser_ 3y ago
      They already do. Drones can cooperate between each other.
      • xnx 3y ago
• superkuh 3y ago
  And all of those miles are in the arid southwest in places that don't have winter. They don't really extrapolate to the rest of the country or world. SF + Arizona is easy mode for autonomous driving.
  • boulos 3y ago
    Winter and snow is hard for a lot of reasons. But we did some testing with safety drivers in NYC last year and will be in Buffalo this year: https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1721629316625093035 https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1721629316625093035 (and others historically).
    • superkuh 3y ago
      Next time you should try in NYC and Buffalo (or Minneapolis) during winter. Doing it without snow like the twitter and blog post show doesn't change much. Good luck.
      • boulos 3y ago
        Sorry if I was unclear, that's what we did in NYC and are doing again in Buffalo. The blog post is actually from the previous Bellevue announcement. Edit to add this link to some footage: https://twitter.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1489318507342807041 https://twitter.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1489318507342807041
        • superkuh 3y ago
          Nice! That's the kind of research that's needed. Obscured roads with emergent lanes.
    • kirse 3y ago
      Ever think about partnering with ARA [1] (and/or Subaru) when it comes to winter/snow and inclement-condition driving? There are groups like Team O'Neil [2] up in NH that offer closed courses for challenging driving conditions, and it would likely be a cool marketing opportunity for Waymo. [1] https://www.americanrallyassociation.org/ https://www.americanrallyassociation.org/ [2] https://teamoneil.com/ https://teamoneil.com/ I've always said that self-crashing cars will win my stamp of approval when they can compete in stage rally. It'd likely push the Waymo team to evolve even further by getting involved in something like that, even with just the basics.
• hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  Here in Finland we already have some autonomous public transportation buses running in my neighborhood. They're great! Can't wait for the day where they displace human drivers in all non-sporting arenas.
  • superkuh 3y ago
    How do they handle when the road markings and road edges are obscured during winter? How do they handle emergent lanes when it's actively snowing? I've never heard of a successful test, let alone deployment, of autonomous driving in a place that has winter. I'm very curious.
    • standardUser 3y ago
      Here is an article discussing the technology: https://www.laserfocusworld.com/test-measurement/test-measurement/article/16566993/robosense-lidar-to-equip-gacha-bus-fleet-for-ultracold-weather-and-winter-conditions https://www.laserfocusworld.com/test-measurement/test-measur... I'm not actually sure why everyone is so concerned about driving in winter conditions. What is the primary concern, other than sensors freezing? As a human driver, I find the biggest problem to be other human drivers who insist on driving fast even in winter weather. It seems like almost all of the complications could be avoided by slowing down.
      • superkuh 3y ago
        In winter sometimes the road markings aren't visible for weeks to months. In winter the lane positions are not absolute but emergent things that flocking humans create day to day by following each other. In winter the edges of ther oad are not straight, or absolute, but instead change from day to day and week to week. In winter, the road surface and road edges are made of the same material: snow. In winter it is slippery. And in winter sensors freeze and obscure, like you say. All of these are very hard problems that aren't quite addressed by a bus driving on cleared bare roads. It's good to see someone tried to work on them instead of just pretending all of earth is like SF. Too bad it seems to have failed.
    • 3y ago
• nerdjon 3y ago
  I sometimes get annoyed at how we talk about self driving cars, we shouldn't expect them to have a perfect track record. There will always be situations that neither choice is a good one but something has to happen. But to me, I often wonder about once this tech comes out what happens once theoretically all of the self driving cars can communicate with each other? So if you need to break suddenly, instead of just your car than its a series of cars that can do it together or example? I have been wondering if there has been any talk about a standard around doing this proposed since to me that is the true power of self driving cars, not just how do they operate with other unpredictable drivers.
  • cpeterso 3y ago
    TCP for cars
  • sdenton4 3y ago
    I think no one wants to deal with the combined effort of standardization and anti abuse...
  • MattRix 3y ago
    That seems laegely unnecessary. Once you have mostly self driving cars on the road, there should be much fewer accidents and close calls because they will all be driving more cautiously and with proper spacing etc. On top of that, their awareness and reaction time will be so good that to an outside observer it will look like a chain of cars all stopping at once anyway. Then of course there are the issues with car-to-car communication. It would open up tons of opportunities for bugs, hacks, and other forms of abuse.
  • darepublic 3y ago
    I have seen the 'self driving cars dont have to be perfect, just better than idiot hoomans' strawman used to deflect attention away from the fact that IMO self driving cars aren't yet as good as the idiot hoomans. Because though they may have a stellar record, it's in the context of disengaging to let safety driver take over, in carefully controlled conditions etc. Basically companies using tricks to create the right stats for their splashy marketing. That said, if Waymo _can_ drive as safe as my the typical defensive human driver, without the need for any human driver to take over, then I would applaud it. Maybe it does, I only follow this news from a distance. We all know what happened with the Tesla hype but I'm more willing to give Waymo the benefit of the doubt. Waiting patiently for self driving cars to become available in my city.
• boulos 3y ago
  Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not on the Safety Research team. The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that. (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple diagram in the blog post, too. [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms.html https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor... [2] https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYvAjyf/7a5b30a670350cc1d85c9d07ca282b0c/Comparison_of_Waymo_Rider_Only_Crash_Data_to_Human_Benchmarks_at_7_1_Million_Miles_arxiv.pdf https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
    This is the first time I’ve seen an AV PR push that is remotely apples-to-apples. Props to y’all for that.
  • choppaface 3y ago
    Do you know why Waymo didn’t include the dog they killed in this report? https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-driving-car-killed-a-dog-in-unavoidable-accident/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-driving-car-k...
    • minwcnt5 3y ago
      I believe this study was about rider-only miles. The dog incident had a safety driver monitoring.
      • choppaface 3y ago
        Sure but the news outlet headline is ‘only three minor incidents’ when in fact they killed a dog. It’s an act of not including all the information in a report about safety.
        • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• happytiger 3y ago
  Forgive me for this but all self-driving cars do is act as the default to postpone and diffuse support for scalable and long term (also driverless) infrastructure with the false promise that self driving cars that will somehow solve all our transportation needs. This technology will increase the issues we have as a society around the use of a car based transportation system, as they are simultaneously expensive to maintain for low density environments while also conversely being almost impossible to maintain for high density environments. Car transport systems have no true limit on capacity so as the efficiency of the transportation system increases, so will demand and density. If everyone changes to another transportation system powered by Waymo and others, what’s to stop a large number of people moving to self-driving cars, increasing the number on the road, and causing grid lock again meaning we have to increase massively the amount of car-centric infrastructure all over again. Isn’t that what history has shown us will happen? Why do we keep supporting the most inefficient and expensive form of transport ever? Downvote if you must but it is a warranted and substitute argument and worth considering. Even if you think it’s not or not on the appropriate post of whatever criticisms you wish to levy (or just as likely work on self-driving systems). It’s always amazing to me how hard people will defend the status quo while calling themselves “technology innovators.”
  • oh_sigh 3y ago
    Self driving cars are something that private companies can mostly do by themselves(beyond getting the okay from government to drive on public roads). Public mass transit infrastructure can't really be created by private companies. So, if you want mass transit, driverless cars really has nothing to do with it. Petition the government to get off their asses and do their job.
    • happytiger 3y ago
      https://apnews.com/article/highspeed-rail-trains-brightline-florida-ac55cc43685666ae10ef3307512d5f33 https://apnews.com/article/highspeed-rail-trains-brightline-... Not sure that’s actually true. Japan’s has one of the most effective models and contrary to what most people believe is privately owned and operated. About 70 percent of Japan's railway network is operated by the Japan Railways (JR), while the rest is served by dozens of other private railway companies, especially in and around metropolitan areas. https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/rail/high_speed/system-summaries/japan.pdf https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/rail/high_speed/s... There is a lot more going on here with self-driving cars being pushed as the only answer that is deeply worthy of examination and discussion, but private companies have been extremely successful in the past before the oil and car companies started acting like cartels and systematically dismantled and destroyed public transportation across the western world. Keeping “public transit” as a government only activity while convincing the public that government is impotent at its implementation was the core strategy. https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-paper-trails-showing-car-companies-dismantling-American-public-transit-and-sidewalks-in-the-1950s https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-paper-trails-showing-car... https://medium.com/modern-city/how-the-united-states-ended-up-with-no-high-speed-rail-476c6209ce16 https://medium.com/modern-city/how-the-united-states-ended-u... Look, I drive. I just think we can do better and deserve to have better conversations about alternatives than what we’re having.
• elicksaur 3y ago
  > The ODD [Operational Design Domain] does not include severe weather conditions, such as thick fog, heavy rain, or blowing sand but does include light rain or light fog. [1] What is the crash rate for humans under good to light rain/fog conditions? This doesn’t seem to be comparing apples to apples. [1] https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYvAjyf/7a5b30a670350cc1d85c9d07ca282b0c/Comparison_of_Waymo_Rider_Only_Crash_Data_to_Human_Benchmarks_at_7_1_Million_Miles_arxiv.pdf https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...
• bmitc 3y ago
  ... in the easiest city and weather environments
• lucidrains 3y ago
  slow and steady wins the race
• VincentEvans 3y ago
  I find it a pretty optimistic take when someone claims success of a safety system after conducting a test that basically equals 600 people using it for an average year worth of driving… Is it enough to support a pretty extraordinary claim that a fully self-driving system that will then be sold in millions of vehicles is now perfectly safe?
  • hiddencost 3y ago
    I don't think you're accurately representing how this will go. This is an incredible volume of data, and very encouraging. What it will justify is the ramp from 10k trips a week to 100k trips a week. As they go, they'll start rapidly collecting much more safety data, which will then be used to justify the ramp to 1M trips a week. As they roll out to new environments (snow, harder and new urban settings, airports) they're taking it slowly enough to collect strong evidence that it's a justified decision. And local regulators are scrutinizing this aggressively.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• wankerrific 3y ago
  I mean, we could be spending effort on making human driving safer, but where is the monopoly in that?
• happytiger 3y ago
  Wow Waymo’s PR team is absolutely killing it this week. They crushed their biggest competitor and now they are on the offensive.
• lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Waymo's approach to self driving is a fool's errand. The only reason it works is that they have mapped out cities with straightforward roads and sunny weather to millimeter precision, and have hardcoded vehicles to operate in those conditions. Compare this to Tesla's AI-first approach, aggregating training data from millions of drivers across the US. There's no overhead to introducing Autopilot in a new city it's never been in before--it just "works," with no expensive 3D mapping required, by extrapolating cheaply acquired vision data from other cities. Elon really got this right from the beginning, but Waymo's aggressive PR and marketing have pitted public opinion against Tesla, as is very clearly evident even in these HN comments.
  • minwcnt5 3y ago
    I feel like I read this exact comment in 2018. And I am certain I'll read it again in 2028, even as Waymo is operating in dozens of cities and serving millions of trips per week. Because with the Tesla religion, the magical AI rapture is always just around the corner.
  • shkkmo 3y ago
    > The only reason it works is that they have mapped out cities with straightforward roads and sunny weather to millimeter precision, and have hardcoded vehicles to operate in those conditions. Yet it actually works. Going to level 4 and slowly adding areas prioritizes safety and reduces the risk of project failure. You can argue the Waymo approach is slower, but is the only one that has worked so far. > There's no overhead to introducing Autopilot in a new city it's never been in before--it just "works," Yet it doesn't. For all their grandstanding, Tesla has remained stuck at level 3 for years. I wouldn't say that trading cheap deployment for public safety is something we should praise.
  • xnx 3y ago
    > it just "works," For certain values of "works" > Elon really got this right from the beginning, but Waymo's aggressive PR and marketing have pitted public opinion against Tesla Consider the opposite
    • 3y ago
• boh 3y ago
  I remember Cruise showing similar numbers and then at some point they ran over a woman and lost their right to operate in the state of California and GM cut 20% of Cruise's workforce. I guess it's pointless to point out the WeWork-level of creative reporting bcs the "if we can just save one life" people don't want to hear it. The reality outside of the engineering bubble is that self-driving is an expensive dud with a smaller potential market than initially hoped (major cities like NYC will not see self-driving anytime soon). The expectation that there just needs to be a little more time for development has run its course and money for speculative bets are harder to come by (especially for something that's burned through so much cash already).
• dontreact 3y ago
  To me safety is mostly about the risk of injury and death to me. And mostly about death. Humans die from driving only once every 100 million miles on average. So until there is a comparison at this scale, to me it’s a very incomplete picture of safety to say that you are outperforming humans. If driving my own car means colliding 100x as often but I expect to die 2x less often, I would consider self driving to be much much much more unsafe. There is really no way for me to understand the risk of fatalities from a sample of only 7 million miles, since either humans or a system with 2x the fatality rate of humans would both be expected to have 0 fatalities at this scale. Given we are at 7m miles, hopefully this comparison is coming soon and I will be much more convinced.
  • cespare 3y ago
    I guess to me it seems like common sense that a system that has substantially fewer crashes also has substantially fewer deaths. Maybe we can't make definitive statements about the expected number of deaths yet, but I think the most reasonable best guess with the information we have is that waymo deaths will be much lower. The alternative requires a scenario where waymo is especially likely to get into fatal accidents while being very good at avoiding non-fatal ones, right? Seems far-fetched.
    • dontreact 3y ago
      I would not make the same inference because we know that ML systems generally struggle with robustness and the long tail, while humans tend to be exhibit much more flexibility to adapt to distribution shifts or unusual situations. For a concrete example of this in computer vision, see work such as the Imagenet—C dataset where simple distribution shifts generally tank ML models but do not impact human performance. But regardless, the claim here isn’t “under some assumptions that some people (and not others) find reasonable, we can extrapolate and predict that self driving cars will be found to be safer” It’s “self driving cars are safer”, which there isn’t enough evidence to claim yet.
  • brightball 3y ago
    This, plus there's a control aspect. People fear flying largely because they aren't in control, even though it's technical safer than driving. But driving...you're in control.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• up2isomorphism 3y ago
  Actually I don’t care about these kind of “benchmark” . I just ask waymo to start running commercial trucks with goods only on closed roads first that should make it profit of it really works.
• firemelt 3y ago
  where is teslA?
• the_black_hand 3y ago
  Unfortunately, cruise set self-driving back by a few years.
• prng2021 3y ago
  The headline does sound impressive, but am I the only one that’s also disappointed? Their website says they’ve logged over 40M miles in total. That is an insane number and many times more than a person would ever drive in their entire lifetime, let alone in just 3 cities. I’m imagining a fleet of cars driving in generally sunny weather cities of SF, LA, and Phoenix, driving every street thousands of times over. After all that, saying they perform better than a human just doesn’t wow me that much. After 40M miles of testing, bring it to Chicago, Boston and NY and let us see how they do in the summer and then in winter. Are they going to do terribly at first because they need another 100M+ more miles of training?
• raydev 3y ago
  Worth noting that this is only in 3 cities that don't really experience "weather" the same way most other cities do. This is of course great news for people living in the desert, but let us know when they achieve this in Toronto or Boston year-round.
• raylad 3y ago
  Do they compare this to the accident and fatality rates specifically where these cars were driving? I think a lot of that was done in a completely flat and mostly empty suburb of Phoenix where the accident and death rates may be much much lower than the national average.
• HankB99 3y ago
  Sadly, if true, it's a low bar. Too many people have horribly unsafe driving habits and contribute to the bulk of carnage on the road. Skill levels vary a lot, even for "professional" drivers. (I'm looking at you, semi driver, who tailgated me at 60 mph and had the gall to honk because I left a reasonable distance between my vehicle and the semi in front of me. This in traffic too heavy to do anything but go with the flow.) Also, I'd find the statistics more believable if they were published by an unbiased third party.