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I don't even get why these count as negatives against Waymo. There's nothing it can do to stop idiot humans driving too closely or just driving into it.

cj 3y ago
Before jumping to conclusions, are we sure these Waymos hit from behind didn't awkwardly and randomly stop in the middle of a busy intersection (where no sane human driver would)? I know YouTube videos aren't always representative of reality, but there are some videos of these cars randomly driving extremely slowly in very busy intersections which might be a contributing factor to getting rear-ended, even if it's not Waymo's "fault" from an insurance perspective.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Doesn't matter. If you drive into a slow-moving or stationary object then it's your fault in every sense. If you are driving too closely and are not ready to react to the vehicle in front doing an emergency stop for any reason then it's your fault in every sense. Most human drivers I observe are taking huge chances every single day. I see them drive at speed around corners they can't see around fully, driving far too closely to cars front, using their phone etc. They get lucky but it's only a matter of time before they have accidents. The three incidents recorded here are simply due to three humans' luck running out.
- mikestew 3y ago
  Before jumping to conclusions... Nah, I'm jumping straight to this conclusion: if you hit something in front of you that didn't leap out in front of you at the last second, you fucked up. The object that you hit was erratically slowing and speeding up? You should have left more room to allow for the unpredictability. It was raining, can't see, the roads are slick? Leave more room in front of you. Yes, I way too often don't do that, either. But if there's something in the road ahead of me, and I hit it? Man, there are few scenarios where I can claim that there was nothing I could do. And in the case of a full-sized vehicle in front of me, I don't care how erratically it's driving, don't run into the back of it.
  - flerchin 3y ago
    If your system is objectively right, but also objectively causing accidents with humans. Well you won't fix the humans...
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > If your system is objectively right, but also objectively causing accidents with humans. It's not causing accidents in these cases. The humans are.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        The causality version of "cause", not the blame version. Accidents that would not have happened without the system.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Right, but also imagine how traffic would be if everyone drove with the pre-requisite distance to do that. Can you imagine I-5 traffic if everyone had 10 car lengths between them? So while your statement isn't wrong, it's also not always pragmatic in the real world.
    - jaktet 3y ago
      I’m guessing an accident caused due to not leaving enough room to safely stop is going to cause a bit more traffic than the alternative
      - bumby 3y ago
        So you're saying we should all drive with a 10 car buffer, then? If not, then you already recognize the probability is less than 100%, so that has to be baked into your statement.
        mikestew 3y ago
- danans 3y ago
  > Before jumping to conclusions, are we sure these Waymos hit from behind didn't awkwardly and randomly stop in the middle of a busy intersection (where no sane human driver would)? I'm nearly certain that I'm alive today because I drove as defensively as something like a Waymo. One day as I was approaching an intersection where I had a green light, I saw a car approaching the same intersection from the cross street at a speed that they couldn't have possibly stopped for their red light. I instinctively slowed down suddenly and that car, as I predicted , ran the red light at high speed and turned just a few yards in front of me. If I had been more tired, hasty, or it had been darker out, I might not have seen it or reacted in time. A fully autonomous and defensive driving system wouldn't get tired or hasty, and lidar can see fine at night. And yes, I might have gotten rear ended, but that's a far better outcome than getting t-boned by a car going 65mph.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    >If I had been more tired, hasty, or it had been darker out, I might not have seen it or reacted in time. If you had just been an average driver. Most people are terrible at defensive driving.
    - danans 3y ago
      > Most people are terrible at defensive driving. Mostly because people misunderstand what defensive driving means. It doesn't mean "go slow". It means always maintain a safety margin between your vehicle and others, adjusted for speed, road/weather conditions, and relative direction of travel. Those are the kinds of objectives a self driving system can very reliably achieve, unlike a human.
cameronh90 3y ago
I agree and I wouldn't hold them against Waymo, but I think when you are developing a self driving car, you should stop analysing it like a crash between two humans with fault and blame, and start looking at it like a system. If Waymos were having a seriously increased rate of non-fault crashes, that would still be a safety issue, even if every crash was ultimately a human's fault.
- nlh 3y ago
  Agreed. I think their current performance is super impressive. I think it's possible to get even better and beat humans by lowering the number of not-at-fault incidents too (although there are only so many variables in Waymo's control). As another commenter mentioned, the fact that the Waymo detected that a vehicle was approaching it from behind at high speed and tried to accelerate to get out of the way is super impressive, and I'm not sure even most good human drivers would have been able to do that.
- LorenPechtel 3y ago
  Yeah. We had an autonomous bus here--involved in an accident the very first day that wouldn't have happened with a human driver. The bus just sat there and let a truck back into it. I also wonder how it fares in a Kobayashi Maru scenario. I chose to cream a construction cone because the guy in the left turn lane went straight. (Admittedly, I think he didn't realize he was in the left turn lane.) I could see the cone wasn't actually protecting anything, could a car do so?
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Bad drivers are reality. If waymo drives in a way that leads to more crashes, even if theyre not its fault, its clear to me that it still deserves some responsibility for not following expected road etiquette.
- bluGill 3y ago
  If Waymo is driving is the way safety engineers are trying to get everyone else to drive, then we should encourage it. There are some things where what everyone else does is wrong. (see the zipper merge)
- konschubert 3y ago
  I think that self driving cars will change “road etiquette”, as you call it, for the better.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Bad drivers are a reality because we decide to tolerate them. We could just not tolerate them, like we don't tolerate bad pilots, bad train drivers, bad people etc.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    There is widespread support for allowing people with DUIs to drive in this country. Even people who negligently kill someone with their car are still allowed to drive. There is no political support for banning people from driving.
- sagarm 3y ago
  The stats clearly show that Waymo gets into fewer crashes, though. In the remaining incidents, the other driver was considered at fault.
xnx 3y ago
These are a good examples of the self-reproach Waymo is exhibiting. Contrast to Cruise which appears to have attempted to suppress information about dragging a pedestrian under one of its cars.
kevincox 3y ago
I think it is important to track these. It may be true that these are entirely the other driver's fault but it is also possible that these accidents were encouraged by unexpected behaviour from the Waymo car. If you quickly exclude things that don't seem like your fault then you will likely exclude too much. So I'd rather include everything (but maybe flag it as likely not at fault) than risking exlcuding important data.
seadan83 3y ago
Stop hard and rear end is a huge risk, this is not surprising and can happen with reasonable following distances. It takes a long time to stop and humans are bad at perceiving it. Just look at how "stop" is painted on a road compared to how you perceive that when driving. Perceived stopping distance is way shorter than actual. This is all to say, for a full and hard stop, the needed stopping distance is huge. Thus reminds me of highways when you can see a back up a quarter mile up. I tap the brakes about 5 times before letting off the gas to cut speed by 20% before actually even braking,which again is preceding by taps on the brake. So. I don't think the majority of these cases were even tailgaters. I would love to see the data of what the following distances were, rate of deceleration, how much space there was for the lead car to avoid the obstacle. Ade these Waymo's cars just out there brake checking people? Are they waiting to the last moment before doing emergency brake mode? At the end of the day, drastically changing speed is up there for dangerous behaviors, human drivers go to great lengths to avoid it and signal the intent. Turning right or left off of a 50 mph road- better believe I'm signaling that turn 2000 feet away and decelerating in stages and incrementally. With luck even that vehicle 4 cars back in the convoy is going to have lots of time.

cj 3y ago

Before jumping to conclusions, are we sure these Waymos hit from behind didn't awkwardly and randomly stop in the middle of a busy intersection (where no sane human driver would)? I know YouTube videos aren't always representative of reality, but there are some videos of these cars randomly driving extremely slowly in very busy intersections which might be a contributing factor to getting rear-ended, even if it's not Waymo's "fault" from an insurance perspective.

globular-toast 3y ago
Doesn't matter. If you drive into a slow-moving or stationary object then it's your fault in every sense. If you are driving too closely and are not ready to react to the vehicle in front doing an emergency stop for any reason then it's your fault in every sense. Most human drivers I observe are taking huge chances every single day. I see them drive at speed around corners they can't see around fully, driving far too closely to cars front, using their phone etc. They get lucky but it's only a matter of time before they have accidents. The three incidents recorded here are simply due to three humans' luck running out.
mikestew 3y ago
Before jumping to conclusions... Nah, I'm jumping straight to this conclusion: if you hit something in front of you that didn't leap out in front of you at the last second, you fucked up. The object that you hit was erratically slowing and speeding up? You should have left more room to allow for the unpredictability. It was raining, can't see, the roads are slick? Leave more room in front of you. Yes, I way too often don't do that, either. But if there's something in the road ahead of me, and I hit it? Man, there are few scenarios where I can claim that there was nothing I could do. And in the case of a full-sized vehicle in front of me, I don't care how erratically it's driving, don't run into the back of it.
- flerchin 3y ago
  If your system is objectively right, but also objectively causing accidents with humans. Well you won't fix the humans...
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > If your system is objectively right, but also objectively causing accidents with humans. It's not causing accidents in these cases. The humans are.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      The causality version of "cause", not the blame version. Accidents that would not have happened without the system.
- bumby 3y ago
  Right, but also imagine how traffic would be if everyone drove with the pre-requisite distance to do that. Can you imagine I-5 traffic if everyone had 10 car lengths between them? So while your statement isn't wrong, it's also not always pragmatic in the real world.
  - jaktet 3y ago
    I’m guessing an accident caused due to not leaving enough room to safely stop is going to cause a bit more traffic than the alternative
    - bumby 3y ago
      So you're saying we should all drive with a 10 car buffer, then? If not, then you already recognize the probability is less than 100%, so that has to be baked into your statement.
      - mikestew 3y ago
danans 3y ago
> Before jumping to conclusions, are we sure these Waymos hit from behind didn't awkwardly and randomly stop in the middle of a busy intersection (where no sane human driver would)? I'm nearly certain that I'm alive today because I drove as defensively as something like a Waymo. One day as I was approaching an intersection where I had a green light, I saw a car approaching the same intersection from the cross street at a speed that they couldn't have possibly stopped for their red light. I instinctively slowed down suddenly and that car, as I predicted , ran the red light at high speed and turned just a few yards in front of me. If I had been more tired, hasty, or it had been darker out, I might not have seen it or reacted in time. A fully autonomous and defensive driving system wouldn't get tired or hasty, and lidar can see fine at night. And yes, I might have gotten rear ended, but that's a far better outcome than getting t-boned by a car going 65mph.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  >If I had been more tired, hasty, or it had been darker out, I might not have seen it or reacted in time. If you had just been an average driver. Most people are terrible at defensive driving.
  - danans 3y ago
    > Most people are terrible at defensive driving. Mostly because people misunderstand what defensive driving means. It doesn't mean "go slow". It means always maintain a safety margin between your vehicle and others, adjusted for speed, road/weather conditions, and relative direction of travel. Those are the kinds of objectives a self driving system can very reliably achieve, unlike a human.

cameronh90 3y ago

I agree and I wouldn't hold them against Waymo, but I think when you are developing a self driving car, you should stop analysing it like a crash between two humans with fault and blame, and start looking at it like a system. If Waymos were having a seriously increased rate of non-fault crashes, that would still be a safety issue, even if every crash was ultimately a human's fault.

nlh 3y ago
Agreed. I think their current performance is super impressive. I think it's possible to get even better and beat humans by lowering the number of not-at-fault incidents too (although there are only so many variables in Waymo's control). As another commenter mentioned, the fact that the Waymo detected that a vehicle was approaching it from behind at high speed and tried to accelerate to get out of the way is super impressive, and I'm not sure even most good human drivers would have been able to do that.
LorenPechtel 3y ago
Yeah. We had an autonomous bus here--involved in an accident the very first day that wouldn't have happened with a human driver. The bus just sat there and let a truck back into it. I also wonder how it fares in a Kobayashi Maru scenario. I chose to cream a construction cone because the guy in the left turn lane went straight. (Admittedly, I think he didn't realize he was in the left turn lane.) I could see the cone wasn't actually protecting anything, could a car do so?

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Bad drivers are reality. If waymo drives in a way that leads to more crashes, even if theyre not its fault, its clear to me that it still deserves some responsibility for not following expected road etiquette.

bluGill 3y ago
If Waymo is driving is the way safety engineers are trying to get everyone else to drive, then we should encourage it. There are some things where what everyone else does is wrong. (see the zipper merge)
konschubert 3y ago
I think that self driving cars will change “road etiquette”, as you call it, for the better.
globular-toast 3y ago
Bad drivers are a reality because we decide to tolerate them. We could just not tolerate them, like we don't tolerate bad pilots, bad train drivers, bad people etc.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  There is widespread support for allowing people with DUIs to drive in this country. Even people who negligently kill someone with their car are still allowed to drive. There is no political support for banning people from driving.
sagarm 3y ago
The stats clearly show that Waymo gets into fewer crashes, though. In the remaining incidents, the other driver was considered at fault.

xnx 3y ago

These are a good examples of the self-reproach Waymo is exhibiting. Contrast to Cruise which appears to have attempted to suppress information about dragging a pedestrian under one of its cars.

kevincox 3y ago

I think it is important to track these. It may be true that these are entirely the other driver's fault but it is also possible that these accidents were encouraged by unexpected behaviour from the Waymo car. If you quickly exclude things that don't seem like your fault then you will likely exclude too much. So I'd rather include everything (but maybe flag it as likely not at fault) than risking exlcuding important data.

seadan83 3y ago

Stop hard and rear end is a huge risk, this is not surprising and can happen with reasonable following distances. It takes a long time to stop and humans are bad at perceiving it. Just look at how "stop" is painted on a road compared to how you perceive that when driving. Perceived stopping distance is way shorter than actual. This is all to say, for a full and hard stop, the needed stopping distance is huge. Thus reminds me of highways when you can see a back up a quarter mile up. I tap the brakes about 5 times before letting off the gas to cut speed by 20% before actually even braking,which again is preceding by taps on the brake. So. I don't think the majority of these cases were even tailgaters. I would love to see the data of what the following distances were, rate of deceleration, how much space there was for the lead car to avoid the obstacle. Ade these Waymo's cars just out there brake checking people? Are they waiting to the last moment before doing emergency brake mode? At the end of the day, drastically changing speed is up there for dangerous behaviors, human drivers go to great lengths to avoid it and signal the intent. Turning right or left off of a 50 mph road- better believe I'm signaling that turn 2000 feet away and decelerating in stages and incrementally. With luck even that vehicle 4 cars back in the convoy is going to have lots of time.