7 ms·
Waymo Driver 3.5x better at avoiding injuries over 14.8M miles in SF and Phoenix
- iudqnolq 2y agoI wonder if the absence of a driver to get hurt skews the crash statistic.
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoThe ride experience is unlike anything else in the self-driving field that I’ve seen or felt. It’s quite an accomplishment.
- jsheard 2y agoMiles driven is only one axis of many, does Waymo get from A to B as quickly as the average human driver would, or does it play it safe by staying in the slow lane and taking suboptimal routes to avoid challenging areas?
- 1970-01-01 2y agoAnother bias is baked into this announcement: how would it fare in Boston, NYC, or DC? Are they better because they're better than humans or are they better because they're cherry-picking their test cities?
- throwup238 2y agoSan Francisco is not Manhattan but its hardly an ideal driving environment. It’s a lot harder to drive there than Phoenix. Narrow streets packed with park cars, lots of bikes and pedestrians jaywalking, a homeless population that spills over into infrastructure, etc. It’s a good test case for most US cities that aren’t NYC.
- noiseinvacuum 2y agoAnd lets not forget the hills. Driving in SF is no joke. In my 20+ rides with Waymo, it feels that it drives more confidently than most Uber drivers I've had experience with.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoIt isn't due to weather. SF weather is nowhere near equivalent to Boston or NYC weather.
- romwell 2y agoIt also means that everyone is driving significantly slower, while making frequent stops. A LIDAR is pretty much all you need to avoid a collision. It's a pretty forgiving environment.
- mxwsn 2y agoIn SF, waymo isn't particularly slow, and drives remarkably humanlike to me, unlike Cruise which regularly took 2x as long to drive anywhere as a human would, and drove very much not like a human would.
- iamleppert 2y ago3.5x better at injuries, 10x the capex per vehicle, 100x the operational capex of a normal taxi service. Plus you get to own the vehicles, pay costs for all maintenance, store them when not in use, carry all liability. We need actual mass transit that works for people, not a roving science experiment on wheels.
- VirusNewbie 2y agoI see buses driving around my city all the time. They're noisy, pollute, take up space, and often have one or two people on them. Why do you think the TCO is less for a bus than for a self driving car? Why would it be more efficient to have mass transit when you don't have extremely high density? Can you share some data?
- jimberlage 2y agoHe might have meant trains rather than buses when he brought up mass transit. It's rare I've been on a train in a metro area only carrying one or two people.
- iamleppert 2y agoIf self driving cars were really capital efficient, why hasn't Google replaced their fleet of busses that travel the south bay to SF with their self driving cars? It's not because of anything technical, it's because it doesn't make any financial sense to replace a bus (even one that carries a few people) with a self-driving car. That, and the business unit that actually operates the shuttle busses lives in the real world.
- creato 2y agoGoogle's buses looked pretty full a lot of the time (a few years ago at least). The economics of those are probably pretty good. That said: I doubt city buses are that bad either. Data is needed for both of these points, speculation is a waste of time.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stanmancan 2y agoSomething I haven't considered much but, in a world where you hop into a self-driving taxi; how is the passenger protected from someone who wants to rob them? I'm imaging a situation where an attacker can step in front of the vehicle, have it safely stop, before demanding you hand over your valuables, breaking a window to get in etc. As a passenger you're trapped in an enclosed space and left without a way to escape, where as a human driver would be able to make the judgement call to do whatever is necessary to get out of danger.
- Footnote7341 2y agoThis fear just seems ridiculous to me when you compare it to going on a train, bus, taxi rideshare, or just walking down the street.
- mrob 2y agoIt doesn't seem ridiculous if you're seen as an easy target. Crime isn't randomly distributed.
- minwcnt5 2y agoYeah but why would a passenger in a locked car that's loaded with cameras and connected to a call center be considered an easy target? And it's hard to tell if there's even someone in the Waymo because of the tinted windows.
- fragmede 2y agoI encountered this problem in a Cruise. I was picked up late at night with a friend, and this drunk person ran over and banged on the window, which caused the Cruise to panic and stop. It called customer support and I told them that there were some drunk people and to please get us out of there. The car started moving, thankfully, but it's an interesting problem to consider.
- 7e 2y agoDoes Waymo drive like a grandma? What’s the speed compared to a human driver in the same trip?
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- jemmyw 2y agoI've only taken one, but it drove at the posted speed limit on the roads it went on. It kept more distance than human drivers.