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> It’s also possible that Waymo's erratic braking contributed to a few of those rear-end crashes It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making

> It’s also possible that Waymo's erratic braking contributed to a few of those rear-end crashes It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake. The article doesn't say whether Waymos are rear-ended more often than human drivers, but it's plausible that this could be the case. Human drivers have a mental model of what other drivers will or won't do, and that model might not work well for autonomous vehicles. It's very possible that Waymos are faster to put on the brakes in unclear situations than a human driver would be, and/or that they categorize different situations as dangerous than a human driver would. I'm sure human drivers will eventually adapt to the behavior of these robots sharing the road with them, but that might take a bit of time and experience.

ghaff 2y ago
You can definitely cause accidents without technically committing a traffic violation. We all assume that other people behave "normally" in traffic while providing some margin.
- falcolas 2y ago
  > You can definitely cause accidents without technically committing a traffic violation. Yup. Just drive the exact speed limit on every highway you're on. And if you're on larger width highways, you can do that in the left lane, since you're at the legal maximum allowed speed. Driving safely and driving perfectly legally are not always compatible.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    There are plenty of stay right except to pass signs but I expect that getting ticketed for driving the speed limit in the left lane is pretty rare.
    - falcolas 2y ago
      Ticketed, no. Hit by traffic which is all going 30 over, yes.
dmurray 2y ago
If you brake more aggressively, you will be involved in more accidents, but in fewer accidents that are considered your fault (courts and insurance companies will almost always find against the rear-ender). You might also be involved in less serious accidents: a low or moderate speed rear end collision is safer overall than hitting a pedestrian, T-boning someone, or colliding at the higher speed from before braking. That's a trade off that Waymo presumably know about, and are taking intentionally. It would be interesting to know what they prioritise: is it fewer overall deaths and injuries, or fewer accidents where they were determined to be at fault?
- kube-system 2y ago
  You really can't control the behavior of the driver behind you, you just have to trust that they're going to do their job of not hitting things in front of them, just as you are. If humans are hitting things in front of them more often because they're concerned that the person behind them might not stop, that's probably indicative of a flaw in human driving behavior. The rules surrounding accident fault exist because of the individual responsibility assigned to driving behavior. If someone would have rear-ended a hesitant waymo, they would have rear-ended an equally hesitant human.
  - dmurray 2y ago
    It obviously wouldn't be ethical for Waymo to brake aggressively just to catch out humans tailgating them too closely (at no risk to Waymo, after all, since the insurance of the car behind them will pay for damage and let's say they do this only when there are no human occupants). Even though it's a "flaw" in the tailgater's behaviour and even though he will have the responsibility assigned to him. So is it ethical to brake aggressively to avoid a 1% chance of an accident up ahead? 5%? 0.1%? This is a real life trolley problem, and the answer can't be as simple as "always brake, feel no remorse because it's the other driver's problem" even if that might be a good heuristic for a human to teach in driver's education.
    - kube-system 2y ago
mnahkies 2y ago
I was going to make a similar comment. One important aspect of being a safe driver is being predictable. Cars (or cyclists/pedestrians for that matter) that suddenly change speed or direction without warning create a lot of risk. Edit: I've been down voted so as clarification I mean a sudden change without any obvious/predictable reason. Think the person that realized too late that they wanted to turn here and instead of continuing and turning around they slam the breaks. Yes you need to be ready for this, but it's still more risky.
- kjksf 2y ago
  Consider famous autonomous Uber crash that killed a person illegally crossing the road at night. The right thing to do for the autonomous software would be to break hard to avoid killing that person. If there was a car behind that Uber car, it would likely rear end the Uber. That would be preferable to killing the human. The software would be right. Unpredictable but right. If the read ending happens because Waymo erroneously did phantom break (i.e. it did break because software was confused), then software would be wrong. Without analyzing rear ending accidents to decide if the software was right or wrong, we can't say if Waymo did the right thing or not. In human-to-human crashes, rear-ender is presumed guilty.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    The rear-ender is always guilty. You have to be able to stop safely if the car in front of you stops abruptly for something you cannot see. The person in front may also be guilty, if they stop for no good reason, or a malicious reason (aka brake checking).
    - kube-system 2y ago
      It is hard to paint with a wide brush here; rules for determining fault vary by locale (sometimes significantly), but there are absolutely situations where your vehicle might strike the rear of another vehicle, and you are found completely free of liability. Often, situations like: * You are stopped in traffic, the driver in the front reverses into you. * Traffic comes to a quick stop, you stop, and the driver behind you rear ends you and pushes you into the vehicle in front of you. Brake checking and unsafe lane changes might result in a split of fault in places that assign comparative negligence, which might be more of what you're thinking of. Often the idea here is that the driver in the rear could have done something more to avoid the accident. This is less likely to be determined to be the case when a vehicle is completely stopped in traffic and the driver has no options.
spacecadet 2y ago
I tend to agree with you, I have decades of driving experience across a huge range of model years and vehicle types. Im very cautious and maintain distances as Im often driving something with subpar stopping power or lacking ABS. My observations have been similar, first when breaking assist appeared and now with self-driving. Those vehicles are quicker to react, more prone to over-react, slower to return to normal, and apply too much breaking power. Ive watched other cars in front of me hard break in a series of what appears to me as erratic decisions, because of what I assume is noise created by traffic patterns, pedestrians, and latency. I also wonder if humans will adjust their behavior... people seem so distracted while driving today.
CalRobert 2y ago
When I was taking motorcycle safety they made it clear you needed to ride only at a speed where you could stop in the space you knew to be clear. That means if the car in front of you turned in to a stationary boulder, you needed to be able to stop. Hopefully human drivers learn to apply the same wisdom to their own driving.
- nh2 2y ago
  Indeed. Most countries' driving laws for good reason demand that you must maintain enough distance to the vehicle in front of you so that if it hard-breaks surprisingly for _whatever reason_, you will not touch it. Lots of people ignore that. They are bad drivers. This normalises bad driving. Robot cars being very good at breaking quickly just makes that more obvious, and will hopefully educate more people to drive in practice how they should have been driving all along.
  - watwut 2y ago
    I tried that. What happens is that other cars will put themselves into the space in front of you. If you slow down to make more space, it will happen more and more. Basically, it is impossible to keep that distance on half busy road.
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      Sadly true, and ur drove me insane when I was riding in San Diego. It helps when places actually ticket people who tailgate.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I was driving someone in for an appointment in a particularly insane area of a city where I don't often drive. They were somewhat gently chiding me for not adjusting my driving to be more aggressive. And this is someone who I would consider a fairly careful driver.
    - nytesky 2y ago
      Absolutely true. The worst is thru lanes and backed up turn lanes, where if you aren’t Gandalf on the stone bridge, you will be cut off by hundreds of cars from the “thru” lane.
freeopinion 2y ago
As a human driver I have to be prepared to drive behind first-year drivers, teenage racers, great-grandmas, people late for work, people on a Sunday tour, people putting on their makeup, people talking on their phone. I don't really see autonomous vehicles as adding some vastly different curve at me. Wait, what?! They obey the law? How will I ever adjust to that?
- moffkalast 2y ago
  That is a problem isn't it? For human drivers seeing a line of cars drive 20 over the speed limit almost always makes us follow herd instinct and "keep up with traffic" even if it's technically illegal. Something a self driving car (I presume) won't do. The problem is entirely on the human side though and needs to be solved there.
  - nytesky 2y ago
    So self driving cars do not speed. Ever?
- HarryHirsch 2y ago
  Experienced drivers have a mental model of other drivers - when you see someone driving slowly and erratically you know to keep at a distance, that fellow is going to hit the brakes suddenly or make an unexpected turn. Waymos on the other hand, they are so new that other traffic participants don't know what to make of them. Maybe it improves in the future because people get more experienced, maybe it doesn't because the alien intelligence is not compatible with human intelligence and those things are inherently unpredictable. We'll see.
martindbp 2y ago
I wonder if the NHTSA-stop is partially to blame
psychlops 2y ago
Or if they have aggressive regenerative braking on their cars.
Log_out_ 2y ago
Or just vote them of the roads forever.
Modified3019 2y ago
>It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake Yeah I experience that in my own truck (a 2022 dodge ram provided by and for work) has this awful delay in acceleration. It’s almost like it needs to “spin up” before there’s power to move, and it’s generally slow when it comes to moving up gears. This results in people misjudging my vehicular body language, thinking that I’m waiting/indecisive when I’m not. So by the time I’ve started moving from a stop, the other guy got convinced I was letting them go first and is also moving. Activating “Tow Haul” mode every time I start up seems to mostly, but not entirely mitigates the lethargy. Also the wheelbase is too damn long, which makes reasonable turns in parking lots into curbs scraping or 3-7 point affairs to get out of. I‘ve driven boats with better handling than this stupid vehicle.
- Vrondi 2y ago
  What model truck do you have?
  - Modified3019 2y ago
    A 1500, with a 153.5 inch wheelbase
JohnFen 2y ago
> It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake Exactly this. One of the most important things that enhances safety is to avoid doing anything that surprises others.
- yadaeno 2y ago
  No, the most important thing is not causing a collision. We don’t need to guess here, Waymo is way safer than human drivers as a car and a pedestrian. So clearly optimizing for “not confusing human drivers” is not correct. Human drivers frequently run into stationary objects and plow over bikers/pedestrians so maybe there’s a huge category of situations where they *should* be surprised
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > No, the most important thing is not causing a collision. That's why I said "one of the most important", not "the most important". Driving in the least surprising way is one of the methods of avoiding accidents. If Waymo's driving style means that they get rear-ended more than normal, that means that Waymo is behaving in a way that surprises other drivers. While it's true that the fault is the driver that did the rear-ending, it can also be true that the accident may have been avoided if Waymo drove in a manner that didn't surprise the tailgater.

ghaff 2y ago

You can definitely cause accidents without technically committing a traffic violation. We all assume that other people behave "normally" in traffic while providing some margin.

falcolas 2y ago
> You can definitely cause accidents without technically committing a traffic violation. Yup. Just drive the exact speed limit on every highway you're on. And if you're on larger width highways, you can do that in the left lane, since you're at the legal maximum allowed speed. Driving safely and driving perfectly legally are not always compatible.
- ghaff 2y ago
  There are plenty of stay right except to pass signs but I expect that getting ticketed for driving the speed limit in the left lane is pretty rare.
  - falcolas 2y ago
    Ticketed, no. Hit by traffic which is all going 30 over, yes.

dmurray 2y ago

If you brake more aggressively, you will be involved in more accidents, but in fewer accidents that are considered your fault (courts and insurance companies will almost always find against the rear-ender). You might also be involved in less serious accidents: a low or moderate speed rear end collision is safer overall than hitting a pedestrian, T-boning someone, or colliding at the higher speed from before braking. That's a trade off that Waymo presumably know about, and are taking intentionally. It would be interesting to know what they prioritise: is it fewer overall deaths and injuries, or fewer accidents where they were determined to be at fault?

kube-system 2y ago
You really can't control the behavior of the driver behind you, you just have to trust that they're going to do their job of not hitting things in front of them, just as you are. If humans are hitting things in front of them more often because they're concerned that the person behind them might not stop, that's probably indicative of a flaw in human driving behavior. The rules surrounding accident fault exist because of the individual responsibility assigned to driving behavior. If someone would have rear-ended a hesitant waymo, they would have rear-ended an equally hesitant human.
- dmurray 2y ago
  It obviously wouldn't be ethical for Waymo to brake aggressively just to catch out humans tailgating them too closely (at no risk to Waymo, after all, since the insurance of the car behind them will pay for damage and let's say they do this only when there are no human occupants). Even though it's a "flaw" in the tailgater's behaviour and even though he will have the responsibility assigned to him. So is it ethical to brake aggressively to avoid a 1% chance of an accident up ahead? 5%? 0.1%? This is a real life trolley problem, and the answer can't be as simple as "always brake, feel no remorse because it's the other driver's problem" even if that might be a good heuristic for a human to teach in driver's education.
  - kube-system 2y ago

mnahkies 2y ago

I was going to make a similar comment. One important aspect of being a safe driver is being predictable. Cars (or cyclists/pedestrians for that matter) that suddenly change speed or direction without warning create a lot of risk. Edit: I've been down voted so as clarification I mean a sudden change without any obvious/predictable reason. Think the person that realized too late that they wanted to turn here and instead of continuing and turning around they slam the breaks. Yes you need to be ready for this, but it's still more risky.

kjksf 2y ago
Consider famous autonomous Uber crash that killed a person illegally crossing the road at night. The right thing to do for the autonomous software would be to break hard to avoid killing that person. If there was a car behind that Uber car, it would likely rear end the Uber. That would be preferable to killing the human. The software would be right. Unpredictable but right. If the read ending happens because Waymo erroneously did phantom break (i.e. it did break because software was confused), then software would be wrong. Without analyzing rear ending accidents to decide if the software was right or wrong, we can't say if Waymo did the right thing or not. In human-to-human crashes, rear-ender is presumed guilty.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  The rear-ender is always guilty. You have to be able to stop safely if the car in front of you stops abruptly for something you cannot see. The person in front may also be guilty, if they stop for no good reason, or a malicious reason (aka brake checking).
  - kube-system 2y ago
    It is hard to paint with a wide brush here; rules for determining fault vary by locale (sometimes significantly), but there are absolutely situations where your vehicle might strike the rear of another vehicle, and you are found completely free of liability. Often, situations like: * You are stopped in traffic, the driver in the front reverses into you. * Traffic comes to a quick stop, you stop, and the driver behind you rear ends you and pushes you into the vehicle in front of you. Brake checking and unsafe lane changes might result in a split of fault in places that assign comparative negligence, which might be more of what you're thinking of. Often the idea here is that the driver in the rear could have done something more to avoid the accident. This is less likely to be determined to be the case when a vehicle is completely stopped in traffic and the driver has no options.

spacecadet 2y ago

I tend to agree with you, I have decades of driving experience across a huge range of model years and vehicle types. Im very cautious and maintain distances as Im often driving something with subpar stopping power or lacking ABS. My observations have been similar, first when breaking assist appeared and now with self-driving. Those vehicles are quicker to react, more prone to over-react, slower to return to normal, and apply too much breaking power. Ive watched other cars in front of me hard break in a series of what appears to me as erratic decisions, because of what I assume is noise created by traffic patterns, pedestrians, and latency. I also wonder if humans will adjust their behavior... people seem so distracted while driving today.

CalRobert 2y ago

When I was taking motorcycle safety they made it clear you needed to ride only at a speed where you could stop in the space you knew to be clear. That means if the car in front of you turned in to a stationary boulder, you needed to be able to stop. Hopefully human drivers learn to apply the same wisdom to their own driving.

nh2 2y ago
Indeed. Most countries' driving laws for good reason demand that you must maintain enough distance to the vehicle in front of you so that if it hard-breaks surprisingly for _whatever reason_, you will not touch it. Lots of people ignore that. They are bad drivers. This normalises bad driving. Robot cars being very good at breaking quickly just makes that more obvious, and will hopefully educate more people to drive in practice how they should have been driving all along.
- watwut 2y ago
  I tried that. What happens is that other cars will put themselves into the space in front of you. If you slow down to make more space, it will happen more and more. Basically, it is impossible to keep that distance on half busy road.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    Sadly true, and ur drove me insane when I was riding in San Diego. It helps when places actually ticket people who tailgate.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I was driving someone in for an appointment in a particularly insane area of a city where I don't often drive. They were somewhat gently chiding me for not adjusting my driving to be more aggressive. And this is someone who I would consider a fairly careful driver.
  - nytesky 2y ago
    Absolutely true. The worst is thru lanes and backed up turn lanes, where if you aren’t Gandalf on the stone bridge, you will be cut off by hundreds of cars from the “thru” lane.

freeopinion 2y ago

As a human driver I have to be prepared to drive behind first-year drivers, teenage racers, great-grandmas, people late for work, people on a Sunday tour, people putting on their makeup, people talking on their phone. I don't really see autonomous vehicles as adding some vastly different curve at me. Wait, what?! They obey the law? How will I ever adjust to that?

moffkalast 2y ago
That is a problem isn't it? For human drivers seeing a line of cars drive 20 over the speed limit almost always makes us follow herd instinct and "keep up with traffic" even if it's technically illegal. Something a self driving car (I presume) won't do. The problem is entirely on the human side though and needs to be solved there.
- nytesky 2y ago
  So self driving cars do not speed. Ever?
HarryHirsch 2y ago
Experienced drivers have a mental model of other drivers - when you see someone driving slowly and erratically you know to keep at a distance, that fellow is going to hit the brakes suddenly or make an unexpected turn. Waymos on the other hand, they are so new that other traffic participants don't know what to make of them. Maybe it improves in the future because people get more experienced, maybe it doesn't because the alien intelligence is not compatible with human intelligence and those things are inherently unpredictable. We'll see.

martindbp 2y ago

I wonder if the NHTSA-stop is partially to blame

psychlops 2y ago

Or if they have aggressive regenerative braking on their cars.

Log_out_ 2y ago

Or just vote them of the roads forever.

Modified3019 2y ago

>It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake Yeah I experience that in my own truck (a 2022 dodge ram provided by and for work) has this awful delay in acceleration. It’s almost like it needs to “spin up” before there’s power to move, and it’s generally slow when it comes to moving up gears. This results in people misjudging my vehicular body language, thinking that I’m waiting/indecisive when I’m not. So by the time I’ve started moving from a stop, the other guy got convinced I was letting them go first and is also moving. Activating “Tow Haul” mode every time I start up seems to mostly, but not entirely mitigates the lethargy. Also the wheelbase is too damn long, which makes reasonable turns in parking lots into curbs scraping or 3-7 point affairs to get out of. I‘ve driven boats with better handling than this stupid vehicle.

Vrondi 2y ago
What model truck do you have?
- Modified3019 2y ago
  A 1500, with a 153.5 inch wheelbase

JohnFen 2y ago

> It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake Exactly this. One of the most important things that enhances safety is to avoid doing anything that surprises others.

yadaeno 2y ago
No, the most important thing is not causing a collision. We don’t need to guess here, Waymo is way safer than human drivers as a car and a pedestrian. So clearly optimizing for “not confusing human drivers” is not correct. Human drivers frequently run into stationary objects and plow over bikers/pedestrians so maybe there’s a huge category of situations where they *should* be surprised
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > No, the most important thing is not causing a collision. That's why I said "one of the most important", not "the most important". Driving in the least surprising way is one of the methods of avoiding accidents. If Waymo's driving style means that they get rear-ended more than normal, that means that Waymo is behaving in a way that surprises other drivers. While it's true that the fault is the driver that did the rear-ending, it can also be true that the accident may have been avoided if Waymo drove in a manner that didn't surprise the tailgater.