36 ms·

A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

• devangs 2y ago
  Results demonstrate that the Waymo ADS significantly outperformed both the overall driving population (88% reduction in property damage claims, 92% in bodily injury claims), and outperformed the more stringent latest-generation HDV benchmark (86% reduction in property damage claims and 90% in bodily injury claims).
• wiz21c 2y ago
  So one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself".
  • tcfhgj 2y ago
    Makes sense
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself" As it should. You’re objectively higher risk, particularly if you’ve ever been at fault for a crash or gotten a ticket.
    • palata 2y ago
      You're "objectively" higher risk, based on a study by the company building the autopilot, right? How objective is that?
      • fxwin 2y ago
        Obviously the assumption is that "one day" we have systems that outperform human drivers + reliable data on said systems.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
      • kolinko 2y ago
        That's ad hominem. The only question is whether the research is correct, and the data is true. Having said that, with time we will have more independent studies.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
      • khazhoux 2y ago
        Like the Borg, every Waymo is the same driver. So in column A, the insurance company has a meta-driver with many millions of miles of statistics. In column B, we have slow-reaction and non-lidar-equipped you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • meiraleal 2y ago
          Column A might have a few kills in their numbers.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • wccrawford 2y ago
          That's initially true, but as the car ages, and maintenance is done (or not done, or done improperly) the car's aspects will change. And as new cars are developed, obviously there are more "drivers". Essentially every year there'll be new drivers for every company that makes autonomous cars, possibly multiple. Yeah, it's still a lot fewer than the individual humans, but it's definitely not just "one driver".
          • jazzyjackson 2y ago
            I'm imagining insurance rates fluctuating with semver...
        • palata 2y ago
          > you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago This is factually wrong: I did not.
          • khazhoux 2y ago
            I apologize if I gave the impression that I had personal knowledge of your driving record and traffic violations spanning over the last 36 months. I assure you, my intent in using the word "you" was merely to illustrate a general situation in which an individual (though surely not yourself, palata, specifically), will find themselves being penalized for a prior incident. As my comment was surely read by thousands of HN readers, one imagines that as each of them read the word "you", they pondered their own driving history in their lived experience. Now that we have established the fact that you, palata, did not have a speeding ticket 3 years ago, I would encourage you to think about the application of my statement, to your actual situation. That is, you may substitute the words "speeding ticket 3 years ago" with any traffic violation or insurance claim where you were determined to be at fault, over any time period which might not be 3 years. Then the question is raised of whether you, palata, would incur higher insurance costs than Waymo.
    • paganel 2y ago
      They should also ask for more money from sick people when it comes to health insurance, as they’re more prone to getting sick again and again and hence consume resources, after all how many Luigis can there be? Which is to say that naked capitalism works until it doesn’t, and when it stops working big chances are that it won’t do it gracefully, see how present-day health insurance CEOs are now scared shitless of Big City streets.
      • anal_reactor 2y ago
        If self-driving cars are widely available, and they can drive everywhere a normal car can go, then you're not driving manually because you need to do so, you're driving manually because you like it, and the society isn't there to pay for your hobbies.
        • paganel 2y ago
          > If self-driving cars are widely available They won't be "widely available" because of the higher prices, just look at the EV market right now. You won't get a self-driving $2,000 clunker, and when you drive a $2,000 clunker you don't do it because you "like it", but because that's all that you can afford.
          • anal_reactor 2y ago
            Ah yes. Technological progress will never happen.
            • paganel 2y ago
              Did it happen for EVs in the here and now? Where can I find a SH EV clunker for $2,000? I'm talking about an EV with performances similar to those of a gasoline-based $2,000 clunker. Otherwise, believing in "technological progress" as a potential solution is just just that, an irrational belief.
              • anal_reactor 2y ago
    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
      "More" is the critical word here. I don't see any reason why insurance premiums should increase. Insurance premiums aren't sin taxes or some governmental incentive, they are offered by private firms. I would expect premium levels to continue to be driven by liability pool payouts plus a profit margin. Autonomous vehicles don't increase driver risk or liability pool payouts. IF anything, they reduce them due to safer driving conditions for the humans.
      • likpok 2y ago
        Insurance always balances between cost pooling and making people pay for their increased risk. Car insurance has always been more expensive for riskier drivers: young men pay more, driving “high risk” cars pay more. If the overall liability pool goes down but the human drivers become an outsized part of it, the insurance company will likely shift that cost to them. If they don’t, someone could set up an autonomous-only insurance company (or google could just insure itself) to take advantage of the lower risk, making the human insurance more expensive (even more so that the liability since the overall pool will be much smaller).
        • s1artibartfast 2y ago
          Yes, that is implicit in what I am saying. We have human only insurance pools today. I dont see a good reason why a human only insurance pool in the future would be more expensive than today. Human driving wont be more risky than today.
  • speerer 2y ago
    This would be excellent! I expect it also costs more to insure a hydrogen-powered zeppellin compared to more modern and stable technologies.
  • MaxikCZ 2y ago
    The best part isnt that you would pay the same and less if a bot does it, you will pay the same when bot drives and extra when you do.
  • chollida1 2y ago
    That's the dream. As a cyclist I would hope that day comes very soon.
    • suddenclarity 2y ago
      I assume such a change would heavily impact you as well? 40% of all seriously injured in the traffic are single-bike accidents. Here in Sweden that is.
    • rytis 2y ago
      Or even as a pedestrian. I'm sure AI will be fine to slow down if it sees a massive puddle and avoid soaking everyone in 3m radius just for lolz.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Or even as a pedestrian Or even as anyone who is ever on the road. Despite the law, driving in America is a necessity for many. That means our bar for taking it away is high. Quantify the safety delta and have an available alternative, and we can start lowering the bar for taking dangerous drivers off the road. (Frankly either >1 DUI or >1 at-fault crash should result in license revocation. We should also delay license issuance until 18 years old and have restrictions on the license until 20 [1].) [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3343314 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3343314
        • viraptor 2y ago
          > Quantify the safety delta and have an available alternative I would love it if these comparisons included "bus stats / average passengers". There are ways to just reduce the miles driven and the chances of collisions at the same time, without new tech improvements.
    • cultofmetatron 2y ago
      yea I don't particularly trust a for profit corporation to take my safety as a cyclist more than the minimum viable consideration. I used to be really excited about self driving cars until I realized that in US culture, it would basically be used to further prioritize car dependent infrastructure at the expense of proper walkable spaces and alternative transportation. we could have amazing and SAFE cycling infrastructure NOW if american culture wasn't so objectively trash.
  • epolanski 2y ago
    It's already borderline happening with the satellite supervision. Here in Italy insurance is 20% more expensive at the very least and the gap is widening if you don't put a tracking device on your car which checks position, speed, etc. I have a hard time justifying why one would not want it (besides privacy), all people that complain about it are people that regularly drive above the speed limit or pull dangerous overtaking maneuvers.
    • thiagocsf 2y ago
      Ah yes. The old anti-privacy mantra: you have nothing to worry about, if you have nothing to hide.
      • sofixa 2y ago
        It's a question if you put people's individual "privacy" (quotes because you're driving in public, on public roads paid for by the public, under public laws, and under the public's view - there's not really privacy as to how you're driving, everyone out there can see it) over people's collective right to live? Road deaths are among the leading causes of death in multiple developed countries.
        • guappa 2y ago
          Roads are public but unless you have someone following around you can't know where everyone is at all times. But with tracker now you have mass surveillance! We criticize chinese government but we do much worse.
      • epolanski 2y ago
        I did write "besides privacy" because it is a valid concern indeed. But considering that most people don't give two damns about their privacy (or at least act like it, keeping 24/7 a tracking device on them and sharing all of their lives non stop) what would be their valid reason to not have a tracking device for insurance purposes on their cars?
        • 2y ago
  • kmarc 2y ago
    My favorite brain picker question: What year would the EU* ban human driven cars on public roads? That's it. Million different opinions ranging from "never" to "within a couple decades for sure", weak, strong opinions, and of course many interesting topics to branch out into. *: sometimes I ask with US, or particular countries, it doesn't really matter for the sake of conversation. Fun fact: people working in automotive tend to say within this century, people who like and owned many cars say never :-)
    • mulmen 2y ago
      Have they banned horses yet? My money is on never. This technology doesn’t need a ban to succeed. It just needs to be allowed.
      • qnleigh 2y ago
        Horse accidents aren't a leading cause of death though. Seems like it'll depend on how thoroughly self-driving becomes a thing of the past on its own.
        • mulmen 2y ago
          > Horse accidents aren't a leading cause of death though. Sure, not now. Because cars replaced them. > Seems like it'll depend on how thoroughly self-driving becomes a thing of the past on its own. Based on my experience with Waymo if they come to Seattle in the next two years I won’t buy another car.
        • graemep 2y ago
          They were a leading cause of death when they were a common mode of transport. Riding a horse is very dangerous. Its just regarded as an acceptable risk (its something many people encourage kids to do) for cultural and social reasons. A British government scientific advisor was fired for pointing out that riding a horse carries about 30 times the risk of a "serious adverse effect" as taking ecstasy.
          • 2y ago
  • ijidak 2y ago
    Isn't that what Will Smith's character was told in "I Robot"? I guess this day has arrived for us. Definitely sooner than I expected.
  • kentiko 2y ago
    I can already see the sign "No manual driving allowed" at the entrance of highways.
    • OJFord 2y ago
      I propose 'autoautomobiles only'.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        autosquaredmobiles
        • Qem 2y ago
          Autoguideles.
    • gizmondo 2y ago
      Don't threaten me with a good time.
    • ix101 2y ago
      Highways seem like they're safer than other roads but if we had fully autonomous highways I imagine speed limits could be effectively removed drastically reducing travel time.
  • jp_nc 2y ago
    And immediately I start singing Red Barchetta in my head…
    • eddyg 2y ago
      You and me both!
  • guappa 2y ago
    Yes, and of course you must pay because the autopilot doesn't work when there's snow or rain or sun on the horizon or it's too dark, or the volcano near you is throwing ash and there's wind so you're now in a sandstorm, or wind is carrying sand from the sahara all over the mediterranean to you. (all of these regularly happen all in the same place)
    • lucianbr 2y ago
      What's the place?
      • guappa 2y ago
        The Catania area of course is one example.
        • lucianbr 2y ago
          > More recently, light snowfalls occurred on 9 February 2015, 6 January 2017 and 5 January 2019, but the last heavy snowfall dates back to 17 December 1988. Says wikipedia. Yeah, I don't know what I expected. Of course there's no actual snow in the meditteranean. It "lightly snowed" 3 times in the last 10 years.
          • guappa 2y ago
            I said the catania area, not the catania city centre. Learn to read perhaps? This is in the catania area https://imgur.com/a/rhnIGNa https://imgur.com/a/rhnIGNa Perhaps you have no clue of what you're talking about? I had snow 2 days ago… but sure, random guy on the internet who's never been here must educate me -_-' how completely unusual… this is in calabria https://www.sullaneve.it/articoli/localita-italiane/calabria/original_lorica.jpg https://www.sullaneve.it/articoli/localita-italiane/calabria...
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    Hopefully!
  • mulmen 2y ago
    Yes. That’s exactly how insurance works. Another way to phrase this is I will save a fortune on insurance by taking advantage of self driving cars.
  • qnleigh 2y ago
    Well really it would be "you get a discount for the percentage of your mileage driven with a autopilot enabled." You can pay less if you drive in a setting that saves the insurance company money (on average).
  • nextworddev 2y ago
    One day, you may not even get to own a car for “safety reasons”. See gun control
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    More than the autonomous cars, but it might not be more then you're paying now - unless the autonomous cars are particularly expensive to crash into.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    Yes, more than the owner of the self-driving car. No, not more than you currently pay, because you haven't become more at risk of collision than you are now.
• 1oooqooq 2y ago
  it's certainly based on route selection than driver vs robot. if you put even teenage drivers on the waymo covered routes and compare with average it would probably have the same drop.
  • chvid 2y ago
    If that is the case then this paper should be redacted.
    • ZephyrBlu 2y ago
      *retracted :)
• tsss 2y ago
  Does Waymo even drive on the highway? No surprise that there's a reduction in grave injuries if they drive 30 kph max in the inner city.
  • disillusioned 2y ago
    This is covered in the paper, although, somewhat ironically, opposite the bias you're implying: >The garaging zip code of the insured vehicle was used as a proxy for the city (Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin) in which the vehicle drives. Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk. For example, commuters from the city would likely experience a reduced crash risk as they travel to less densely populated areas (Chen et al., 2024). Previous studies have shown that most injury collisions occur within a small radius from residency, and that American drivers rarely travel far from their place of residence, with approximately 80% of one-way household trips being less than 10 miles (DOE, 2022). Third, the benchmark drivers garaged in the Waymo deployment area are not operating with the same distribution of mileage within the geographical limits as the Waymo ADS. Chen et al. (2024) explored the effect of Waymo’s driving distribution on benchmark crash risk and found that - should the benchmark driving distribution match Waymo’s in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles - the benchmark police-reported crash rates would have been between 14% and 38% higher. Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative. Surely, there is an opportunity in future work to leverage new data, such as insurance telematics, to more precisely define and leverage the benchmark driving exposure data to better account for this potential confounder.
• autobodie 2y ago
  in the same weather?
• sebstefan 2y ago
  I can't trust that number if it comes from Waymo.com. I'd need to see it from an independant third party who has no interest having their finger on the scale
  • zurfer 2y ago
    The authors are from: a Swiss Reinsurance Company, Ltd, Switzerland b Zardini Lab (research affiliate), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA c Autonomous Systems Laboratory (research affiliate), Stanford University, USA d Waymo LLC, USA e Casualty Actuarial Society, USA
    • suddenlybananas 2y ago
      So you can't really trust it due to the obvious conflict of interest.
      • hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        I mean.. I get that for the Waymo guys. But the SwissRE ones? Seriously? Who _should_ do that evaluation? You will necessarily have Waymo co-authors. They have to provide the data. They are the only ones who have that..
    • ddalex 2y ago
      Swiss Re is the actual thing when it comes to actuarial tables and statistics.
      • richardw 2y ago
        And would be very motivated to know the correct numbers in this case.
    • passwordoops 2y ago
      So not independent. And published as a white paper on Waymo's website. And only addresses the collaboration between Waymo and the insurance company, no mention of who funded the academics. Pretty sure if you dig deep enough, Swiss Re is somehow a Waymo investor. I'd trust this more if Waymo had a direct pipeline to an anonymized public repository of their complete data set for independent analysis
• zurfer 2y ago
  It seems like they compared apples to apples. Which make that an exciting result! “The benchmark was calibrated using both mileage (driving exposure) and residence zip-code (geographic region). Specifically, only the claims associated with vehicles registered to addresses (i.e., where the insured resides) within Waymo’s operating zip codes in San Francisco, the Phoenix metropolitan region, Los Angeles, and Austin were included.” Page 11 “Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non-access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS.” Page 26 “Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates.” Page 26 “Four claim frequencies were independently calculated for vehicles within Waymo’s operating zip codes in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin. Thereafter, these frequencies were proportionally weighted according to Waymo’s mileage distribution across these four regions. This resulted in the definition of a benchmark driving population which had driven the same driving distribution across geographic regions as the Waymo Driver.” Page 12 “Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet… Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative.” Page 26
  • amelius 2y ago
    > It seems like they compared apples to apples. Which make that an exciting result! I'd want to compare to our best drivers (e.g. ambulance drivers), not average drivers.
    • mulmen 2y ago
      > I'd want to compare to our best drivers (e.g. ambulance drivers), not average drivers. Why? As long as it is better than the median driver the roads are safer.
• ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  Is there any possible future, where Waymo is NOT one of the major players in self driving software?
  • d--b 2y ago
    Maybe Elon Musk will yield enough power in the US government to influence safety policies in such a way that is harmful to waymo. It doesn't seem like conflict of interest is bothering him much.
    • ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
      That might help Tesla catch up. That might make Waymo nr 2. But my question was about being "one of the major players". The market is huge. My rough guess is that every 10% of market share is worth $1T in market cap. Which is half of Google's overall current market cap.
    • threeseed 2y ago
      Elon Musk is already planning on scrapping the self driving crash reporting: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-transition-recommends-scrapping-car-crash-reporting-requirement-opposed-by-2024-12-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...
      • ddalex 2y ago
        So Musk is effectively the most powerful man on the planet right now, he's a major player in 3 key industries, and the head of effective (de)regulation in the largest consumer market by dollar volume. Isn't this a bit like ole' good Crassus in ancient Rome? Head of the government and richest buddy aroubnd? If history repeats, we'll see the American Imperial Era rising up very soon, were the interests of the state will fraction between the interests of the oligarchs and the lines blurry between law and personal convenience of the wealthist citizens
        • viraptor 2y ago
• impoppy 2y ago
  How did Waymo do this? As far as I know, replacing drivers with an AI was the goal of ever-money-losing Uber and Lyft, however, Waymo managed to get to this much sooner while having less funds.
  • iscrewyou 2y ago
    I adores wondered the same thing for any new breakthrough. I listened to the Eric Schmidt interview on Diary of a CEO regarding this and definitely agree with his reasoning. He basically says the reason new companies get ahead while we wonder why the existing companies who should’ve been doing this stuff are so far behind is because the old companies were also do everything else. He was especially talking in terms of AI and how Google seems behind while OpenAI came out so quickly.
  • t8sr 2y ago
    Started 15-20 years ago, whereas Uber and Tesla hopped on the bandwagon late and tried to play catchup. I remember talking about the self-driving project at Google in 2008 or something like that. (IIRC they were trying to use Haskell for something.)
    • achatham 2y ago
      We started January 2009.
  • mlnj 2y ago
    I've also not seen much drama coming out of Waymo in the past. I could be wrong but I guess this is the benefit of keeping your head down and focussing on the problem instead of growing too large.
    • saalweachter 2y ago
      I think they did something very smart, but I don't know if it was accidental or intentional. Waymo existed for like a decade on the basis of "we have a pile of money and our founders think it's cool". They moved slow and broke nothing. They made slow, incremental progress exploring the self driving space for years with plenty of funding and no expectation of a product launch. So when a bunch of other companies came along, years and years later, and were all "we're going to have self driving cars next year!!!", and Waymo had their "oh shit, we better actually make this into a product or why do we even exist " moment, they were already in a really good place. They weren't rushed, they probably could have pivoted to a product a year or three earlier. They'd already solved the problems everyone else was just handwaving. If it was accidental, they sure got lucky in the amount of time they were given with relatively little pressure, and in the timing of that competitive pressure at the end.
• digitcatphd 2y ago
  Good to see studies of incidents in comparison to human drivers. Historically what I have seen is 'self-driving car crashes into X, which seems to be concentrating exclusively on outliers to prove a point.
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    Funny enough, when drivers hit people that’s _also_ reported as “car crashes in to x”
    • MyFedora 2y ago
      Ah, the classics: "Pedestrian involved in accident" "Cyclist collides with car" "Car brushes against cyclist" "Vehicle loses control" Amazing how responsibility shifts when a two-ton machine is involved.
• tobylane 2y ago
  Is it possible to compare this to humans in another way? Could it be said that Waymo avoids 95% of the accidents that we regularly get in, and does have 3% of accidents that we manage to avoid. I think a major hurdle to mainstream acceptance is the errors that robots make, and a real mind doesn't.
• rglullis 2y ago
  Great, now let's compare it against public transit.
• gostsamo 2y ago
  No time to read the study, but does it correct for the circumstances of the claims - daylight, weather conditions, type of road?
  • nextworddev 2y ago
    Considering Waymo cherry picks conditions it drives on, this study is already fundamentally flawed.
• mulmen 2y ago
  I rode in a Waymo recently and was amazed at how good it was. It was easily in the top 5 best drivers I have ridden with. Really really impressive. It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive. It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the norm. For the first time in a decade I’m excited about an emerging technology. The future is bright.
  • meiraleal 2y ago
    > The future is bright. We have been there. The internet and then Google, Facebook were the same. Big Tech can't be trusted.
    • mulmen 2y ago
      I think the Internet is pretty great. It’s not perfect but I’m not ready to throw out the frictionless communication baby with the cynical bathwater.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Big Tech can't be trusted Trust, trade and mutually-beneficial coëxistence need not go hand in hand.
      • rglullis 2y ago
        > mutually-beneficial coëxistence Their side is benefiting a lot more than ours, and the few benefits that we might end up seeing come with a good amount of harm inflicted by them.
        • tim333 2y ago
          I like my tech toys - the usual macbook, iphone, internet etc. provided by big tech. I'm not sure how they are supposed to have harmed me?
• mindvirus 2y ago
  I think insurance prices will drive adoption of self driving very quickly. Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for non-self driving cars gets expensive fast as there are more and more self driving cars on the road.
  • ZacnyLos 2y ago
    Outside of mapped and heavily driven teritory? Good luck.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Outside of mapped and heavily driven teritory? Why wouldn't rates go up for drivers driving outside mapped and well-driven territory?
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • michaelt 2y ago
      Believe it or not, a lot of driving takes place in heavily driven territory :) And I'm sure the autonomous vehicle will have a go-very-slowly mode for navigating people's driveways and similar places the mapping cars haven't been yet.
    • jillesvangurp 2y ago
      The world is pretty well mapped at this point I don't think this will be a showstopper. And the nice thing about driver less cars is that they can drive wherever and whenever pretty cheaply. There's no driver to pay. Just the electricity bill for charging the vehicle and some servicing/vehicle depreciation and other fixed cost. That's a race to the bottom in terms of cost. There's no good economical reason to limit this to just small areas. You might charge passengers a bit extra if they are further out or even for the distance the car has to drive to pick them up. But there's no good reason for that to be very expensive as it would be with a paid driver.
• SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  And what staff levels are required to do the "self-driving" ? In number of back-end remote human operators per self-driving car. I get that some administrative oversight in always going to be needed, but to what extent is the AI "Actually Indians" at present?
• Brian_K_White 2y ago
  I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Waymo would say "don't worry, it sees you" and maybe the numbers even show they do some percentage more than the average human driver, but that still does not reproduce the self-help aspect of you looking at a driver until you see that that driver sees you. I think that is a pretty significant thing. It needs some sort of better answer than "don't worry about it" Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects. IE, you can't make eye contact with jersey barrier, but you don't need to, you know what it will do (nothing). And you can't make eye contact with say, a motorized railroad crossing barrier, but you don't need to. It moves, but only in an absolutely predictable way. You can be a cyclist around the railroad crossing barrier no problem. Maybe Waymo and others will be that consistent that you can treat them like "moving inanimate objects" safely. I don't know if they are right now. They may be better than humans on avaerage, but that is a long way from predictable and safe. Maybe They can build in some way for the car to signal back to the surrounding people what all it has taken note of, or not. Some way for a cyclist or pedestrian to look at a Waymo and see that it sees you. That should be possible. Maybe it can go both ways, maybe we can develop some kind of standard where if you need to get a cars attention there is some gesture you can do that it will be especially watching for. So even if it doesn't see you, it will see you if you wave your hand a certain way or something. Only problem with that is you have to be able to do the thing, and some of the times you need a car to see you the most will be the same times when you are incapacitated, ie lying on the road after some accident or something.
  • mstade 2y ago
    This makes a lot of sense, also for pedestrians and other drivers. Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat.
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      Need to give them led matrix front lights. The cars will be much less scary if they regularly blink.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  Does that mean it just never has crashes where anyone survives to make a claim :? I’m joking of course, but it was the first thing I thought when I read the title.
• zigzag312 2y ago
  I would be interested in comparison to human drivers excluding humans driving under influence. We know that humans under influence are really bad drivers. So bad, that DUI is illegal. Stats commonly include accidents caused these drivers.
  • jonasdn 2y ago
    Is this not the "no-true-scotsman" fallacy? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)
    • zigzag312 2y ago
      No, it is not. I'm not saying stats that include DUI accidents are not good or useful, just that additional analysis (together with these results) would be interesting as it would give us better insight. For example, let's say an analysis tells us that a disease X has 1.0% mortality rate. Would you consider additional analyses that tell us that 90% of these are kids under 10 and that mortality rate for kids under 10 is 10% an useful insight or not? EDIT: Maybe a better example would be a results from real studies that show a slight U curve for relationship between alcohol intake and total mortality. People not drinking any alcohol have higher total mortality than people who drink in moderation. Without additional data it seems that a moderate amount of alcohol is good for your health. Data from a newer study however shows that, if you exclude people who don't drink because of health issues, there is no U curve anymore and people not drinking any alcohol don't have higher total mortality than people who drink in moderation.
• thom 2y ago
  Ah, but can they do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke?
  • rwmj 2y ago
    I certainly hope so, and soon. I hate driving. Micro-managing a 1 ton machine where any slip-up could kill someone.
• metalman 2y ago
  fake, fake, lying, no conection to the reality of what is needed for 90% of short trips on roads. millions of trips an hour require going into tight, poorly lit, uneven , and unmaped ,end destinations, that are where a huge amount of the included "bodily injury" is happening, and waymo is never going into. Add in other realitys like, heavy acqward baggage and cargo, tools, food, kids,dogs, etc,etc that waymo (wayno) aint carrying and there is no comparison to be made. curb to curb, nicy nice areas, if you dont mind going slow inside a robot, by yourself, and pay through the nose, then sure, whatever but WHEN, one of these things runs over someones kid, expect a backlash , right
• necovek 2y ago
  This sounds quite a bit like massaging statistics until you get the numbers you like. A few things that pop to mind: did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive (under the influence, no valid driving permit, cars with issues [braking broken]...)? (This mostly matters for evaluating the average performance compared to average non-impaired human — a drunk person might mess up with self-driving vehicle sensors as well just for kicks once they are in suitable numbers and widely available) Did Waymo drive across all the same areas and time periods as the humans did with an equal "proportion"? Could we compare "time behind wheel" instead of miles travelled? (Eg. lots of small crashes happen when traffic is at a standstill) There are so many ways to slice and dice this and come up with favourable results for self-driving systems that I can't but be dubious of any claim. But notably, if we can liberate ourselves from driving through congested traffic, it would certainly reduce the incentive to speed and aim for more efficient driving as we'd be free to do other stuff while we get to our destination — and simply slowing down would buy both human and software drivers time to react and avoid most crashes (nothing really saves you from someone recklessly driving straight into your car).
  • Reubend 2y ago
    > did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive One could argue here that it would be unfair to exclude the worst performing humans. Plenty of humans cause accidents for easily preventable reasons, but that's an honest part of our behavior. Or to rephrase, I think excluding the categories of people who drive terribly, but do still drive nonetheless, would be less representative of reality. > Did Waymo drive across all the same areas and time periods as the humans did with an equal "proportion"? No, they didn't. Their methodology didn't adjust for things like highway vs city street miles, although it did adjust for city and state. > Could we compare "time behind wheel" instead of miles travelled? We could, but that would incentivize slow driving rather than safe driving. You need to travel the same minimum distance from a hypothetical "Point A" to "Point B" no matter what, but the number of minutes could be inflated easily. Economic factors discourage inflating the number of miles. > There are so many ways to slice and dice this and come up with favourable results for self-driving systems that I can't but be dubious of any claim. I think it's fair to criticize the fact that they didn't adjust for geographic area with as much granularity as they should have (i.e. for highways vs city streets, or for excluded zones like airports). But other than that, their methodology seems solid to me.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• milicat 2y ago
  Still worse than public transport, wastes more resources and endangers cyclists and pedestrians. I have yet to see anything that deserves to be called progress in self-driving. Yet another scam to sell more wasteful, inefficient vehicles.
  • Iulioh 2y ago
    Public transport is not the answer to everything man and saying this again and again is cringe. -A man in his 20s who doesn't need a car and only uses public transport
    • ericmay 2y ago
      You’re right that it’s not the answer to everything, but today car-only infrastructure is considered to be the answer to everything throughout America, so much so that we’ve reached the point where public transit is the only answer to how to move people more efficiently right now because it’s quite simply where all of our transit funding should be going.
  • mavhc 2y ago
    If I'm the only person going from/to somewhere having a large public transport vehicle take me is wasteful
  • dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    Waymo is public transport. If they introduce automated vehicles that have fixed routes and larger carrying capacities then Waymo is indistinguishable from actual public transport.
  • acuozzo 2y ago
    > Still worse than public transport I agree that the US needs better public transportation, but most of the US is not a city. If the nearest grocery store is 30 miles away and the nearest bus stop is several miles away from your home, then using public transportation turns this into a half-day affair.
    • 2y ago
• Dah00n 2y ago
  "Waymo achieves 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human drivers" ...claims Waymo.
• unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
  Did the paper really prove its claim? It set aside more than half of Waymo's claims history and compared only the most recent portion of its own history to the all drivers benchmark. All drivers do things that Waymo doesn't like operate outside specific city centers, drive in snow or other severe weather, real people drive more during the day in traffic but Waymo is biased toward nighttime (less traffic), and real people drive freeways and high speed roads. If you rigorously enforced those limits on regular drivers and additionally imposed an interlock device to prevent DUI and remote insurance company monitoring of driving habits-- that's the comparison population I want to see. Otherwise, this is a press release disguised as an academic paper.
  • zild3d 2y ago
    why should DUIs be excluded? There are regular human drivers out there at various levels of intoxication. I do want to know waymo vs all population. But yes it should be compared in the same areas during the same period.
    • unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
      Maybe DUI's should be included, but a paper drawing the conclusion that "Waymo is safer because its computer drivers aren't drunk" suggests very different policy actions.
      • zamadatix 2y ago
        Unless we really can finally stop drunk driving overnight after all these years of trying I don't agree the comparison should result in significantly different policy. I want to know how Waymo statistically compares to all of all the actual drivers when setting policy, not how Waymo compares to what we wish real drivers would have been like. The only mistake would be to compare solely to drunk drivers, which is what you comment makes it sound like. I would like to see the data sets filtered to match driving areas though. I.e. Waymo drives almost exclusively in urban environments so per mile data should be compared almost exclusively to urban driver data.
• schlipity 2y ago
  Since you are completely removing at least 1 human from potential bodily injury claims, wouldn't you need a greater than 100% reduction in bodily injury claims in order for this to be better? I mean when you are literally removing 1 person from possible injury, you literally can't have the same number of bodily injury claims. It can only be less.
  • rsanek 2y ago
    are you? somewhere around 60-80% of miles driven are people alone in their vehicles. aside from the car driving itself somewhere, when there's a passenger in there that's the same as your average car.
• black_13 2y ago
  [dead]
• bhouston 2y ago
  Pretty cool. I wonder if this will ever make it to Canada's winter wonderland where there is ice and snow on the road for 4 months of the year (more or less in other areas.)
  • bryanlarsen 2y ago
    They've done some testing in Buffalo NY, which gets more snow than pretty much anywhere in Canada. The hard part about self-driving is dealing with / predicting the behaviour of humans. That's something that humans are good at and robots are bad at. And SF has more weird human behaviour than anywhere in Canada. Predicting the behaviour of vehicles in snow is something computers are much better at than humans. Solving the sensor problem for driving in rain/snow also seems like a standard tech problem where vehicles can quickly become much better at than humans who are limited to mark 1 eyeball.
• rwmj 2y ago
  On a tangential topic, I'm surprised Waymo don't self-insure. Is there an advantage to Waymo of outsourcing insurance? Is it a legal thing?
  • chippiewill 2y ago
    It's easier to budget for an insurance policy than an insurance claim. Clearly Waymo can afford to self insure, but its difficult to accou t for the underspend and overspend depending on accident rate. Insurance companies have the advantage of amortization over a much larger number of policies. Even insurance companies will have their own insurance.
• decasia 2y ago
  Given how bad most human drivers are in my neighborhood - and I see vast amounts of them on their phones and not looking at the road - I'm thinking that this is not very surprising.
  • cryptonym 2y ago
    Good point. I have never been responsible for an accident and was never implied in a serious one with body injuries. Maybe I'm already avoiding >95% of the accidents by not driving drunk, not texting, paying attention, not speeding & basically following the rules? People might go sovietic saying Waymo is better overall, so let's force it on everyone. Maybe we could achieve an even better result by being stricter on applying the rules and leveraging far less complicated technologies to prevent car from going over limit, preventing it to start when driver is drunk...
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  [dupe] Earlier official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463170
• dgan 2y ago
  Remember kids: everything that can, eventually, will be turned against you! Some fun predictions, gathered from other comments + my own: - You ll have to dispute a dead family member against a faceless company that conveniently deleted crucial logs. - They will make you wear wireless tags every time you cross a street, and fine & shame you, if you don't. -Tags will contain your real identity, so that you ll get a bonus for your medical insurance. - Insurance companies will refuse to insure your ild mechanical car, and will force you to buy a subscription for the new shiny car, that will have to be replaced every N years. - The new car will refuse to drive you at X location because you overused your monthly C02 quota.
  • returningfory2 2y ago
    > - You ll have to dispute a dead family member against a faceless company that conveniently deleted crucial logs. On the contrary, of all my negative experiences biking in NYC over 10 years, the _only_ time I was able to hold a driver accountable was when they were riding a Revel scooter in which case the "faceless company" took them off their platform. This comment seems to significantly overestimate how easy it to hold human drivers accountable.
    • acchow 2y ago
      Drivers don’t get held accountable in America. You can actually kill someone without any significant consequences, as long as you do it while driving https://sfist.com/2024/04/18/71-year-old-driver-skates-with-lenient-probation-sentence-in-crash-that-killed-four-year-old-girl/ https://sfist.com/2024/04/18/71-year-old-driver-skates-with-...
      • returningfory2 2y ago
        Yep, fully agree.
  • acchow 2y ago
    Sure, that’s not good, but neither is getting killed along with your whole family, while waiting at a bus stop…? https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/3-month-old-infant-dies-days-west-portal-crash-19327748.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/3-month-old-infa... Also, it’s certainly better than having everyone drive themselves home after drinks at a bar?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tantalor 2y ago
  Looks like this is comparing to human drivers on the same miles and conditions: only the claims associated with vehicles registered to addresses (i.e., where the insured resides) within Waymo's operating zip codes in San Francisco, the Phoenix metropolitan region, Los Angeles, and Austin were included
• arnaudsm 2y ago
  These results are meaningless, Waymo only drives in controlled, good weather, urban streets, while the human control group does not. This is not science, this is PR. We need independent investigations. And remember that currently, self-driving cars in California are exempt from traffic tickets : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/self-driving-cars-exempt-traffic-tickets-san-francisco-autonomous-vehicle https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/self-driv... We learned that the hard way with Boeing, you cannot trust a company to self-regulate their safety standards. But with Musk in power, the legislation might encourage them to do so.
  • tim333 2y ago
    Google says >Waymo One, is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the following cities: >Los Angeles Waymo One is available across nearly 80 square miles of LA County, including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Downtown LA. >San Francisco Waymo One is available across 55 square miles of the Bay Area... 24/7 across those areas sounds different to what you mention.
    • arnaudsm 2y ago
      I agree about the 24/7 part, but the safe zone and weather biases are too big to ignore
  • creer 2y ago
    "controlled areas" is relative - for example it includes mayhem zone SOMA and the hills. Also they just got started, relatively speaking, and have been expanding. Give it a minute. Really, computers seem more naturally suited to driving in SF than humans - from the point of view of paying attention to enough things, not having to pay attention to map navigation and having more modes of sensory input than humans.
    • jajko 2y ago
      I'll believe such companies with my life and life of my family when they can handle usual South east Asia capital city for example also during monsoon, say Bombay. Because this is in stake, nothing less. This aint some web app deployment where flaws are annoying but thats about it. I've just finished 2 day 1500km drive back home across Europe in various storms, heavy rain, a bit of snow, a lot of it in the dark, tons of properly dangerous idiots, weird non standard marked repairs (we talk about germany), some serious accidents along the way, few nearly misses. Our F11 BMW 5 series took it on effortlessly, complementing my and wife's skills but not interfering. I am not stellar but definitely above average driver. I've done this drive maybe 30x over past 15 years, without kids normally in one 16-18 hour push. Nr of clueless idiots is definitely rising and roads are definitely more full. No way in hell I'll trust something fully with most precious stuff in my life until its properly battle proven by billions of miles in harsh complex situations, which what you describe it isnt. Till then there is no self driving, just steps towards it. I don't need this for driving around some short distances that much. Good luck with beta testing to ya all.
• lopkeny12ko 2y ago
  I'm surprised that no one has yet commented on the inherent reporting bias here. Waymo commissioned a study, conducted by Waymo employees, for Waymo to study Waymo's own safety record, and found that Waymo is safer than human drivers. Has this finding ever been independently verified?