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I understand that viewpoint from an insurance perspective, but not necessarily from my own safety perspective: I wonder how well Waymo would fare in circumstanc
by necovek 2y ago
I understand that viewpoint from an insurance perspective, but not necessarily from my own safety perspective: I wonder how well Waymo would fare in circumstances I see as a driver. Eg. humans can control whether they drive under the influence or not (eg. if you don't take your car to a bar, you ain't coming back driving it).
But most notably, aggregated statistics like these focus on comparisons similar to comparing averages vs better statistical representations (like average vs median or p75 or... eg. it's possible for one driver to cause 20 collisions, and in a set of 10 drivers with no other collisions, we'd be at 2 collisions per driver instead of 0 really).
It's also not only about highway/city street miles, it's also about time of day: if Waymo is proportionally less on the streets and areas where there is more risky driving (eg. around bars and around midnight to 3am when there are also drunk pedestrians around) compared to human drivers, that would obviously skew the numbers in SDV's favour. Again, potentially they did since they acknowledge a separate study focusing on those, but later on they only talk about aggregated insurance claims.
They also acknowledge they are not accounting for accident severity, not even by using the dollar amount: while they had no fatalities, it's obviously important to weigh accidents by their severity.
With all this said, this does demonstrate current insurance liability of an average human driver compared to a Waymo SDV in Phoenix and SFO, but only once we have more comparable data should we make a bigger claim.
- hnaccount_rng 2y agoI get where you are coming from and you are correct. This is, up to a point, a PR piece of Waymo and we should take that into account. But they are pretty transparent about what they are doing. You just have to read the report. And for their metric, which rounds to "all distance travelled in the interesting ZIP codes", they are succeeding. What I'd take away from this is: If you give them a different metric, they can optimise for that too and they will end up being better than humans. That doesn't answer the questions: 1) Is it worth it? (I.e. what does it cost to achieve that) and 2) Is a Waymo better in any situation? I guess they don't have the answer to either yet. I'm pretty sure their cost-per-mile is still dropping like a rock (probably though not fast enough for their accountants) and they haven't reached all situations yet either. But I wouldn't bet on "because it's too hard", but rather "because we didn't get there yet" (and yes, they will have started with the easy part, as they should)