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Waymo Safety Impact
- mkw5053 8mo agoLiving in SF (and dad of a toddler), this seems like a no-brainer. I can't wait for fewer human drivers.
- kstrauser 8mo agoI've said before that Waymo is already vastly, incredibly safer than some of my older relatives who refuse to give up their keys. Ever been around The Villages in Florida and seen a man leaning forward behind the wheel to squint at what they're driving toward, with their wife shouting at them to turn left!, turn left!? That's just kind of tolerated in some places where the cops don't want to make waves with the wealthy older community. A self-driving car never gets tired and sleepy after driving for many hours straight. A highway-bound Waymo would be safer than a few instances of distant past me who stayed on the road longer than I was safe to. They also never get drunk, and are safer than approximately 100% of impaired drivers. I genuinely think we'll all be safer when lots of people collectively realize that someone other than themselves should be driving.
- Schiendelman 8mo agoPeople won't collectively realize squat. Insurance companies will simply price people out of driving. And I welcome it SO very much.
- onoesworkacct 8mo agoI enjoy driving (basically) wherever I want to though. I don't want to have the freedom to go places determined by some faceless multinational, according to my subscription. Or via some "safety" regime.
- nutjob2 8mo agoSelf driving doesn't mean forced self driving, there will always be a manual driving override. But your insurance may be more expensive.
- jedberg 8mo agoAnecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans. The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they hit the child at a lower speed than a human would have because of the reaction time. I would rather be in an area where only Waymo's are allowed than an area where they are banned.
- crudgen 8mo ago[flagged]
- bloppe 8mo agoYa and they're the only ones I can count on being polite during rush hour
- Retric 8mo agoWaymo as a system has crossed the threshold where I trust them more than average driver, but all this hardware is relatively new, well maintained, and their software is closely tied to it. I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.
- mtklein 8mo agoI am also not looking forward to the system transitioning from "big experiment, burn money to make it good" to "established business unit, tweak it to death for incrementally more money / personal promotion." We're still in the honeymoon period and I very much expect to hate Waymo in 10 or 15 years when they reach a steady state.
- gfody 8mo agoenshitification should be a new certainty along with death and taxes
- bogardon 8mo agoI'd love to cycle more outdoors, but I'm always wary of the risks. How cool would it be if you could hire a waymo as a "team car" and have it follow you around? It could also carry extra equipment...and act as a ride home in case of emergencies.
- sonofhans 8mo agoI get your idea, but it does rather sound like asking a 4,000lb death robot to follow you around closely and hope that it doesn’t screw up …
- amarant 8mo agoTo turn the colourful phrasing against you, I too would like a death robot to protect me from all the murder monkeys having a death race around me if I was out biking on the road/death race track.
- vel0city 8mo agoWouldn't the better solution be to prevent those murder monkeys from doing the death races around where people would want to cycle? Some kind of grade-separated trail? More regulations on those murder monkey death races? Crazy thought, I know.
- amarant 8mo agoThe grade separated trail sounds great in theory, but in practice it's surprisingly ineffective for some unknown reason. In Sweden we have a ton of those and for some reason bikers insist on participating in the death race with the other murder monkeys. Which is annoying because it can really slow the race down! But I guess once they have a good alternative, at least their death race participation is voluntary, and so I guess they're fair game like the rest of us
- toast0 8mo ago
- Detrytus 8mo agoSomeone once said that this is because Waymos are novelty, and they still behave a bit weird, like being slow and undecisive. Which leads to humans being super-careful around them. So the Waymo safety record is actually not their own achievement. I guess we'll have to wait to one of the two things to happen to really assess Waymo's performance: 1. They need to lose their markings and easily distinguishable features (like a big lidar on top), so they don't get any special treatment from other drivers. 2. They need to be majority of vehicles on the road.
- bt1a 8mo agoI'm only a little weirded out when they're right next to me stopped at a light and that thang is spinnin and making note of me
- Analemma_ 8mo agoThat info is pretty outdated: they were slow and indecisive in 2024, but now they behave pretty much like any top-decile human driver. I don’t think they get special treatment from other drivers either, I can’t read anyone else’s mind but I treat them like just another car and it seems like everyone else does as well.
- linkjuice4all 8mo agoUgh - either the commons is an unregulated 3D space or we actually tag and separate moving bodies regulated by size/weight, purpose, owner, occupant type, etc. I don't necessarily hate commercial vehicles utilizing the various rights-of-way but clearly there is a difference in momentum, agency, and general "value" between some human wandering around and a heavy robot.
- doubled112 8mo agoHow slow and indecisive? The other day a human driver in front of me was doing 30 km/h under the speed limit down the middle of two lanes. On that same drive, another driver doing around 15 under clipped a roundabout on the way in and on the way out. Guess they couldn’t decide to turn the wheel fast enough. I refuse to believe everybody is hammered all of the time, but I’m starting to wonder. It is less than 10km round trip, in the ‘burbs. Driving with humans scares me anymore. Bring on the robots.
- zardo 8mo agoIs this an independent study?
- brunoTbear 8mo agoThey make the data available on that page for you to do your own research.
- bt1a 8mo agoI've been observing their behavior in Atlanta for about the past year. Our roads here are fairly curvy, hilly, and lacking of expected markings, yet I haven't seen a driverless Waymo vehicle make a single odd move. One thing that brought a smile to my face was when I came to a 4-way stop at the same time as a Waymo vehicle at night & I flash my brights to tell the other vehicle to go ahead (southern hospitality) and I see the Waymo immediately begin its course through the intersection. I was so jolted that I began to tail it in order to pull up next to it to see if there was a human behind the wheel. Watching it drive down this slowly descending hilly road with intermittent speed humps and cars parked alongside the main right lane gave me a close up view of its slightly curving trajectory and braking behavior with regard to the humps. My thought on human or not was inconclusive until we reached a red light, and as I shot my eyes over and saw an empty driver seat, I smiled widely knowing that the software responds to brights flashed at 4-way stops (please don't tell me it doesn't and it just saw me indecisively not initiate at the stop). Thanks for reading
- kfarr 8mo agoIt definitely does not respond to flashing headlights in that manner. You’re observing its default behavior when at a 4 way stop with other vehicles not moving.
- djsavvy 8mo agoHow are you saying that so confidently? Waymos respond to traffic cops directing traffic manually
- jmalicki 8mo agoUnlike the traffic cops directing traffic that would likely require special programming, "proceed if the other car flashes its lights at you" is completely the kind of thing that could just accidentally fall out of a neural network learning to imitate humans.
- shawabawa3 8mo ago
- t1234s 8mo agowhy does HN still use links to twitter.com and not x.com?
- wffurr 8mo agoPresumably that was the submitter's choice.
- rhet0rica 8mo agoOptimism. Someday the blue bird will be free.
- oblio 8mo agoImagine creating a brand that became renowned world wide and even created its own verb. And then throwing all that away for the genius brand name of... "x". Brought to you from the same 50 year old that decided that having car models that spell S3XY is cool.
- The_President 8mo agoNothing has been thrown away, evident by billions of dollars in the continued success of many flagship products that leave the competition in the dust.
- sonofhans 8mo ago“Safer” == “Safer than all other human drivers in the same city.” By their own admission, this is not a straightforward comparison. If they could do the math for the same routes, times of day, and conditions … maybe I’d believe it. Otherwise, this data is trivial to cherrypick, and they have every reason to present it as well as possible. I believe Waymos are pretty safe, and that’s a great thing. “Safer than humans (for selected rides inside this area)” is still very good, but it’s not at all “Safer than humans (period).”
- jstummbillig 8mo ago> By their own admission, this is not a straightforward comparison. If they wanted to cherry pick, would they not omit that admission? In any case, it seems plausible to me that the routes that Waymo drives are above average in human incidents, given that Waymo is probably overrepresented in high stress/traffic, inner city scenarios.
- lich_king 8mo agoThe comparison gets picked up as the headline; the admission does not. This is exploited quite often, e.g. in science reporting. I'm not saying this is what Waymo did - they don't seem to be bad actors - but absolutely, the pattern does occur.
- lemoncucumber 8mo agoI've heard that Waymo relies on having very accurate map data for the areas where they operate, so perhaps they could perform worse than human drivers in areas where they don't have good map data. But I also trust that the company wouldn't deploy them in those areas until the quality data they need is available. So perhaps "safer in the environments where they are actually deployed" would be more accurate, but that's also the only thing that matters. Speculating about what would happen if they were used in ways they are neither intended to be used nor are actually used feels a little silly. Most machines can be unsafe if you use them in ways they're not intended to be used.
- 8mo ago
- butlike 8mo agoMore boring, too. Can't meet cool people if it's yet again just me left to throw a proverbial tennis ball against the proverbial wall.
- stebalien 8mo agoI live in LA and Waymos are the only cars I don't have to play chicken with when crossing the street. Even the drivers that see you will just give you a "sorry, I'm in a rush" wave as they nearly run you over.
- leovander 8mo agoMake sure to never be in a hurry to get anywhere because you might then get stuck behind a fleet of them going exactly the speed limit, grid locking you in.
- flipbrad 8mo agoIsn't the correct answer to this, lobbying for higher speed limits? Rather than chastizing obedience to current rules.
- TimTheTinker 8mo agoYes, agreed. Though speed limits higher than 75 are not something I will ever support.* * Unless we're talking about removing a speed limit altogether and regulating unsafe driving using other criteria.
- jjav 8mo agoWhat happens at 76mph?
- TimTheTinker 8mo agoSame thing that happens at 77mph :) I think 75 is memorable and roughly in the region where the tradeoff between increased kinetic energy and decreased time to arrival per additional unit of velocity becomes untenable.
- The_President 8mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agonon-X source: https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/waymo-safety-impact-update-170m/ https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/waymo-safety-impact-update-170...
- xnx 8mo agoAh. That's the link I was looking for.
- scj 8mo ago"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement weather." I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.
- xnx 8mo agoThey're definitely aware and working on it: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/2028863520037867820 https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/2028863520037867820
- notatoad 8mo agoIt’s wild to me how people are so fixated on this. Yes, obviously winter driving has challenges. And also obviously, the leading self-driving company has thought about that. They’re preparing to launch and have already been testing in Chicago, detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston, NYC, and London. I think it’s safe to assume they’ve considered winter driving.
- sdeiley 8mo agoAnd they're in Pittsburgh. Seen them driving while snowing.
- boulos 8mo agoOur sixth generation sensor suite is intended for winter driving: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-driver/ https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... for some nice visuals.
- eichin 8mo agoOoh, that's a worthy challenge. Of course, I can imagine getting enough data on all of those cities and deciding to launch everywhere else but not Boston "because your roads are garbage and you all drive like you're impaired 24/7" :-)
- 8mo ago
- kevwil 8mo agohttps://people.com/waymo-exec-reveals-company-uses-operators-in-the-philippines-to-assist-autonomous-vehicles-11900507 https://people.com/waymo-exec-reveals-company-uses-operators... might be relevant content as well
- ellieh 8mo agoas a motorcyclist I often feel more comfortable riding near waymos at this point I trust that they have seen me, know that I'm there, and won't behave unpredictably
- Underphil 8mo agoAlso a motorcyclist. I've seen perhaps 6 or 7 Waymos whilst riding. One pulled out of curbside parking space right in front me. It wasn't life or death or anything like that, but I was close enough that it was a real "dick move" and I had to get on the anchors a lot harder than I'd have liked. Not sure what sensor or whatever it was missing for that to happen, but I can assure you it did. (I'm not suggesting my anecdotal evidence says anything particularly worthy around autonomous vehicle safety, just sharing a surprising incident)
- cjonas 8mo agoRelevant: https://youtu.be/cJER6WtOkjk?si=pfUMpqgCL8IHewKy&t=28 https://youtu.be/cJER6WtOkjk?si=pfUMpqgCL8IHewKy&t=28
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- xnx 8mo agoThis page is old, but they just refreshed the data shows Waymo is 13x safer than human drivers (in the cities it operates in).
- pokot0 8mo agoMy question is: is safer than average human good enough? When I drive I have the option to choose to be safe or not. When a computer drives I lose that option. So for 49% of the people, safer than the average human is less safe than before. I think we need to reach "Safer than the safest 10% of humans". Also these reports should be done by a government agency.
- cgeier 8mo agoYes, it's good enough. Because you cannot control who else is on the street around you. Having cars around you that are driving safer than the average is better than them driving average.
- necovek 8mo agoYou seem to be thinking this is compared to median driver, and not average one: if most accidents are caused by small number of bad drivers, your average will be bad, but even median might still be good. And this does not even compare the drivers, but simply miles driven. So I think that 80% of human drivers would likely be safer than Waymo unless they are driving under the influence or extremely tired or distracted. Note that "13x safer" already implies being in the top 10%, though.
- srini 8mo agoFrom a purely technical perspective, I would expect a Waymo to react to unexpected external stimuli much, much faster than a human. It gives the Waymo options that are unavailable to a human's slower reaction time.
- jeffbee 8mo agoEven the most visible academic skeptic of Waymo (Phil Koopman) had to throw in the towel and admit that they've cleared every conceivable statistical hurdle to conclusively demonstrating that they are better than humans on injuries and airbag deployments. They have moved the goalposts to aesthetic arguments, for example: if it's so safe why does it sometimes do weird stuff? But to principled systems thinkers they have already shown what needed to be shown. It's safer.
- altruios 8mo agoCar centric design is ruining this country. The great deal: let's redesign our cities to be car free. Consider the economic boom that amount of renovation would produce. Consider the increased economic activity from happier and more productive people. Consider the increased space for nature, parks, real estate, development. Cars are the worst thing to have been invented. Optimizing the personal automobile leads to optimizing for a horrible living experience in the city. Let us reconsider all of this. This is bad. We can do better. We must.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> let's redesign our cities to be car free Or, let's not spend trillions of dollars on a behavioural experiment and get pedestrian safety with now-proven kit.
- uv-depression 8mo agoAmericans will vehemently deny this, but you're absolutely right. Decades of car industry propaganda has convinced people that the ability to drive anywhere is true freedom, and they can't see that the freedom not to need a car (all the time) is better for everyone; cities are quieter, more comfortable, and less polluted with fewer cars (no, electric cars don't fix this). It leads to other absurdities, like US cities frequently having parking minimums for bars. That's insane! There's also the classic problem of people wildly misinterpreting statements and getting mad about it. You can say "we should design cities not centred around cars" and people will hear "I'm going to make it illegal for you to own a car". Or my favourite exchange, "Let's improve public transit" followed by "but public transit is bad for me, I can't take it".
- freetime2 8mo agoYes, this debate comes up every time someone mentions the word "car" on the internet, and there are crazies on both sides. But I don't think it's fair to frame either side of the debate by what the crazies are saying. Or to assume that just because someone disagrees with you they have fallen victim to propaganda. I think most Americans just like their cars and are reasonably happy with the status quo. They can be receptive to incremental improvements to public transportation, cycling, and pedestrian infrastucture, but they bristle at the idea of turning their city into a "car free city" (which is what the parent is suggesting) or being told they are wrong for liking their car.
- weusedto 8mo agoAnecdote from 1000s of miles biking: I bike a lot in the Bay, for fun, exercise, commute, all of the above (I'm a friendly one, I promise!) and the comfort I feel when I see a Waymo alongside me or at a stop sign is immediately apparent. I have been hit 5-10x riding in NYC and SF (nothing serious, gratefully, mostly just people turning right not knowing/caring I was there), and the Waymo's awareness that I exist is immediately obvious and so different from a large percentage of human drivers. I hope the meaningful improvement in safety continues to convince people this should be a part of the future.
- proudestmonkey 8mo ago+1. I bike in the Bay and have been hit 3 times (1 broken bike and 1 broken helmet, but thankfully okay otherwise). I can’t wait for the day when I can be confident that all vehicles see me and I don’t have to worry about being the victim of a moment’s lapse in attention.
- Schiendelman 8mo agoI stopped biking on Seattle streets after being hit a third time - in a bike lane. I want human drivers off the roads.
- _p1l9 8mo agoBlaming the kid here is absurd. The kid lives in a system where pedestrians are second class citizens in a world dictated by the auto-petro industrial complex. An industry that has co-opted unelected traffic "engineer" in the US and completely changed the way we live for the last 70 years and have made Americans fatter and less connected. If the child lived in a neighborhood where cars went slower (it was a 25mph zone) he wouldn't have gotten hit in the first place. Praising Waymo here is like praising a priest for not molesting a child. Yes it's good that the waymo slowed down more than the average car, but really the whole system should be completely rethought. Instead, we're pouring billions into single occupancy vehicles, when we should've been pouring billions into high speed rail, subways, etc. I'm hopeful that waymos converge on a more efficient design and improve cities in general. As it stands, they are a way for the rich to commute without having to exchange pleasantries with the underclass.
- spankalee 8mo agoGood thing no one blamed the kid.
- _p1l9 8mo agoI was probably a bit too harsh on the OP. The OP was probably not blaming the kid. But if Waymo isn't being sued and the city isn't being sued, then society has collectively placed blame on the kid and their parents.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 0x3f 8mo agoBlame isn't really zero sum is it. Like you can be criticized for leaving your laptop unatended and your doors unlocked, but it doesn't really reduce blame for the thief.
- jedberg 8mo agoWhat you're talking about has nothing to do with Waymo at all though. It's ostensibly off topic here. You're talking about car culture in general. Yes, I blame the parents or the adults that were supposed to supervise the child (but not the child). I teach my kids not to run into the street. I also watch them like a hawk near streets because kids are dumb. I agree with you that we have too strong of a car culture. But we do. So until that changes, we need to teach our kids and adults to be vigilant. But while we do that, I'd still rather have Waymos around than human drivers.
- bryanlarsen 8mo ago13X is way more impressive than it seems at first glance. Let's take a simplistic model of accidents: that the average driver is at fault in an accident 50% of the time. So a perfect driver would only halve the number of accidents -- they only eliminate the accidents where they would otherwise have been at fault. But Waymo's numbers are better than the "perfect" driver above. How is that possible? Because in most accidents the blame is not split 0%/100%. You can avoid a lot of accidents with defensive and safe driving.
- rafaelmn 8mo ago13x compared to what ? The average driver is such a bullshit statistic - accidents are highly correlated with stuff like alcohol/drugs/lack of sleep/lack of experience/physical issues, then the other huge behavioral factor distraction and driving style, and on top of that car performance matters a lot too. I don't see any attempt to correct for that in their "human benchmark". Heck the least they could have done is compare to human taxi drivers which would be apples to apples. If it's 13x compared to that I'm sold for using it as a taxi service ! But individual driving - you can eliminate all those factors assuming you're a healthy, expericed driver with a new car. Nothing against self driving in principle but the failure cases I've seen look so bizarre - I'm way more comfortable with my limitations.
- gozucito 8mo agoIs it a bullshit stat though? it's not like you or I can go to a different dimension where all drivers are healthy, fully awake, undistracted, sober, competent, etc.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoYou don't need to. You just need to be in good condition yourself and actually paying attention. Professional delivery drivers routinely achieve seemingly absurd mileages per incident.
- 8mo ago
- small_model 8mo ago[dead]
- philip1209 8mo ago> doesn't sound too safe to me. Compared to what?
- small_model 8mo agoHumans or more intelligent full self driving systems.
- jaesonaras 8mo agoI just watched a short that said some (all) Waymo drivers are not autonomous, but remote controlled by humans in the Phillipines. I'm sure it's a combination of both since the latency would mean immediate reactions are impossible, but the presenter raised an interesting point, and that was that the remote drivers are not licensed to drive in the states that Waymo operated in, which would make it illegal.
- keeganpoppen 8mo agoexcept for the overwhelming evidence from video we already have that waymos are reacting than a human in the driver’s seat would, much less someone 200ms away.
- dbt00 8mo agoWaymo uses remote contractors to hint the Waymo driver when it can't figure out a path forward. They're not being remote piloted. They are however, very cagy about how often this is necessary.
- astrange 8mo agoThey don't necessarily even hint them. I think the car mainly asks them yes/no questions and they respond.
- koinedad 8mo agoPretty cool to see. But the UI of the visual animations has some weird re-re-rerender bug, at least on mobile safari.
- Lammy 8mo agoNow do Surveillance Impact: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6-billion-round-and-details-of-the-ai-used/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6... “Waymo is using around four NVIDIA H100 GPUSs at a unit price of 10,000 dollars per vehicle to cover the necessary computing requirements. The number of sensors – five lidars, 29 cameras, 4 radars”
- paulnpace 8mo agoMy understandig is that in private settings, third-party consent has a very difficult legal bar to meet.
- whatever1 8mo agoThe bar is low. I don’t want comparison with an alcoholic with multiple DUIs who still drives and crashes. The benchmark should be the top decile of drivers.
- rossjudson 8mo agoThe number of people who think they're top tier drivers never ceases to amaze me.
- whatever1 8mo agoYes statistics are full of drivers with more than one accidents at fault. 15% of the drivers are causing more than 70% of the accidents. I don’t care about the average driver. I care about the median. It is not a high bar to expect an autonomous system to be better than 90% of the American drivers.
- motbus3 8mo agoIf someone drives badly they might go to jail if they hurt or kill someone. If a machine does it who pays? I want to see waymo and other CEO for decades for each mistake.
- thebigman433 8mo agoI feel like an important thing here is that we are very much not good at imprisoning bad drivers at all, even if they injure or kill multiple people. We rarely even take away their licenses! The only type of car crash that consistently gets some level of enforcement is drunk driving, basically everything else is written off as an accident
- motbus3 8mo agoMaybe at your country. Not at mine. Driving irresponsibly might have consequences. If you race, advance red light on don't stop for pedestrians, if there is not enough evidence you couldn't do anything about it, you might go to jail.
- Filligree 8mo agoI want whatever causes fewer deaths and injuries total.
- thumbsup-_- 8mo agoI was sold on Waymo when in San Francisco I saw it treat a human holding a Stop sign in a construction zone just like a human driver did. For anyone who doesn't know this, in a construction zone if a human is holding a stop sign, it means stay stopped until they flip the sign and suggest you to move slowly. Waymo just handled this as a human would
- plopz 8mo agoWhen is waymo going to be available in the north east?
- valley_guy_12 8mo agoHard to predict. Waymo is trialing in several northeast cities. Search for "waymo trial boston" or "waymo trial nyc". But beyond the technical issues, there are also political issues. Search for "new york bans waymo".
- wayeq 8mo agoThe cynic in me says this is a moral hazard waiting to happen, perhaps we'll raise speed limits and reduce traffic regulations until the stats match the pre-robo-taxi days.
- lets_dig_deep60 8mo ago[dead]
- MBCook 8mo agoI give up. I’m not even going to try to read “fade in” pages anymore. We had an article about that just the other day. It’s horrible and makes reading harder. I wanted to see this, but I give up.
- tim-fan 8mo agoCan they just report directly how many human lives they have saved since beginning operation? (of course, within some error bars) Maybe that's too much of a statistical stretch. But would be a good to-the-point number to have on hand for some waymo debates. "yes they caused some disruption in an intersection in so-and-so scenario, but on the other hand they saved X number of human lives last year"
- carbocation 8mo agoI think the average is ballpark 1 per 100 million miles, so my guess is that someday they might show this, but they probably want to wait til they have more miles driven.
- tim-fan 8mo agoOK right, so they're at 170 million now, maybe ~1 life saved. I see it might be a bit early to be making claims about that. Also in comparison the cases of disruption/blocking intersections/emergency-services do seem significant - seems plausible in the right circumstances you could lose lives. Seems they need to 10x their miles before they can start making confident claims about lives saved.
- bitfilped 8mo agoGreat, what's more concerning than crash rates though are impeding emergency vehicles, blocking roads, stalling when traffic lights are down, rolling past school buses with stop arms out, navigating in construction zones and lots of other issues that are left out of this report.
- Dylan16807 8mo agoNo, I think those are solidly less concerning than crash and injury rates. Like, could you imagine yourself seeing a self driving car that's perfect in all the ways like that, no dumb quirks, but it crashes twice as often as a human, and saying "well it got the important stuff right"
- bitfilped 8mo agoAutonomous vehicles need to be safer than human drivers, not trading one set of safety concerns for different ones.
- Dylan16807 8mo agoWaymo's cars are safer. You have to pick one thing to be more important. Accident rates, or the stuff you listed in your first comment. Which one do you pick? These cars are not one step forward, one step back. They're five steps forward, one step back. Saving lives is much bigger than the weirdness.
- cjk 8mo agoI was recently in a Waymo in SF. It was turning right from a busy street onto a narrow street. Mid-turn, the car slammed on the brakes. I sat there for a couple seconds like “???” wondering if we'd hit something. Then a dude on an e-bike _flies_ past the car in the bike lane. The car saw this dude coming from way down the street, flying, and was like “yeah, better stop.” Probably saved the biker from serious injury, or worse. I wouldn't have seen him if I was driving.
- efavdb 8mo agoThe tldr for me from the report was Waymo is great and SF is a dangerous place to drive.
- cjk 8mo agoI would largely agree with that assessment, yeah. Dangerous place to bike, too. I've even seen pedestrians get clobbered by bikers because they stepped into the bike lane not realizing a bike was barreling toward them at 20mph+. This is part of why Waymo and Uber warn you when the dropoff is next to a bike lane.
- qwerty_clicks 8mo agoA city with driverless cars is still a city dominated by cars. Bikes, trains, busses, and walking support the human soul and a city worth living in so much more than a robot car that requires car infrastructure and mentality.
- tsycho 8mo agoI would love 24 hour Waymo buses, running at a high frequency. If taking a bus becomes easy, reliable and fast, more people will do it, and there will be less cars on the road.
- aag 8mo agoI love Waymo. Using the word "impact" is unfortunate.
- gboss 8mo agoI don’t use Waymo’s because they are really slow. At least for me. I get they’re safer. What’s new is everyone I know is complaining how expensive they are. Why are they so expensive? Is it because they are trying to make a profit on the total cost of ownership of a vehicle? They’re electric so it’s not gas. Uber and Lyft definitely outsource the cost odd maintenance onto the contractor.
- gorfian_robot 8mo agoanecdotally from Mesa: DoorDash has these little cute robots doing delivery. I often seen them followed by a person on a e-bike. This has been going on for more than a year. My recent Lyft driver said one reason is because the Waymo's ignore the other robot and kill them and the bike ensures they don't.
- kulahan 8mo agoWow. >40% of their accidents have a speed delta-V of less than 1mph. They should just sell this thing as a kit to pop onto your existing car, with a major discount on car insurance. I’d buy it in a heartbeat if they can get it under $30k.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- theultdev 8mo agoWaymo's funniest home videos: https://x.com/xdNiBoR/status/2027296859803336869 https://x.com/xdNiBoR/status/2027296859803336869 https://x.com/TexasTSLA/status/2030400998611788226 https://x.com/TexasTSLA/status/2030400998611788226 https://x.com/barstoolsports/status/1995629394308821184 https://x.com/barstoolsports/status/1995629394308821184 https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1950676793335152693 https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1950676793335152693
- socalgal2 8mo agoI wish the executives at Waymo would go to prison until their cars stopped breaking traffic laws left and right. I get they're safer then humans. I've enjoyed my rides. But they're doing one of this "fuck the laws while we cash in things" because they know they can get away with it. I guess more realistically, I wish the government would step in demand footage because the cars have records of every law they broke.
- mapleoin 8mo agoSo how long until this is enshittified and how will it go? Will people ask for cars to be faster so they will take riskier decisions? Will a cheaper company with a worse training model capture the most market share? Pilot products are usually great, but that rarely lasts into their profitable period.
- dzonga 8mo agothere was a startup I saw once here on HN selling driverless kits that could be added to general cars. if Waymo can do the same - then partner with insurance companies - they can easily be a $1 trillion dollar company even if they just reduce accidents by 5X. The insurance market or cost thereof is their market.
- PostOnce 8mo ago"More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette." I'll take my information from a neutral third party, thanks.
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