Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability. People will use it when they are drunk if it means not going to jail and it's readily available.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them.
In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the car behind it was rear-ended by an SUV traveling at high speed. Both that car and the SUV then struck the Waymo. The SUV hit a total of 6 cars and someone in one of the other cars died. According to the police, the SUV may also have been involved in "multiple hit-and-run accidents reported just minutes before" [2].
In the second [3], the Waymo was yielding to a pedestrian when a motorcyclist made contact with the left rear corner of the Waymo. The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
If you drive on urban streets, no matter how good of a driver you are, there's a chance you're going to be involved in some sort of incident that's completely out of your control -- that seems to be what both of these are.
I agree that these cases are ridiculous to blame on the waymo entirely, but to give logic to their reasoning here you're unsure if on average the 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles (FPMM) may also be on average ridiculously not the drivers fault as well. Perhaps if you were to throw out all ridiculous cases you'd have an average of CDL's having a 0.3 FPMM vs Waymo's having 0 FPMM.
The nuance you describe at the end is the better interpretation: fatalities per mile driven is a useless metric since it's such a rare occurance and incredibly circumstantial that it cannot be used as a meaningful comparison metric for safety.
It also gets better depending on the medical services nearby and there competence. So having more competent medical services in cities, lowers murder statistics and car-fatalities. Thus the actual accident rate would only be visible in the countryside.
If we want to get closer to the "real" number, we would also need to account for mechanic failures of the car, wildlife, and suicide. We don't usually attribute people jumping in front of trains as the fault of the person driving the train. Fatalities per mile driven may very well be biased in favor of waymo that has nothing to do with safety of drivers, which in turn create uncertainty when trying to estimate the statistical result of making all cars Autonomous. For example, car owners can have a higher variance in maintenance than waymo, they can use the car in areas with more wildlife than city traffic, and they can commit suicide through other means than personal being behind the wheel (suicide statistics is itself quite complicated).
> The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
The commonly cited fatality statistics do not discuss fault, so, absent more precise information, a apples to apples comparison should not conditionalize on fault.
Why? Well let us try to imagine a world where Waymo has the statistically average fatal crash rate, yet is never at fault. In this world, every fatal crash occurs at the Waymos. You just have a bunch of crazy drivers roving the streets causing fatal crashes against (or involving) unsuspecting, not-at-fault victim Waymos.
If that is the world, then are these crazy drivers only crashing into Waymos? Probably not, these crazy drivers would almost certainly be crashing into a statistically average distribution of unsuspecting, not-at-fault victims.
So this imagined world is consistent with the overwhelming majority of human drivers engaging in 0 fatal accidents at fault with a small, crazy roving subset being at fault for all fatal accidents. So, in that world, a Waymo that is only ask good as the statically average driver would actually be infinitely worse than the overwhelming majority of human drivers. If you only replaced the 10th percentile driver (90% of drivers are better), you would actually be increasing the fatality rate. Only by displacing that crazy subset would you actually be decreasing the fatality rate.
Are we in that world? The Waymo numbers on fatal accident involvement with no fault actually kind of point in that direction (though the mileage numbers are still too low to make a strong conclusion). Seemingly massive crash and injury reduction due to massive reduction of at-fault crashes, but the fatality reduction does not seem proportional. Another possibility is that the Waymo driving distribution is biased toward being in situation that result in more no-fault fatal crashes.
But, that is all just conjecture and thought experiments. Unless we have better data, we unfortunately should be restricting ourselves to apples to apples comparisons which, in this case, do not conditionalize on fault.
Though, to nitpick on the original post, I think that the 2 fatal crashes in 170 million miles (~85 million miles per fatal crash which is similar to the USA human average of ~83 million miles per fatality), is probably not the correct analysis. The average fatal crash is probably 2 vehicles and 1 fatality. So, the 85 million miles per fatal crash versus 83 million miles per fatality is probably fine in the crash vs fatality direction. But I am pretty certain you would actually need to double the 170 million to account for the "statistically average mileage of the other cars".
Otherwise, if we have exactly two cars in the world each with 100 million miles and they engage in one fatal crash with one fatality, then we would conclude that car 1 has 1 fatality per 100 million miles and car 2 also has 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Naively averaging them, we could conclude that the overall fatality rate is 1 per 100 million miles. Therefore, over the 200 million miles the two of them drove, there were 2 fatalitys. Obviously incorrect, so we almost certainly need to weight them by their relative proportion when aggregating them.
That second accident looks like it could be one on those typical cases of SDC causing accidents by behaving unexpectedly (like braking for a pedestrian where human drivers would have denied right of way)
I havent read the doc and I am not arguing either way, just saying that you can cause an accident in other ways than by ploughing into someone.
They really can't stop tying themselves into knots to dunk on self driving cars. They don't even know it's the case, they just suspect it's the case. Even if it _were_ the case, the drivers behind them most likely don't have this information available, they probably can't distinguish between "SDV being cautions and giving right of way" and "SDV stopping an immediate impact", they can just see a car in front of them suddnely stopping. So they should stop.
As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.
Earlier today saw a guy on a pick up truck griefing an empty Waymo by brake checking and boxing it, all over the road for about 10 minutes and over 5 blocks (no idea how much earlier it started), causing every other driver to freak out or be confused about what was going on.
All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".
I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle.
One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.
Good thing we get wiser with age. Oh, wait no we don't. We insist on driving while beeing unable to look over the shoulder or having dementia. Knew somebody whose by no deceased dementia afflicted father used google to navigate him home when he forgot where he was. Thats the accidents with a "confused" driver, not from the accident.
I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.
Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.
Nah I think the brain shuts down once you’re not in the driver seat. Wouldn’t see someone care enough to throw something at others from a taxi or a bus either.
The whole premise imagines that we have a fixed set of problems that have always been this way and are fully/honestly represented by this headline article by the chief NYT industry plug… and once corporations roll out the solutions, ta ta. We’ll be rolling fancy free. With 580,000 surplus Americans to boot!
As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.
Photographing bikes or electric scooters does nothing without enforcement through the city. It allows tracking down the person who placed it wrong, but in the absence of fines through the city, the rental companies surely won't start fining their customers and drive them away.
I doubt that. Across the street of our small organic shop around the corner is a bike parking spot. Still, I recently fall over a bike parked directly in front of the door of said shop. Bike people are lazy more often then not.
If someone parks a car in an illegal area, it can and should be towed. Same for bikes. Part of the needed "biking infrastructure" is proper policing and enforcement.
> rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers.
Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconfident. I would be very surprised to find out they are above average drivers.
Per mile driven I expect it's true, just given their greater experience than most drivers. Not that I disagree with you that many Uber drivers are not actually great at driving, but neither is the average driver in North America. I expect we just notice rideshare drivers' mistakes more, and get exposed to them at a greater rate.
There's probably some sort of bias here when you observe someone else driving - it's like that joke - if someone drives slower than you - just curl up and die already boomer, and if they are driving faster than you - what an absolute psychopath.
Ride share companies use all kinds of techniques to off-board drivers that they deem unsafe. This can be as simple as tracking the driving record and accidents, but they also use the accelerometer in the driver app to assess the location of the car and what G-forces are being placed on it to figure out and predict high-risk (expensive) insurance.
I don't know how aggressive this filtering is, but it is a way to save money on the insurance costs associated with the gap insurance in rideshare. This filter alone would probably put rideshare drivers above average, but that's speculation on my part.
In my circle, everyone who's tried Waymo never wants to use Uber/Lyft with a human driver again. And, many of them wish they could own one or at least use one for much longer drives (100s of miles).
I would visit my mom (2hrs by car) more often if that 2hrs (each way) wasn't so stressful and exhausting and I could just be chauffeured by a self driving car while I browse the net, play a game, watch a movie, or talk to friends.
Yeah, most places other than the US do. Good public transit is a far, far better solution than better cars. Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind. Fortunately there's progress, like in NYC and Seattle.
When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.
Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.
> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not necessarily trains or subways. Buses exist.
And my answer to that is, if your area where people live isn't able to support a bus line, it's not a city. That means there's a lot of reality big towns out there.
And here we get into details. The problem with buses is their rubber tires. The awesome thing about buses is also their rubber tires. Need to move the bus line around? No need to run new tracks, just have the driver drive a different route. But all the negativities to buses aren't small details. Because you can just up and move the bus route, it means that the cafe owner right by the stop is at the mercy of the city planning department to exist, which leads to obvious power issues aka corruption. After everything else is greenified, rubber tires are the biggest source of pylori
pollution from buses.
With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.
Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.
No no the invisible hand of the market will fix it, you see. Car manufactures will become so big and pay so many taxes that we could pave every road with rail.
>Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind.
A former member of the Pinellas County[0] Sheriff's Department related a relevant story to me many years ago. It was the practice of sheriff's deputies to park near bars around closing time and wait for drunk folks to leave the bar, get into their cars and drive away. And these folks were almost always intoxicated.
One night, they waited outside the bar and a patron exited, stumbled a bit, dropped their car keys a few times, then got in their car and drove away.
Cue the lights and sirens and the deputy pulled the driver over and prepared to arrest them for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI). However, a field sobriety test[1] and a breathalyzer[2] showed the driver to be stone cold sober. When the deputy returned to the bar, all the other patrons had made their exits.
So, rather than having a designated driver, they had a designated decoy!!!
This is great until your city was built by a 50s urban planner. Past a certain amount of sprawl building functioning public transit becomes nearly impossible. LA and Santa Clara County come to mind here. LA can sort of work if you are on the metro and don't need transfers.
I kinda wish some day some dark wizard curses those two areas to lose 75% of their roads and parking lots and make everything a lot closer.
Trouble is, when you need to get to the middle of nowhere is when you need transportation. If you stay within the densely populated areas where the people live you can walk. That's why people stopped living in rural areas after all; so that one didn't have to rely on transportation. Don't forget that rural areas had trains back before the urbanization movement! Passenger rail in the US died out because people moved closer together so that they didn't need mechanized travel.
The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of small cities etc. In the US you get maybe 5m in a contiguous city like Phoenix (which fills the circle) or the Bay Area. (LA is more dense and you might get 10m.)
Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. S the effective density experienced is much higher.
> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing.
Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have been woven into that after the fact to best support the rural-esq population shape.
Whereas America was built by the train. Established originally to support the same rural-esq shape idea, but, with little in the way of existing settlements, the train ended up enabling the people to purposefully congregate rather than simply expand outward, which allowed those congregations to be designed such that transportation was unnecessary; being the whole appeal of leaving friends and family behind to move into those settlements. The passenger train eventually started dying out at the height of the urbanization movement because there was no longer a mass benefit from it like the was, and continues to be, in Europe and other places that grew up in those earlier times.
Yeah thats a useful factor for all those "visiting mom in Portland" trips from Washington DC that a train is obviously meant to replace, not any of those "100 mi or less visits to mom" that de facto MUST be taken in a car regardless of the population density of the surrounding 100mi radius.
Also we should ignore the fact that the US already had a national rail network and STILL DOES for freight and had frequent regional rail service to even incredibly small podunk nowhere towns for decades. It's clearly impossible! We're too big! IT CAN'T BE DONE!
Where I live now to where my mom lives would take 24 to 30 hours by train and cost 400 to 500 usd. At 30mpg and $5/gal, the cost of driving is $200 and takes 12h. So I can take a train for double the time and cost or I can drive. Now consider round trip and passenger. It's 40 miles either side to get to a train. Neither side has a walkable city so being without a car sucks. Summer in one is hot as hell, winter in the other is frozen hell. Tell me again how trains are a viable option?
The vast size of the country sounds like an argument for trains, rather than against it? Trains are a comparatively cheap way to provide fast transportation between places where people actually live.
Not really. Over short-to-medium distances rail and air have similar door-to-door times, but as a country grows vast and travel is much more likely to happen over long distances then rail is much less compelling. Which means smaller ridership, which makes it difficult to support operations.
The US already had the nation-wide passenger rail system. At one time it was the envy of the world. It'd still be here if the riders were. But they moved on to newer technologies better suited to the landscape.
Technically a large landmass, but essentially nothing happens in the western half. For the sake of travel it is a relatively small country. Whereas NY->LA is the route the USA would need to most service if it were to get serious about such a thing. The short-run corridors are already reasonably well serviced.
Trouble is most people doing the NY->LA run are going to choose flight instead.
In most places where train travel is an option, you'll probably be a 10-15 min walk from a station, or a 5 minute cycle, or a short connecting trip on a bus or tram. Multi-modal trips and short walks are normal in a lot of places - I know this isn't the case in America because of how American owned mapping apps like Google Maps go out of their way to hide routes with more than a 5 minute walk involved.
Meanwhile, my job commute is a 30 minute walk to the train station or... a 30 minute bus trip to the station (yeah, taking a bus literally saves no time at all). Plus a 50 minute train ride plus another 30 minute walk.
Honestly, I would 100% use a car for this if it weren't for the fact that doing so is literally 10 times more expensive. I'm sure this is the case for the vast majority of people that use public transport. And I just can't wait for a world of cheap electric autonomous cars where I don't need to waste my time and I can sleep comfortably on my commute.
Enforcement, too, including the little things that "don't really matter". Letting people get away with minor infringements like parking where it's forbidden, idling with the engine running, close passes etc means the window of what's acceptable driving behaviour shifts.
We should return to the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right.
AFAIK there isn't data about fatality rate for rideshare services (I'm sure Uber has this data but I don't think they make it public). Without this data I wouldn't automatically jump to the conclusion that rideshare services are safer than the average driver, anecdotally at least I don't see any reason to assume this.
It's also extremely important to normalize this data per geo and driving type (urban vs freeway miles), which Waymo does do and you seem to ignore.
> It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
You already have it, people want this.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
> And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
Keep in mind the lesson of seat belts. Which is that the highest-risk drivers are also the least likely to wear a seatbelt.
Selective recruitment is a danger in this armchair analysis, too. I don’t think 18 year olds aren’t giving up the thrill of tearing down side streets at 60mph to use a self-driving car - they probably can’t even afford one. To be honest, I am just guessing at the profile of the biggest offenders but insurance rates seem to back me up.
A horrifying number of people flagrantly use their phones while driving. Im not talking about peaking at a text or google maps, but straight up scrolling tik tok while driving. At the end of the day there is going to be a lowest common denominator of selfish morons on the road, and the two practical solutions I see are 1) aggressive surveillance state grade distracted driving enforcement 2) self driving cars.
I used to bike to work in Chicago and it was surreal being able to look right into someone's car and see hardly anyone is paying attention.
I'll also never forget the first time getting hit by a car (car did left turn when I was biking straight through a green light) and right before impact seeing the driver's face illuminated by their phone while looking straight down driving into me.
It doesn't have to be a surveillance state for enforcement. Just preventing repeat offenders would practically remove that lowest denominator. For example, I knew a guy in high school who totaled 4 cars and had other minor accidents in 2 years. There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle. On the prevention side, we could require more training.
If you tried to enforce self driving cars, you'd still need some level of surveillance too.
> There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle
Doesn't much of america outside of cities also have the secondary problem of you physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything without operating a vehicle?
At some point the cost has to be high enough to get the attention of the offender.
I hope you wouldn’t be saying this if they had killed someone in one of their crashes. How about injured? They must have. Get some standards instead of saying everything is ok.
As in a full on country wide prohibition? Whatever amount of road deaths that would prevent would be offset by idiots dying via drinking industrial spirits.
The best way to reduce driving fatalities is probably to reduce the amount of driving that people do. Excellent public transit, denser cities, better pedestrian / bike infrastructure, mixed-use zoning, etc.
My (simple, naive, etc.) solution is to ban young males from driving until they're 25. Immediate drop in the accident rate plus a clamour for better public transport / bike infrastructure that even the dumbest government couldn't ignore.
(Yes, I know this is completely unworkable, sadly.)
Sorry, why would the baseline be their rideshare drivers instead of the average population? That seems like an arbitrary segment given that when talking about safety baselines, the average driver is what someone would reference. And why would waymo want to publish their own ride share driver safety data, especially if it is presumably not supporting their point, and what would anyone gain from them doing that? If they did do that, the counter argument would quickly be "they published ride share driver data because they know it makes them look better, why not compare to the average driver?" (Its equivalent because we do not have stats on waymo drivers vs the average driver and both statements are built off assumptions)
I believe their argument is weak but, I think it is a fair assumption that the average ride share driver is safer than the average driver. That is to say the average driver is unsafe due to the fact the average driver is the set of all people which includes the set of drunk drivers whereas we can generally assume that set of rideshare drivers don't, especially while on the clock.
Good point. Waymo is not comparing apples to apples here
"At-fault" Waymo crashes on 35mph city roads driven only in good weather vs. all crashes regardless of fault for on all roads including highways driven in all weather conditions
(Ex-Waymo) Waymo tries really hard to compare apples to apple miles, considering a number of dimensions (weather, speed limits of the roads the miles are on, the specific cities, and more). This is one of the things that they feel distinguishes them in the space.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
fault absolutely matters. and with two fatal accidents, it should be trivial to find out if waymo is at fault.
You could have looked up the collisions instead of making vague accusations of bad faith. In one, a Tesla going 98MPH collided with a line of vehicles (including a Waymo) stopped at a light. In the other, a motorcyclist hit a Waymo from behind and fell off their bike, where they were struck and killed by another vehicle (that fled).
Not sure if you meant to imply it, but you don't need to remove driver liability to incentivize the inebriated to use autonomous mode. That's a calculation even someone who's blackout drunk can easily make.
Removing liability might incentivize more people to, e.g., drive their car to a bar. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Maybe great for bars and restaurants, or possibly quality of life, but removing liability probably has other unintended consequences.
It's maybe too early tell whether criminal liability should be changed, or at least how it should be changed. If criminal liability had been removed when Tesla started making their extravagant self-driving claims, surely you'd agree it would have been too soon, and potentially resulted in more accidents. Few if any consumer autonomous driving modes are as reliable as Waymo
Absent statutory changes, common law tort will probably evolve in some states to take into consideration new incentives and norms, and that might help point the way for changes in criminal law. Those policy changes are typically driven by courts wrestling with real world cases, whereas de novo legislative changes are often driven by imaginations and lobbying.
Criminal liability aside, if I am in a wheelchair all my life, requiring expensive medical care, someone will need to pay for that. So civil liability will need to be sonewhere.
Is that not precisely the point of the current discussion? Currently, the manufacturer is not liable. The liability can not be delegated by the driver.
The manufacturers of a self-driving car can be held and are held liable today, same as if the brakes were defective (strict product liability) or improperly marketed (negligence). That doesn't mean the driver might not also be liable. It all depends on why an accident occurred and a host of other factors. There's really nothing special about self-driving cars in this respect, except that litigation can be much more factually complicated. For failing breaks, it's relatively clear given X speed and Y distance, and assuming they were engaged, whether they worked. Then you work backwards from there. Negligent driving? Poor maintenance (driver or mechanic)? Defective design? But in driver assistance and automation systems there are many more questions about what was actually expected to happen, or what was reasonable to expect to happen.
And those CDL drivers go at speed limit because they have to cover as much distance as possible, meanwhile Waymo and similar driverless tech frequently go 10km/h below speed limit. I believe there would be much less incidents by humans if they too were to drive at those speeds.
These are great points. I would add that part of societal buy-in might involve driving the cost of hiring cars down by automating them, though I realize at the moment Waymo can charge a premium because people prefer to not have a human driver. Over the long term autocars should be cheaper than either Uber or owning a car yourself.
I was talking more about mandating or encouraging the tech in personal vehicles. I think there's plenty of buy-in for driverless taxis already. It's a perception thing - trust a stranger or trust an automated system. I think it's a much tougher sell to put it in person vehicles, especially due to cost.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol.
The biggest thing would be safer road/street design, but Americans are kind of allergic to that. Talk about traffic calming or road diets and a lot of folks get absolutely furious.
And an even bigger thing would be providing viable alternatives to driving, which would reduce the amount of cars on the roads, and help with those driving unsafely (because they're tired, not good drivers, "had a couple of drinks", etc).
Correct, part of safer street and road design is supporting transit, biking, and walking.
That said, it's essentially impossible to get rid of cars entirely, and you can see that just by looking at countries or even regions that have good transit and notice that they still have tons of cars. Even Singapore has lots of cars, and the entire country is a super-dense city-state!
So it's definitely worthwhile to develop self-driving cars and trucks, even if you have fantastic transit and biking and walking available.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data
You can't subsidise "better driver education" (to a meaningful sense, to my knowledge) or "banning alcohol." You literally can't do the latter. We tried, and I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
You can use direct poicy action to save lives through AVs.
So at the end of the day, we're deflecting from harm reduction to preserve a parochial mode of transport or not.
I took banning alcohol to mean lowering driving BAC to 0%, not banning alcohol society-wide.
It would be a lot easier for drivers to have the following thought process: "I drank tonight, I can't drive home" rather than "I drank two beers over the period of 3 hours, am I good? Yeah, probably, let's gooo."
> I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.
Drink driving has stiff penalties in the UK. It is also socially unacceptable to drink and drive. The UK also has increased requirements on drivers, and the number of road deaths is far lower per capita than it was in the 60s when there were fewer people driving. There are numerous other measures, which are too numerous to list here.
My understanding is that in US states a DUI (Wisconsin) is nothing but a fine, and drinking while driving isn't taken seriously at all.
Insurance underwriters may make societal buy-in easier when rates are vastly different but that may take quite a while to hit critical mass so both drivers are self driven
That observed fatality rate, 2, is too low to give a precise estimate of the mean. If we assume fatalities follow a Poisson process, then it's plausible (at 5% significance level) that the true expectation is only 0.36 deaths, not 2.
So it's more useful to look at serious injury statistics as a proxy. For those, Waymo says that there is a significant reduction.
The CDL comparison seems misleading. Those are very large and safe vehicles that are mostly on the highway. Being close to that number is impressive to me.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Superman: I want to get rid of guns.
Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale. Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.
Superman: But most. You know we could.
Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.
Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Some would fight.
Superman: Let them come then, with sticks. Think of the lives we’d save. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Smoking.
Superman: What?
Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more. People keep smoking even though they know it’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die.
Superman: And?
Mr. Terrific: You want to save lives? Jail every smoker. Check. And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check. Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check. Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.
Banning drugs like alcohol imo is not a solution for any drug, people have their own reasons to consume them and the underlying cause should be resolved first
Aside from the fact that I don’t see how you can calculate a rate off two data points (without really wide error bars), I also don’t understand how fault doesn’t matter. If neither of these were Waymo’s fault, then Waymo has never caused a fatal accident, whereas we can assume that nearly all of the fatal accidents that make up the rate you’re comparing it with were caused by a human, right? Well, at least the ones that were someone’s fault as opposed to random chance or something.
Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.
Waymo is better than it was last year. And next year it will be better than it is now. And every year after that it will continue to improve. Meanwhile, a thousand years from now humans will still be humans.
I don't know why you come across as so antagonistic to self driving cars. But even if they're only as good as humans today, then you have completely and flat out lost the argument already.
Don't forget the elderly. They are responsible for a crash in roughly $age% of the cases. So a 66 yo person is the reason for a crash in 2/3 of the cases... I hear Greece has a mandatory doctor visit after 65 of so every 2 years. Since that is hard to politically get through in other countries apparently, AVs might save some lives here if made mandatory of the elderly.
If the most advanced ie FSD by Tesla still does not come with gurantee and the human has to babysit it ie stay alert at all time so they can take over in a moments notice or less , then shouldn’t the positive results be also attributable to the humans that drive those autonomous vehicles?
> The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Citation definitely needed.
The last couple of human rideshare drivers I have had were AWFUL. One was so awful that I gave them a one star with "Actively dangerous remove from road, please." I never give one star reviews.
> Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person... Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
LOL, we have a machine that can now drive much more safely than average humans, and comparable to professional drivers. Yeah, this is not impressive at all. C'mon people, wake me up when we actually make some real technological progress, will ya?
Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas.
The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad.
Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad."
I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.
How many of those 64% had their accident because of phones/drugs/recklessness and claimed to be distracted instead? With all the liability and shame involved in fatal crashes there's absolutely no way people are going to honestly self report illegal behavior.
The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.
Seems at least somewhat comparable to walking through a forest full of predators, while, say, hunting/gathering.
Evidence that is is compatible with our psyche is the fact that we're at 1.19 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, and ~50% of those being booze and/or speeding.
That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.
At least they have simulators. Last time I saw a driving simulator I was a teenager.
Imagine you had to pass a simulator test involving responding to ANY crisis while driving before your license would be renewed. Rates of driving would plummet.
I bet most drivers don’t even correctly handle a flat tire on the expressway.
As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint:
Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.
Most US states have some sort of assigned risk pool which makes minimum coverage available to even the worst drivers, as long as they still have a valid license. (I'm not claiming that this is necessarily a good public policy, just pointing out that it exists.)
But, when the (sad) alternative is that person keeps driving without insurance and the unfortunate victims are left with the full bill, I think the absurd insurance may be better than not?
Surely this problem is mostly solvable with ALPRs now. Every plate is attached to an owner and the insurance status can be checked. There's the situation where an uninsured driver is using someone elses car, but that's at least most uninsured drivers taken off the road.
An estimated 1 in 6 drivers in Los Angeles don't have insurance. I know at least a dozen people who have been hit by uninsured drivers, and that's not counting hit and runs, who probably are also mostly uninsured.
The victim's own insurance will pay if they have uninsured motorist coverage (you'd be a fool not to have it, living in LA at least), but there is basically no punishment for the uninsured driver, assuming a fender-bender. The police won't do anything. The insurance companies don't think it's worth their time to try to squeeze out something from someone who probably has almost nothing anyway.
Unfortunately, if you make (or are born with) enough resources, you might skate for quite a while. Eventually you might get a lot of fines and even some jail time, but afterwards, some people just take their chances and drive anyway.
You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.
Population level statistics let you look for statistical aberrations that you can’t detect at the individual level.
Further suppose you define “good driving” as a set of behaviors but failed to include narcolepsy or similar medical conditions in your definition, then some of your “good” drivers would represent a significant risk to the general public. Thus the actual criteria the defines good driver behavior is accidents.
It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).
I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".
The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash.
The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.
Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
> "~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes"
That's between fatalities, not between crashes. The reported injury rate is 62 times higher than the fatality rate, and the overall police-reported crash rate is 170 times higher than the fatal crash rate.
You are correct, I missed the adjective on my second use. As my points were exclusively about fatal crashes and I never mentioned the injury or crash rate at any point and previously used 5,500 years exclusively in relation to fatal crashes, it should be obvious that I intended to mean that and my point still stands with that correction.
Remember, I'm responding specifically to how good people are at driving, not how likely they are to die while driving. How likely a person is to die is mediated by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how good they are as a driver, like airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones.
In thread context, you're conflating a bunch of things, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.
1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.
2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.
3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.
4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.
5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.
Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:
If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?
The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc
edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.
It's more of a category error to imply that robotaxis are 92% safer than human-driven taxis if it turns out that the raw accident rate they're baselining against is disproportionately caused by people who not only aren't full time professional drivers but shouldn't be allowed near a car [in their current state]...
The article uses robotaxis as its example self-driving group, but it's not an article about robot vs human taxis. It's an article about self-driving vs non-self-driving vehicles.
The nice thing about a future where all cars are self-driving (this probably will happen) is that it won't only be the taxis that get replaced.
The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.
I mean when comparing to machines though the only thing the machines are better at is maybe not getting distracted while humans tend to be better at adapting which is usually important for safety to put it mildly
After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
This is not supported by crash data. In Australia alcohol is involved in some 30% of fatal crashes. A lot of crashes are caused by a very small number of hoon drivers, distracted drivers etc.
Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving.
It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise
So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, public safety concerns, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is insolvent, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as 100% nothing will change for the better in this regard, so then car driving it is. I didn't make it this way, it's the way the city management has botched it over the last decades, but it's still on me now to adapt to it, and cars are one of the ways.
I agree with you in spirit, that everyone should have great public transport ideally, but when cities are broke and that infra doesn't exist, then that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK cool, but with what money?
> So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
Huge amounts of insolvency is due to supporting this failed urban planning experiment. Urban centers are significantly more economically productive and significantly less expensive. Carism leads people into this trap when they should be advocating for significant expansion of dense cities and transit.
This is just learned helplessness. The US already spends unfathomable amounts of money and resources on car infra, and there's always some nonsensical defense like "it's just impossible to do it any other way!", as if cars are simply a law of nature. That lack of money can be solved by diverting some of the money going into roads into instead improving public transport infra.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".
No one said it is, and I even clarified at the end that better public transport infra makes life for drivers easier as well. More public transport means less people on the road since they're concentrated in buses and trains and trams, meaning for people who do need cars, they have to compete for less space on the road.
For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.
The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.
The point is this: if you live in a city with bad/no public transport, then a car is necessary for going about everyday life. If you live in a city with good public transport, it's really not.
Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.
You can argue all day whether cars are good or bad. That's not my point. My point is that pretending public transport is equivalent to cars if you have good enough infrastructure is silly. They are different experiences, each with their own tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs matter differently to different people.
I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
> Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked.
How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh.
It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.
Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter.
The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety.
At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually.
literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere.
i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.
Even in New York City,
a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
I don't live in NYC for the record, my point was more about not having to own a car than public transport, hence i gave a few options surrounding traveling through NYC.
I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.
a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and
b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason.
We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.
"Let's make car owners more miserable" is a typical sentiment held by young, healthy people who live in dense cities and ride an electric bicycle to work.
Not everyone can do that. Many areas also completely lack the public transit infrastructure needed to support a normal life.
E.g., a couple of days ago, I was shocked to learn just how bad the UK public transport system really is, apparently, outside of major metros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286)
Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited.
But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.
Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here (https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-...) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mountains.
It's certainly doable, if you wanted to have last mile public transport.
Another consideration that needs to be made before tossing out private transit because "public transit is better" is not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
If it is 2am and you need to get home as a woman, it would be a no brainer to get in an autonomous vehicle while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
If you have sensory difficulties that make public transit uncomfortable, private transit is always the better option.
The list goes on for many reasons and people that having only public transit would harm. The idea we can get rid of or otherwise push out private transit marginalizes everyone who isn't prototypical nor should we hand-wave that they can just rely on runs-on-other-people's-time disabled specific transports to get them into city centers because private transport isn't allowed in.
> not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
People on wheelchair do drive, often with hands control. I knew a guy who would drive manual, since in our country automatic didn't even exist at the time. All with his hands.
Also as a disabled guy myself, public transport here in sweden is NOT accessible (despite what the swedish propaganda will claim) but even if it were, you're not going to have a stop inside your apartment, and when there's roadworks or ice or whatever and they leave you stranded 1-2km away from where you were supposed to go, having a ramp on the bus isn't going to help you that much.
Also I've witnessed drivers picking up and literally throwing out a woman on a wheelchair because the ramp didn't work. It wasn't her stop, she didn't want to get off, they were simply fed up with trying to get it to work.
You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US.
Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want.
I'm in Austin, and Waymos rule. I walk most places, bike others, and rarely drive. I very, very rarely get a rideshare (and often get Waymo by way of Uber lottery). Autonomous vehicles exist, are real, and serve an actual need in this very low density city that most people on HN have heard of. I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second. I would even pay for that to happen.
If you're arguing about some idealistic society, that's one thing. In reality these things are way better than our public transit, and fixing public transit in a place this (not) dense is not as easy as you might think. The last mile is real, and people are coming from every direction and going every other direction and not willing to wait and transfers when these autonomous vehicles already solve the problems door to door so inexpensively.
US cities are spread out due to policies enacted only 50–60 years ago to improve connectivity by car. New policies can (and will) reshape them again in the next couple of decades. For example, building transit creates environments where people's trips are well served by transit.
Trains and subways, by definition, are not serving you in that "last mile". The "last mile" is where you disembark from the closest rapid/public transport, but you still need to travel to your destination.
Every time you make someone switch modes of transportation to complete their commute, the suffering increases exponentially in my personal experience. I much prefer going door to door and getting the benefit of resting my mind and body.
I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country.
Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable.
There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times).
I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?
But it is. In America if you tell someone they are going to need to walk home for 15 minutes they will in the base case opt to take their car.
This type of convo has come up in a number of different ways on HN and folks just hand wave away the problems in the US all the time. Americans don’t want to walk outside for an extended amount of time and the last mile(s) problem is quite hard.
In most US cities you cannot economically solve the last mile problem efficiently with public transit and similarly most folks will already opt to take their car even if the public transit is great.
This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking.
Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space.
We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.
Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
They really should just open up letting you have a small vehicle everywhere in the country. Sometimes you visit some city or little rural area where they let you drive golf carts or atvs or snow mobiles on the roads, grocery store lots are more full of those instead of bigger vehicles as a result, and the sky doesn't seem to fall down either.
Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
I get it if you live in a dense metro. A car is not worth it in NYC, SF, etc. Other than that it's pretty abnormal for people not to want a car. It's usually some weird anxiety about driving. Not to mention - heaven forbid - you have a family.
They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too.
When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car.
I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
>I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co
When the bus (in your example) runs on a hourly schedule, while your car is always there when you spontaneously need it, then that freedom is real and not just propaganda.
I did this type of commute before where I had to catch the bus to work, which was also once every hour, and the anxiety during my early morning routine to not miss the bus was crazy since missing it meant one more hour of wait, compared to the freedom of jumping in my car without a fixed schedule while also saving 1h/day of time compared to the public transit, the difference was night and day, not propaganda.
Now if I had a train/subway to work, where I could sit down, and it ran every 15 minutes or less, then yeah, fuck driving and public transport all the way, but nobody sits in traffic for fun, but because of all options for their commute, driving is the better option.
Then let's keep on fucking the planet, and let's keep on moving 70kg of meat over 30km per day on average with 2500kg of steal, 400kg of battery, etc. super efficient and sustainable!
>we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
Didn't you just say you can get around fine on the bus? Can't you just get a car if it suits you?
For me personally it's nice to have a car. It would certainly be tough if I had less resources and public transit would be more appreciated.
Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it.
I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
The famously small conurbations and the reality that Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year. They have cars and public transit for the rest.
I'd add that these discussions tend to handwave the reality of safety when you're on an open platform movie at high speeds, the reality that not all people are physically able, and a lot of others issues that the vocal "cars are the devil" folks don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and it increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "kill all pitbulls" crowd.
> Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year.
They very much bike all year round, even in the north where it regularly gets to -20C(-4F) in winter. Biking in snowy sub-freezing weather is really not a big deal as long as you maintain the bike paths as well as the streets.
Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used. The only time I can recall where people I knew who usually commuted by bike didn't do so was during an unusually heavy snowstorm. They instead had to walk about half a kilometer to/from where the city had managed to plow the streets and take a taxi. That was decades ago.
Scandanavians have been getting around without cars for millenia. Nobody had even heard of a car until just over a century ago.
Car dependent infrastructure is definitely not helpful for the physically disabled, as well as those too young, too old, and too poor to drive a car. This and a lot of other issues that the vocal and active "cars aren't the devil" crowd don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "Pitbulls make great family dogs" crowd.
Hospitals at the dawn of the 19th century in Europe were generally places only poor people in desperate situations went to give birth because they were hives of disease transmission.
The notion that doctors should wash their hands between treating one patient and the next was met with ridicule. Doctors were insulted by the suggestion that their hands might be unclean, so mortality rates for childbirth in hospitals were horrendous. The idea of handwashing emerged and died many times before it finally caught on, and then only at the behest of vigorous campaigning over a generation.
There is a long list of hidden costs and negative externalities associated with car dependent sprawl as well, they are well studied, but nobody want to hear that their hands are unclean. This idea one should be washing their hands a dozens times per shift is patently absurd. Physicians would be wasting hours a day just washing their hands! How would we be able to treat all these patients?
I think you need to re-read the parent comment, specifically this part:
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
You're almost certainly an American, and you probably have no idea what public transit is like in countries that have been investing in it for decades instead of focusing 95% of their resources on infrastructure for cars.
The problem with transit systems is that they aren't designed for competition. They're costly to make, have few builder companies to choose from (who all know the game very well and go over budget as a tactic), and extremely difficult to overhaul/retrofit when more efficient tech becomes available.
They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long.
As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.
Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.
It does. About the same amount of money was spent in funding for Waymo as funding SFMTA over the period Waymo has existed. So in SF we are putting in as much money on public transit as Alphabet et al. is on Waymo and we both have the results we have.
>If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros.
There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.
We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies.
I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.
To my knowledge there are only a handful of public transit systems in the world that operate at a profit, let alone that operate at enough of a profit to recover construction costs. As in, maybe 5 if you squint really hard. Who do you expect to fund new ones if not the government?
Regional or state is better than local government. Local governments would struggle to raise the required funds for the costs of modern transit and would have a mandate to really support transit within their municipal borders vs a regional solution that is agnostic to the byzantine municipal borders.
Small self-driving busses would do exactly what you want. The cost of increasing bus service is overwhelmingly the cost of bus drivers. If the busses could drive themselves, cities could afford to deploy a lot more busses, especially smaller busses, running much more often.
As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile.
And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation.
It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.
That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
> And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
Self driving taxis have to be parked (or cruise around continuously), I guess, and that parking better be close cause ain't no one waiting for a self driving car parked 30 minutes away to get moving.
>all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.
Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem.
The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult.
For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.
AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.
Building roads for buses are _few orders of magnitude more_ expensive than roads for cars only.
Unfortunately we still have trucking, but it's starting to feel we should build separate roads for them and for special cases only allow multi-axle delivery trucks on normal roads.
We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficiency.
You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?
No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.
I see. But Waymo investments are also vanishingly small compared to PT OpEx. If you for some reason could tap all of the Waymo money, operations and R&D and all of the rest of it, you could fund WMATA and that's it. Americans spend 100x more just on motor fuels than Waymo spends on itself. If you wanted to raise a similar amount of money you would need a mere 5¢ incremental gas tax. Private Americans furthermore spend $1 trillion every year just replacing and fixing their cars. You could double the public transit subsidy across the nation with a 5% car tax.
The safest car is the one that is parked. I’m not anti-car but in terms of safety we should focus more on getting people using bus/rail/bike/walk especially for daily needs. It’s more cost effective too. Autonomous cars are cool and will be great for reducing crashes, but it’s an additive solution, not a subtractive one.
Yes, instead of fixing the problem let's go back 100 years and start walking everywhere. It's easy for someone that works for home or an in office, but most people truly rely on their cars, otherwise they would lose hours everyday...
Most people in societies built car-first/only (USA) truly rely on their cars. The situation is not the same in big parts of Europe and Asia. We can go 100 years forward and fund public infrastructure which is better for the environment, more safe and gives a much higher socio-economic value (except for the highway lobby).
Public transit is not "100 years back". London, uk is not exactly backwards looking in that sense, and the vast majority of people use trains/metto to go to work.
I walk 10k steps a day on a normal day, only drive when necessary to go out of my normal routes. This has an added benefit of keeping me, an aging programmer, in shape (as well as other relevant activities).
It is healthy to walk. You should be walking probably an hour a day at least if we are being honest. You are made to hunt and forage all day, not sit down. Use it or lose it.
If they were going to do that, they would have done it by now for those drivers opting into the insurance monitor device: they can literally tell that you're a driver that never took a risk, never got into a situation to brake hard, never drove recklessly, etc, and yet, the insurance cost with the device is only slightly less than the insurance cost without the device.
In any case, if this was strictly a financial decision, why would the human cost go up? The larger the percentage of SDVs there are on the road, the less likely a human driver gets into an accident, their risk goes down too, so their insurance should also go down.
It's a pool. If all the drunks switch to autonomous vehicles then we all win. If all the school teachers switch to autonomous vehicles then the drunks lose.
In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.
> Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?
My understanding is that it is a legal and safety liability for them to drive. The driver is employed by and the car is owned by a company that the wealthy person founded and pays so if the driver hits & kills someone, the company gets sued for a bunch of money then the liability can be discharged in bankruptcy / isolated to the company's coffers rather than the wealthy person's.
It's the same gambit as their security. I am sure more than just Gates and Musk do it but I know that both of them own personal security companies who only provide security to themselves. It's all just shells of liability shielding.
That's assuming people are rational with their money.
Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.
An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.
If freedom is being shackled to an expensive appliance by a yearslong loan and autonomy is being trapped at home if it breaks or you lose the ability to operate it... I'll pass on both.
Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.
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Well, there is the alternative that prosecution is low enough in case of accidents that insurance payouts are low and consequently insurance is low priced. Also, the majority could easily vote for price controls on car insurance like they have on home insurance.
I can easily construct arguments along the lines of “cars are necessary to drive and insurance costs are regressive since they don’t scale with income so we need to have price controls on insurance for low-income drivers”. These will be quite popular.
Waymo is already self-insured so if they have an advantage it's already on their balance sheet. In California nobody is going to get a discount for having ADAS software because we encoded into the state law in the 1980s, part of a long magical thinking campaign by boomers, that insurance companies can't use that type of thing to set prices.
Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.
In 2015, Volvo issued a press release claiming that Volvo would accept full liability whenever its cars are in autonomous mode.
[…]
Starting in September 2023 in the United States, Mercedes-Benz takes liability for the Level 3 Drive Pilot as long as the "user operates Drive Pilot as designed," but "the driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times when prompted to intervene by the vehicle."
The actual money will be made because the driverless car manufacturer is self-insuring and cutting out the insurance company. Competition among manufacturers will then pass most of those savings on to you.
Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.
I have said for a while now that self driving cars do not need to be perfect. They will have accidents, of a different type than humans have, and sometimes they will be ones that most humans would avoid.
What they do need to be is better than humans overall, and then it would make sense for them to be allowed onto the road. When they get far safer than humans, phasing out of human driving will make sense.
They reached that point a while ago, now we just need legislation and public opinion to catch up.
I would imagine that world running on fully autonomous cars would certainly be less error-prone than a world running on human-driven cars where each human has different intelligence, reflexes, emotions, moods e.t.c. A purely algorithmic system of autonomous cars is certainly safer, just needs to be fully adopted. The only drawback I suppose is the fear of these systems being hacked, something that is not so easy with biological humans.
>> In March, Waymo’s independent study showed 92 percent fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes, a 13-fold reduction versus human drivers in comparable city environments.
I can't progress beyond this point in the article. How is Waymo's study "independent"? I don't understand.
Of course they do, an 8 bit PC rigged up to an old Nintendo Duck Hunt sensor would drive more safely than some of the morons in my neighborhood. I've ceased to be annoyed at them, and instead just shrug at the idiocy.
There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers:
> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]
I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.
I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.)
If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
Sure, but I'm failing to see how an autonomous driving system without a steering wheel or brake fitted is safer than one with a steering wheel and brake fitted but the human driver ignoring it and sitting in the back seat.
The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.
You are correct but I think previous comment hung on specific word you used: "semi-autonomous". What that would mean is a system that still requires attention / supervision. What I believe you meant is an AV that still has human controls but is capable of unsupervised driving.
If you aren't familiar with SAE AV levels, check them out. It is a common refrain that L3 AVs are a SUPER bad idea because they would be 99.9% perfect at driving but could still mess up so 'drivers' of them would become too trusting and minimally attentive which would cause accidents.
The common thing is that L3 needs to be skipped entirely so a car should either be L2 and wouldn't be good enough to drive entirely on its own for long periods (lane assist, low speed traffic jam chauffeur, etc) or L4+ where the car can drive on its own but if conditions degrade where it can't continue it is capable of finding a safe spot to stop rather than aborting in the middle of driving suddenly.
The controls vs no controls isn't really an argument. Like you said, it will basically be fine either way if the system is sufficiently advanced especially if autonomy can't be disengaged while moving.
Failing to see or refusing to look is not evidence that something is not there.
The human part is the failure point IMO. The problem is when the human is not in the back seat, but overriding the car.
A car with no wheel, and the human in the back, is not different to one with a wheel and the human in the back, it is when the human is sat in the front only partially controlling the vehicle. That is when it is less safe.
So 2 situations, one where the human can sit anywhere and the car is just as safe, or one where the car is less safe if the human sits in one of the seats.
One of those situations is less safe than the other.
There was research some years ago in Sweden that cars with 4WD get into accidents 20% - 30% more often than cars with 2WD. And cars with 4WD averaged 10% higher speed at the moment of the crash.
The cause was found to be drivers with 2WD losing a little traction early in their drove and subsequently slowing down, while drivers with 4WD just kept driving like normal until they were suddenly off the road.
Another statistic is that intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers cause more than half of all fatalities. So making a solution with machine learning and cameras that could retrofit into any existing car and just deny starting the car for such drivers, and having insurance companies cut premiums for having such gadgets installed, would be much more effective than any form of self driving or similar.
The gadgets would have to meet an impossibly low false-positive rate and they'd need to be mandatory and non-removable for this to be effective. Constantly impaired drivers won't voluntarily install the devices, and any non-impaired driver who is falsely prevented from using their car will get rid of the device and not care about the insurance discount.
Also, they really need to be able to detect the other really bad cause of impairment: mobile phone usage.
It's like those approval prompts in coding agents. At the start you are reading the commands intently but after being bombarded with them for days you just hit accept on them.
Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.
I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.
Any time I crossed a bridge near me that is kind of steep and has a structure over it, the automatic braking engaged HARD. Like hard enough that I nearly caused accidents until I figured out how to turn it off.
I wonder if there will be some extra liability if the driver kills someone and the logs show automatic braking would have engaged. Something similar happened near me where a lamborghini driver disabled traction control, spun out and killed a girl on the way to school. They had to add new laws increasing the liability if you disabled TC.
Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
Some years ago, I was in a major crash. The traffic in front of me stopped, I braked hard and stopped in time, the truck behind me rammed me into the car in front. Nearly killed me.
Some time later, I was on a snowy road. The cars in front of me stopped, I stopped, and checked my rearview mirror. There was a truck, who clearly wasn't going to stop. I pulled off to the side, and he hit the car in front of me.
>was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives
To be fair, if the cars behind you had automatic emergency braking you would be at much lower risk of getting rear-ended when there's a false positive.
Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely?
I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
Never hear of someone who was rear ended being liable. Guy behind should keep a distance that allows him reacting in time and he is responsible for keeping that distance.
The same for skiing you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, one behind you is responsible for not crashing into you.
In car you have rear mirrors but if you have something in front of you and breaking you are not going to look in the mirrors.
Automatic braking can also be hazardous! In a front-wheel drive car, understeer is a fact of life. When you're approaching a bend in the road with your foot in the accelerator, you're going to be pointed at the guardrail, since the car's going to rotate around the bend when lift your foot off the gas. Now imagine you're driving a car with AEB and it slams on the brakes while you were lightly accelerating towards the guardrail, right before you were going to lift your foot off the gas. What was a perfectly routine curve just turned into complete loss of control, and there's a very good chance your car's going straight into the guardrail!
Even when it doesn't slam on the brakes, if you were concentrating on the road, those jarring beeps can just as easily break your focus on driving as they can break your focus on a distraction. I think it's better to avoid distraction by keeping cruise control off, and you can compensate for having human-level reaction time by following at a safe distance and staying in an appropriate gear or setting an appropriate level of regenerative braking to avoid mindlessly getting too close to the car in front of you.
I think that too often, driver assist features are being added to cars to compensate for the other features (like adaptive cruise control) that encourage drivers to mentally disengage from the task of driving. There's also the fact (well, opinion) that driving a car without electronic assists and nannies is fun and engaging (especially on back roads with the windows down and the radio up). Riding in an autonomous vehicle is just as dull as riding on public transportation, all while being less efficient, less social, and worse for the environment.
It would be interesting if we could somehow test how the reduction in crashes with the introduction of driver assists would compare with if we had just banned cruise control, introduced minimum visibility and minimum suspension stiffness standards, and mandated manual transmissions.
This is the perfect expression of chronic windshield brain. If you are driving anywhere near the limits of dynamic stability on a public road, then you are already driving dangerously. Also, computerized stability control works better than 99.99% of human drivers.
The limits of dynamic stability go down drastically when the brakes are locked up. You can be _far_ from the limits of dynamic stability when going around a bend in the road, but if your car locks up the brakes mid-bend, you can unexpectedly go from nowhere close to those limits to exceeding them in the blink of an eye. A human driver would wait until they've straightened out to brake hard, but the computer in a car is entirely at the mercy of whoever programmed it. Hopefully it would do the same, but do you really trust Tesla (or whomever) with their move-fast-and-break-things additude?
Then there's the fact that automatic emergency braking requires the software algorithm to make decisions based on data that is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the data used by electronic stability control and ABS systems. It's much easier to detect steering angle and wheel slippage than it is to detect how an object in the distance is likely to behave.
Confirmed: you don't understand this subject. Any readers who find themselves needing to stop a modern car in an emergency are advised to stand on the brake pedal with maximum force while the computer sorts the situation out.
i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.
As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.
Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.
Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.
An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally.
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip.
Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.
The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.
I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.
It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.
Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
That’s a Facebook motto but Facebook (now Meta) isn’t in AVs. I suppose that excludes Facebook of pre 2016 from participating in AVs? I think everyone is fine with that.
> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.
> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]
One thing I'd like to see modeled is how many excess deaths they cause in, for example, London.
Driving in London is already very safe because the street design prevents people going very fast. American roads are, by comparison, unsafe. That probably means AVs in those countries had a lot of low-hanging fruit, so they could have a significant impact by staying within the speed limit, for example. Without such low hanging fruit, will there be so much benefit in London?
London has excellent and very safe public transit, far safer than even professional drivers. If AVs are cheap and convenient enough to pull people off transit, that might expose enough people to higher risk that makes them overall kill more people than if they'd stayed on the tube.
Likewise, more driving (even EVs) generates more asphalt and brake pad dust, which cause respiratory illnesses. If they cause a drop in transit ridership compared to no AVs, how does that affect the excess deaths in the city?
My gut says that, in London and other cities with safer streets, they're going to have more difficulty getting such headline-grabbing numbers. Combine that with the potential to take people off safe transit and put them on the road and the balance might slightly tip against them.
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue.
No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
But they still cannot drive cars. All this stuff can do is react very slowly, maybe, if it detects it, to a change in the environment.
Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.
Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.
I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.
An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd find and post the one where my Tesla slowed down to a stop at a red light, lulling me into a sense of security, and then without warning lurched forward and broke the red light.
That is not even a perception issue (I've already had multiple very close calls because of that, and I think Elon was extremely negligent in pushing for vision-only;) This is a damn bug in the planning logic. That's Elon's "move fast and break people" philosophy shining through.
I would trust autonomous cars if they're Waymo. I would not trust Tesla.
That is either an old story or you are on v12 because mine used to do it often and I haven't seen it in at least a year from my recollection. The newest versions are really good.
Waymos aren't without fault either, they smash the front off cars, run into static poles, block emergency vehicles, etc; just the nature of AV development.
> Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.
Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.
It's also easier to do shared housing but part of it is just that people like having their own personal dedicated space to exist in even if it's not the most efficient answer.
That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.
Depends at the scale you're looking at. How much money is wasted by 30 people driving 30 cars when a bus could take them all? Taking into account car wear, gas, etc.
Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political
Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?
I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars.
The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.
> The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
That doesn't really math, because axle weight is a large factor in road wear. There's details and it doesn't always apply, but the commonly used rule of thumb is that "road wear increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load."
If a transit bus weighs at least 25000 lbs and has two axles [2] and a F-150 has an average weight of 5000 lbs with two axles [3], you get a lot more road wear from putting a bunch of people on a bus compared to all of them driving their f-150s by themselves. The power rule says the wear from one bus is equivalent to 625 F-150s. Although if people rode around in classic Beetles (~ 2000 lbs), there'd be even less road wear, and things would be a lot groovier.
So your contention, then, is that Google>Waymo and the other companies should have invested billions not into AV, but instead into funding trains and paying for buses?
Slightly besides the point, but I love seeing people in massive modern SUVs, clearly completely overwhelmed by them, barely able to tell where it starts and ends, probably distracted by the screen.
Its especially funny in parking here lots in Europe, where they barely fit. If you drive such an SUV, I have a suggestion: Let the computer do the parking, you can't park and you can't drive well either. Just let the clanker figure it out, it'll save everyone time.
I have a feeling that once everything goes EV and autopilot, they will start phasing out regular cars or will make it more difficult to obtain the license.
This will be a gradual process. But probably getting a drivers license will become a lot less common for people over time. There won't be any need once cars drive themselves.
Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers.
This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer.
As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.
And it'll negatively impact all but the upper classes. Automakers would rather everyone use their autopilot taxi services for the higher profit margins, so autopilot EVs will be prohibitively expensive to outright buy.
There's a large percent of people who have their daily commute possible by public transport, but the weekend or odd trips are not well covered. A cheaper uber powered by self driving would cover the odd trips and save people the massive expense of owning a car.
Also, the autonomous car companies will have their vehicles coordinating to make it difficult for humans to drive, such as holding a long convoy with close following distance in a single lane.
Definitely. They'll be like the obnoxious people on public transport who play music and videos out loud, people who don't give up seats to the elderly etc
``less cars, more X, where X is bikes and trains''
save more lives than autonomous cars?
Also: We have 580k direct deaths a year due to a top pollutant society cross-funds for those who buy them? This is insane.
After ten-thousand years, nearly six billion humans died in car-related accidents, i.e. one population of earth when I was young? How is a personal level risk of one in ten thousand each year acceptable? Ban at least human-driven cars, not (only) AI/AGSI!
As for driving in full automation: seems impossible outside clear-weathered rectangular cities, for now. But perhaps that does not stay this way for years, and in some places, we can could either adopt this tech, pragmatically, or build liveable, walkable/bikable cities instead in the more long term.
Driver assistance and self-driving cars are probably one of the cheapest and low-effort band-aids to the infrastructure mistakes made in the US.
They are, of course, not as good as more enlightened city planning, but they’d be an improvement to the status quo I expect, especially the way the quality has made some serious strides lately.
I get a sense that traditional automakers are done chasing Tesla on the technology and that’s unfortunate. Those traditional automakers figured out that their buyers don’t care that much about it, and the ones that do care already left for Tesla. Plus, the self-driving that really works best relies heavily on serious AI technology.
The articles I've read on this have said it's murky because of obfuscation of reported data by self-driving companies.
The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."
My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.
I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?
I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.
From a policy standpoint…I wonder about creating a rule that anyone who got a DUI could get an amended license where they could legally operate only autonomous vehicles. First DUI is a permanent AV-only license.
Since 7 million people have DUI’s, that one policy change would completely reshape the industry.
Calling something that kills people but just does it less as "saving lives" is batshit crazy. Looks like people in the US got so brainwashed by the toxic car culture that not killing feels the same as saving lives. It's like calling it a saving when my girlfriend decides NOT to buy something. This whole article is a joke, right? Right???
It is correct to compare to average drivers because that is ultimately what they are going to replace. AVs are coming for the whole market, and if they are significantly safer than the average driver the average driver shouldn’t drive. I intend to stop driving when possible.
Hopefully the people that find autonomous cars great are the bad drivers of today. They will transition into that and leave the better drivers of today to drive in peace.
In theory they should be cheaper one day because you don't need to pay someone to drive. This means you can use them in situations where for cost reasons you would have driven yourself - e.g. for long journeys, in the countryside, for commuting etc.
Getting people out of their own cars and into autonomous cars is better for several reasons:
1. We need to own fewer cars collectively, which is better for the environment.
2. Don't need to waste a ton of space on car parks.
3. It's safer (at least for Waymo). Not just for occupants but also for pedestrians and cyclists.
Having a cheap option for last mile travel also makes trains more attractive.
All of this of course rests on them actually ending up cheap, which hasn't been the case so far but we'll see.
They won't be cheap until there's competition to drive down the price, which will otherwise be as high as possible to justify the initial investments. It's only a matter of time, but likely on the scale of decades.
But I wanted to add on the future benefits front - as more vehicles on the road become autonomous, they could communicate with each other and reduce the buffer distances between them, allowing for faster travel and improved saturation while still being safe.
Title includes "autonomous cars" - url includes "self-driving" - I smell what you are selling.
Meanwhile, the article never gives a share, but as far as I can tell, nearly all the lives are saved by basic ADAS: auto-braking, which is really cool and should be the focus.
If you want to click-bait, fine, but then at least tell the truth after the user clicks.
I’ll risk sounding crass to state the quiet part out loud:
Majority of car accidents outside of the occasional genuine freak accident are self-inflicted. Call it FAFO or Darwinism, whichever you prefer.
I’m saying that having done that myself once in the early days of holding a drivers licence and feeling heroic with my speed and a corner. I was lucky to walk away with minor bruises, mostly to my ego. And wallet.
That day I learned how a car behaves when it loses traction.
15 years later accident free, minus one person bumping the rear left side because they’d thought it would be a good idea to cross over into my lane over a solid line.
Having watched how autonomous driving is “developing” over the same span of time - I’m not convinced, the last decade was spent more on “trust me bro” targeting lawmakers than genuinely trying to have a breakthrough in the technology and we’ve hit a wall (no pun intended).
The correct answer to this problem is better driver education, and a higher bar for entry.
Lest we let the idiots take over and we as a society accept a lower standard.
People run the stop sign all the time by my house. The highway sounds like a fast n furious movie every night. There's no education shortcoming. They know what they are doing. They know how to go the speed limit and stop for a sign for the DMV test. They know when no one is looking and they can get away with dangerous bullshit.
Certain drivers just need their privileges revoked, cars crushed, and some nights spent in jail if we are being honest.
It'd be really nice to have bolt-on after-market automation. I'm not sure if the car companies will want to accommodate this, but I'd really love to make my old Honda self-driving.
I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.
OpenPilot and comma.ai are very close to a bolt-on after-market solution; not FSD 14 quality but you can get a lot of autonomy and intelligence with a $1000 Android device and thirty minutes for installation.
It isn't truly stick-and-go, you need to have existing ADAS and other sensors already in the vehicle. As people are now holding onto cars for an average of 15+ years, the bolt-on kits are about 10 years ahead of the average driver's car.
Looks like we're over the biggest engineering hurdles. I used to tell people we'd see self-driving cars take off in the 2030s, (with them generally starting to appear mid 2020s) and now this looks like the case.
I wonder to what extent this effect comes from the fact that robotaxis don't get drunk.
I seem to recall a paper showing that human crash frequencies surge up to 6x between midnight and 4am on weekends, despite that traffic accounting for only a miniscule percentage of vehicle miles traveled.
Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
Such a standard for motor vehicles would result in the loss of licensing for a large majority of Americans. Most people would fight against such testing standards as a condition for driving on public roads. It might not be a bad idea. I just don’t think it’s feasible.
There's no legislated standard in the US, nor pre-sale verification that a vehicle has met most of the other automotive standards. That's just not how the US regulatory environment works.
There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
China is going for what's sometimes called "L3.5" - hands off wheel, eyes off road, driver may have to take over if alerted, but if the driver doesn't, the vehicle must safely stop and pull over if possible.
The trouble with "driver assistance" systems is the handoff to the driver. That's not reliable. Results from the aviation community indicate that it takes about ten seconds after an autopilot disconnect before the pilot has stable control of the aircraft. "L3.5" accepts that. The < 2 second response required by some L2 systems does not.
While I would like to see that just for the data, from a regulatory standpoint all we really need are the manufacturers being liable in a crash if their cars were driving. The insurance savings of their cars being safer will create the incentive they need.
The loss of the joy and satisfaction of driving a proper drivers car with a firm feeling manual transmission will be hard to explain to future generations for sure.
But the bigger fear is the loss of autonomy in movement that having everyone become beholden to a botnet for transportation will bring.
"Drive me to the anti government protest. I want to make my voice heard."
IMO the benchmark to pass will be to show it has better safety than the average sober, non-speeding, non-phone-using, seatbelt-wearing driver.
IDK how that could even feasibly be shown but that's when people will actually start going all-in on it. Otherwise I will simply meet those criteria myself for free.
Bordering on zero human drivers fit that profile. The competition to AVs isn’t a mythical race of flawless humans. It’s the drunk, speeding, distracted idiots who currently operate motor vehicles (e.g., us).
It has been, from the start and even before FSD had any basis in reality and was just sci-fi stories, obvious that FSD would eventually get here. The only question has been when. We clearly aren't there yet but it is pretty obvious we aren't as far away as the naysayers make out.
I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake.
You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.
I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar).
I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider.
They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.
Self driving can be safer even if it's less competent because it can just be programed to be more risk adverse, always keep safe stopping distances and slow down when the conditions are adverse. A human driver _might_ be more skilled in driving through a snow storm but the self driving car just slows down and ends up safer.
Most drivers take absurd risks that negate any possible skill advantage.
We've done(ish) the first 80%: long straight roads and grid cities in south USA getting 350 days of sun per year.
The last 20% will be tough. There are 1.3b vehicules in the world, most of the aren't in the US, most places will need a complete infrastructure revamp before autonomous cars can even dream to drive there
People kill and hurt others in cars for many reasons but the main ones are:
-being dangerous on purpose (speeding, ignoring signs, tailgating etc.)
-being inattentive (phones, screens in general, being tired, being sleepy)
-road raging in many forms
As evidenced by comments in this thread and elsewhere people also have terrible judgement about reality on the roads - blaming cyclists, justifying speeding etc.
Self-driving cars remove all those from the equation. It would be shocking if they didn't save lives. We put too high a bar on them. It's a life saving tech and we should put them on the road yesterday and go from there.
It doesn't really matter whether autonomous cars crash less than human drivers. A computer can never be punished, so a computer must never be allowed to kill any humans.
How does punishing someone make crashes better? I would rather have fewer crashes because of a system that can't be punished than more crashes with punishment.
Being able to punish someone doesn't change the fact that a crash happened and it doesn't change the fact that someone died. There is a difference between punishment and justice, there is rarely ever perfect justice in life.
The best we can do is mitigate harms as much as possible, and it seems self-driving might be the best mitigation of traffic accidents compared to human drivers.
Suppose human drivers were killing 1 person every 100 miles driven, and software was killing 1 person every 10 billion miles driven. We should just accept that the human population will be decimated each day for accountability reasons?
I do think that currently we're at the stage where Waymo is trying to convince most of the world of the _quality_ of its offering, so for the moment, things are well aligned.
But in 5 years if there are multiple self-driving offerings competing on things like price, door-to-door time, OPEX (e.g. does a camera-only system with no moving parts need less skilled maintenance?), then someone may try to be the cheap but good enough self-driving service that cuts corners -- and we should want some execs to actually go to prison rather than just some cost-of-doing-business fines.
Growing proof that PR for autonomous car companies has aligned on a strategy of painting you as a bad person if you want to drive your own car, and therefore you should pay them money to continue being a good person.
You are dismissing this as "unhelpful negativity", but are not addressing in any way the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
>the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
The author Lawrence Ulrich references research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Why would it be "obvious" that they are paid PR shills for Tesla/Waymo?
I'm jaded and cynical so I can accept that they may be secret PR mouthpieces but isn't it reasonable to expect a little evidence rather than just throwing out a random accusation?
IIHS works for the insurance industry who will happily throw you under the bus if it makes things more predictable on their side. Not better, not lower claims, more predictable.
The alignment between what is good for you and good for the interests they answer two is not all that much.
But of course, they work very hard to market themselves as peddlers purely of safety, after all only a barbarian would be against safety <mockingly clutches pearls>
This isn't to say that some people they don't care, but giving a crap isn't gonna change the incentives.
How do using autonomous vehicles benefit their claims-settling? Wouldn't it make it unpredictable- in an accident between two self-driving vehicles, who is liable? What if both vehicles are from the same company? Doesn't this lead to extreme variability?
Can you actually define what the kool-aid is here? Because AV companies are saying "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually. Not once, not even the usual one or two crazy people you can find to support almost any other crazy statement.
Where is the kool-aid from the robotaxi side that's so visible? Keep in mind that "kool-aid" implies that something is factually incorrect.
> "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
A lot of these are true about other things like pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, and mass rail transit. The kool-aid is that the robotaxi people act like they are the first one to solve this problem.
Pedestrian friendly streets are great! You can't walk that far, and I love walking places when I have time and energy.
Bike lanes are great! I bike to work. If I'm not careful I'll arrive sweaty, and that inherently limits when and where I bike.
Mass rail transit is great! It cannot get directly to every door or frequently even to within walking distance of every door (I take a train to the office when I don't wanna bike).
I really do understand that it's trendy to hate on cars. There are a lot of bad things that come with car dependence.
All of that is true AND YET cars make us more productive and allow us to do things that would be impossible otherwise.
Robotaxi companies are not trying to replace any of those things. That makes no sense because they don't need to do that to succeed.
So I will ask again: what is the kool-aid that I'm supposedly drinking?
Saying an article is just PR, without addressing the specific article is not helpful.
Argue how the author was funded by such and such a group with ties to this other group. Say something about the methodology used. Say literally anything about the actual post.
This would be the equivalent of me just calling you a "shill" with no other context. The burden of proof is on you since you're making the claim that this is misleading PR.
Yeah, and it should not be understated how bad only having autonomous cars would be for privacy and security conscious folk.
A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.
If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.
Given the state of cybersecurity, the car goes wherever anyone with sufficient motivation wants it to go. Including into pedestrians. And, such a scenario could happen at the scale of a botnet swarm. In other words, hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be simultaneously hijacked.
"If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go"
I think privacy conscious folks like yourself consistently overrate how much purchase this argument has. I am perfectly happy to forgo this in exchange for a sufficient increase in convenience / safety (for myself and others). This is not because I have been brainwashed by autonomous vehicle company propaganda, it is because I have different values and concerns.
So you mean to tell me that when I called a Waymo a few weeks ago at 1AM because I was drunk at a bar and wanted to go home, it was actually because my government and Google wanted me to go home?
Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! Next you'll tell me that a taxi ride requires mutual consent between me, the taxi driver, and the dispatch company!
You cannot deny the evidence though, driverless cars are safer per-mile than human drivers on average. 1/100 deaths in the United States are due to car accidents, even shaving off 10% of those would save ~4000 people per year.
But.. what if it's true? It's like not wearing a seat belt, or smoking, or drinking while driving. If AV are widely available it becomes similarly opt-in high risk behavior.
Using SUVs are definitely worse for safety as well, and it does not require a huge overhaul of the transportation infrastructure, a few new technologies to be invented, replacing ~all the existing cars, etc. etc. But no-one takes the comparatively basically free steps to remove/reduce SUVs.
Lets not forget that its all about the profits, and if we truly want to save lives there are more cost-efficient ways than what some tech sales-people peddle.
If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
I hadn't thought about it like this, but I think I want the grassroots version of the PR campaign. Society was finally able to rein in smoking when we collectively realized how dangerous secondhand smoke is. People who smoked indoors and exposed loved ones to an early death weren't bad people, but creating societal pressure to feel bad about doing that has saved a lot of lives.
You are more likely to kill someone driving your huge SUV than you are taking a Waymo. Driving your own car certainly doesn't make you a bad person, but I hope self-driving cars will be ubiquitous and safe in the future. When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now.
At a systems level, transportation is something we have to be very, very careful about, because if you get it wrong, you start excluding entire groups of people from being a functional part of your society just because they are different from you in where and how they live.
"When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now." Really? I drive on logging roads a few times a month to get to some property. This is pretty sketchy even in good conditions and there's always the chance of getting stuck and having to hike a mile or two the rest of the way up to go get the tractor and sort it out. I'm probably not buying a self-driving car any time soon, if ever.
Now, is having self driving taxis a fantastic idea in a very dense city? Of course. There's huge benefits in keeping the average car as safe, efficient in both energy and pollution, and highly utilized as possible. Are these also a good retrofit to dense-ish suburbs where a bus/rail network isn't quite enough (and the costs to build it in already-developed land are unpalatable)? Also yes. But that's not ubiquitous, that's just part of a larger system that needs to be able to serve all users.
And if your point is that "move out of the mountains and into a city because that's the less-selfish option"... that's a certain kind of political statement, I guess.
Didn't this just happen in an internet company's self driving car with couple kidnappings in the past month? (They were done according to the companies terms of service is what the internet company says if I remember reading correctly)
There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
Why? Insurance companies use detailed risk data. If they discover that letting you drive your own car is a much higher risk than an auto-drive, why should they not be allowed to account for that?
Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.
But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.
I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.
> Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
If pricing risk was an exact science, you'd get the same quote from all providers (given similar coverage). Yet if you try that, you'll find that the quotes could vary as much as 2-3x. Therefore no, we shouldn't blindly trust "the algorithm".
I agree with your first statement but certainly not with the second. Rates for human drivers should and will skyrocket.
Individual states may try to push back with regulation but it won't succeed in the long-term
Rates for human drivers are currently at the correct level for insurance companies to pay for damage and make some profit.
If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
> If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
Wouldn't the accident rate for humans go down as well as the percentage of SDV increase? After all, the humans won't be exclusively having accidents with each other.
I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road.
We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.
Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today.
Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?
The way to prevent pileups is not to assume that everything will work correctly, including every system on every car.
It's to assume that every single thing that could break, will break, and design enough resiliency in that you have to stack up as many failures as possible before things truly go off the rails.
So to do this without killing people, you add the new systems with the same safety thresholds, then gather quite a few years of statistics, then, slowly let things become more efficient if that's both warranted by data and also warranted by simulation of events that you do not yet have data for.
Skipping steps in this because you want to put more cars on the road immediately is foolish and dangerous.
This is testable. The profits of car insurance companies should rise (let’s say substantially) in real dollars as accident payouts decrease as a result of the inevitable dominance of autonomous vehicles.
Why should they skyrocket? As more autonomous vehicles appear on the roads, incidents with non-autonomous vehicles will go down. Driving will become inherently safer.
In the long-long-term, self-driving will get good enough and people will be relying on it so thoroughly that allowing people to drive on their own, with barely any practice, will probably be more risky than it's worth. In say, idk, 100 years (probably sooner), I doubt people will be able to drive their own cars in the way they do today.
The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving.
Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point where I'm not actually sure that robotaxis can reliably beat them yet.
Yeah, a hundred years from now fewer people will drive themselves, but considering how many people DESPISE driving and only do it because it's required of them, that isn't bad.
There should be laws taxing people who insist on driving themselves. And the money should be used to subsidize people who switch to self-driving or install automatic assisted systems on their old cars. That'd partially mitigate the externality generated by human drivers.
The law put into place would be that the people who put autonomous cars on the road would risk their freedom and safety just as much as a driver if that car causes an accident through their neglect.
This will never happen, because the entire purpose of the corporate structure is to avoid responsibility.
It is understandable that you think this is the case as someone who is not above the age of 50. You will see that health and life insurance premiums rise precipitously once you reach certain milestones. Once you reach 90 years old, you will find that car insurance companies will discontinue your policy based on a single traffic ticket.
We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.
Many boomers hated antilock brakes, but insurers gave discounts for having them on your car anyway. I think it’s likely going to be a similar thing with self driving.
Even today, I don’t like the intrusiveness of the insurance monitors you can install on your car today and I am willing to forgo that discount to keep my privacy.
Tesla did something sneaky just few days ago. They added crash avoidance even when FSD is not enabled, but purchased. So in future if they add pay-per-mile option (great for road trips) you'll likely still keep paying for monthly since it offers additional protection even if you prefer driving yourself (which is lol).
Thats too much of an honest assessment. An age old playbook. I'd like the tech do actually do things that are hard for me, like taking control of the car in a high stress situation. Sub-milisecond reactions to correct for a mistake. Something, anything more useful than a fancier cruise control.
Your car does that already. It has a superhuman braking system that saves a lot more lives than cruise control, though not quite sub-millisecond in its reaction time.
The promise of tech has been that if we let it rip, we'll have a better democracy and living conditions for all. That promise has failed to materialise, for a variety of reasons. There is increased surveillance, enshittification, huge subscription fees, and upward pressure on climate change (directly linked to bitcoin mining then AI data centres). Then you get Musk lobbying against a city's plans to build a public transport network, so he can build an unsafe single-car tunnel for the rich.
I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.
Sorry, "tech" is not some catch-all for all the new things. "Tech" has given us wonderful new medicine and safer cars and faster internet.
Subscription fees? So "tech" should make producing a film ... free now? What exactly is your point?
Who exactly promised all these so-called benefits you keep saying you were lied about? The companies make products and services. Many, many people buy those things. Both sides are happy, transaction over. What "greater good" are you complaining about, exactly and who promised it to whom?
The article sensibly asks if the (intentionally or not) cherry-picked stats about automated driving (fair weather only, limited to specific areas that aren't especially difficult) is valid then cites a study that really massages those stats in a dubious way (e.g. only counts as a crash if the airbag triggered, no mention of weather). Hmmm...
Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?
Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives in cherry picked temperate and clear environments that don't get things like snow. The article mentions this point and acknowledges it is a serious problem and then just leaves it at that as if it doesn't completely demolish the entire argument they're making. They don't try to refute it or anything.
>How Does Limited Fair-Weather Data Compare to Traditional Crash Statistics?
>A key question is whether Waymo’s robotaxis, currently limited to fair-weather operation in a handful of cities in the U.S., are directly comparable to humans driving a wider variety of roads in much more variable conditions.
That's literally all they say about the subject before moving on to talking about incomplete sampling of true crash rates.
The lack of transparency and misinformation coming from the industry players and the NHTSA cast serious doubts on any "science" around autonomous car safety being possible.
If it was really known the full extent of the cover up it would probably be termed a conspiracy between the autonomous car companies, the state DMVs and the federal authorities.
It will take many years and many more unnecessary deaths before we know the truth. THEN give me science based on real and complete data.
Having worked in more than one of the big AV players, I can tell you that your fears of cover-ups or conspiracies with the government, is completely wrong. It'd be interesting if you have to first-hand experience otherwise, though...?
Honestly, mount a front and back dash camera, and allow people to submit tickets for speeding and tailgating themselves.
I’m not kidding excessive speed and not keeping a safe distance equates for some 50% of all deadly traffic incidents.
It’s because a small and vocal minority drives like absolute fucking assholes and they will rally lawmakers not to introduce speed limits and to loosen grip on enforcement. The ADAC (German motor association) is a perfect example. When they announced after decades that they support a 130km max speed limit members jumped by the doves.
The only vastly meaningful improvement I can see in FSD is faster reaction times when it comes to assholes. Coincidentally those are the people who insist on driving petrol and will never upgrade to FSD because they like to drive like assholes.
IMHO it’s time for strict enforcement. Let’s ban them from the road finally. Set fines in percent from income. Allow self reporting via dash cams. Add stricter penalties for recurring offences, if you’re caught speeding 5 times in 2 days your licence is suspended.
That’ll have a much bigger impact than FSD. Maybe we can rally our representatives making them all giddy with all the extra cash they can earn from these offenders?
A hope (fantasy?) I have is that fleet robo taxis will (as part of regulations) get standardized “black box” recorders that can be admitted as evidence. Both for incidents, but also general traffic enforcement.
I feel like we never get real data on autonomous cars as we never do with data centers. It’s hard to tell if bad stories are anecdotal or rooted in truth. I hear the vast majority of accidents would be things that no human could avoid either - but then I’d also be anecdotal.
You have to remember that this is data from the US, where the road death rate is just about level with Somalia, something like 30% of road deaths involve drunk drivers, and something like 50% of fatalities overall are because the casualty wasn't wearing a seatbelt.
Driver training is non-existent, vehicle safety inspections are frankly comical.
I have been driven in a car by an American colleague, supposedly trained to a high standard (former public safety) and frankly I think you could train a pigeon to peck buttons to control the car better.
We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.
not if they're in a tunnel or a highrise canyon, or there is weather-related interference, or the maps have not been updated to reflect reality, or there is a detour for construction, etc.
GPS not nearly that reliable. There's a reason drones are moving towards computer vision rather than purely relying on GPS. The physical signs won't glitch out and show 100m offset because a tall building was reflecting GPS signals.
Maybe in a 100% automated system we would replace the icons with QR codes or something but physical markers will likely be here to stay.
Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability. People will use it when they are drunk if it means not going to jail and it's readily available.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them.
In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the car behind it was rear-ended by an SUV traveling at high speed. Both that car and the SUV then struck the Waymo. The SUV hit a total of 6 cars and someone in one of the other cars died. According to the police, the SUV may also have been involved in "multiple hit-and-run accidents reported just minutes before" [2].
In the second [3], the Waymo was yielding to a pedestrian when a motorcyclist made contact with the left rear corner of the Waymo. The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
If you drive on urban streets, no matter how good of a driver you are, there's a chance you're going to be involved in some sort of incident that's completely out of your control -- that seems to be what both of these are.
[1] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-9724
[2] https://archive.ph/5M05h
[3] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-11713
I agree that these cases are ridiculous to blame on the waymo entirely, but to give logic to their reasoning here you're unsure if on average the 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles (FPMM) may also be on average ridiculously not the drivers fault as well. Perhaps if you were to throw out all ridiculous cases you'd have an average of CDL's having a 0.3 FPMM vs Waymo's having 0 FPMM.
The nuance you describe at the end is the better interpretation: fatalities per mile driven is a useless metric since it's such a rare occurance and incredibly circumstantial that it cannot be used as a meaningful comparison metric for safety.
It also gets better depending on the medical services nearby and there competence. So having more competent medical services in cities, lowers murder statistics and car-fatalities. Thus the actual accident rate would only be visible in the countryside.
If we want to get closer to the "real" number, we would also need to account for mechanic failures of the car, wildlife, and suicide. We don't usually attribute people jumping in front of trains as the fault of the person driving the train. Fatalities per mile driven may very well be biased in favor of waymo that has nothing to do with safety of drivers, which in turn create uncertainty when trying to estimate the statistical result of making all cars Autonomous. For example, car owners can have a higher variance in maintenance than waymo, they can use the car in areas with more wildlife than city traffic, and they can commit suicide through other means than personal being behind the wheel (suicide statistics is itself quite complicated).
> The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
I wonder if they ever caught that guy?
She turned herself in (After the police went to her home and she wasn't there)
The commonly cited fatality statistics do not discuss fault, so, absent more precise information, a apples to apples comparison should not conditionalize on fault.
Why? Well let us try to imagine a world where Waymo has the statistically average fatal crash rate, yet is never at fault. In this world, every fatal crash occurs at the Waymos. You just have a bunch of crazy drivers roving the streets causing fatal crashes against (or involving) unsuspecting, not-at-fault victim Waymos.
If that is the world, then are these crazy drivers only crashing into Waymos? Probably not, these crazy drivers would almost certainly be crashing into a statistically average distribution of unsuspecting, not-at-fault victims.
So this imagined world is consistent with the overwhelming majority of human drivers engaging in 0 fatal accidents at fault with a small, crazy roving subset being at fault for all fatal accidents. So, in that world, a Waymo that is only ask good as the statically average driver would actually be infinitely worse than the overwhelming majority of human drivers. If you only replaced the 10th percentile driver (90% of drivers are better), you would actually be increasing the fatality rate. Only by displacing that crazy subset would you actually be decreasing the fatality rate.
Are we in that world? The Waymo numbers on fatal accident involvement with no fault actually kind of point in that direction (though the mileage numbers are still too low to make a strong conclusion). Seemingly massive crash and injury reduction due to massive reduction of at-fault crashes, but the fatality reduction does not seem proportional. Another possibility is that the Waymo driving distribution is biased toward being in situation that result in more no-fault fatal crashes.
But, that is all just conjecture and thought experiments. Unless we have better data, we unfortunately should be restricting ourselves to apples to apples comparisons which, in this case, do not conditionalize on fault.
Though, to nitpick on the original post, I think that the 2 fatal crashes in 170 million miles (~85 million miles per fatal crash which is similar to the USA human average of ~83 million miles per fatality), is probably not the correct analysis. The average fatal crash is probably 2 vehicles and 1 fatality. So, the 85 million miles per fatal crash versus 83 million miles per fatality is probably fine in the crash vs fatality direction. But I am pretty certain you would actually need to double the 170 million to account for the "statistically average mileage of the other cars".
Otherwise, if we have exactly two cars in the world each with 100 million miles and they engage in one fatal crash with one fatality, then we would conclude that car 1 has 1 fatality per 100 million miles and car 2 also has 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Naively averaging them, we could conclude that the overall fatality rate is 1 per 100 million miles. Therefore, over the 200 million miles the two of them drove, there were 2 fatalitys. Obviously incorrect, so we almost certainly need to weight them by their relative proportion when aggregating them.
That second accident looks like it could be one on those typical cases of SDC causing accidents by behaving unexpectedly (like braking for a pedestrian where human drivers would have denied right of way)
I havent read the doc and I am not arguing either way, just saying that you can cause an accident in other ways than by ploughing into someone.
The situation in question: "yielding to a pedestrian crossing the driveway entrance to the parking lot on the right-hand sidewalk".
Now, really? As far as backwards logic goes, this is up there. Better to break the law and endanger others because what, some can't drive for shit?
They really can't stop tying themselves into knots to dunk on self driving cars. They don't even know it's the case, they just suspect it's the case. Even if it _were_ the case, the drivers behind them most likely don't have this information available, they probably can't distinguish between "SDV being cautions and giving right of way" and "SDV stopping an immediate impact", they can just see a car in front of them suddnely stopping. So they should stop.
As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.
Earlier today saw a guy on a pick up truck griefing an empty Waymo by brake checking and boxing it, all over the road for about 10 minutes and over 5 blocks (no idea how much earlier it started), causing every other driver to freak out or be confused about what was going on.
All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".
I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle.
One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.
But taxis already existed?
Is is a receivable argument in a US court ? Or does it just influence a jury ?
Good thing we get wiser with age. Oh, wait no we don't. We insist on driving while beeing unable to look over the shoulder or having dementia. Knew somebody whose by no deceased dementia afflicted father used google to navigate him home when he forgot where he was. Thats the accidents with a "confused" driver, not from the accident.
Which country is this? In the UK they take your licence off you straight away as soon as there is a dementia diagnosis, I believe.
I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.
Best way to improve the behaviour of other drivers (at least in the UK): drive a van, ideally an unmarked one with a couple of dents already.
Miraculously everyone else suddenly learns how to drive and doesn't try anything stupid
Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.
I imagine these same people are the type of people who would throw something out the window of an AV too.
Nah I think the brain shuts down once you’re not in the driver seat. Wouldn’t see someone care enough to throw something at others from a taxi or a bus either.
Nah they already have tho there’s been bottles thrown shots fired people thrown from waymos
Plus waymos become v spicy if someone attacks while ur in it
If "road rage" is any indication, sometimes the reverse is true as well
The whole premise imagines that we have a fixed set of problems that have always been this way and are fully/honestly represented by this headline article by the chief NYT industry plug… and once corporations roll out the solutions, ta ta. We’ll be rolling fancy free. With 580,000 surplus Americans to boot!
this happened to me twice as a child, once on a main road with a shoulder and another time on a side street with no shoulder.
As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.
The solution for this is to improve biking infrastructure.
Not only that.
Copenhagen is littered with electric hire bikes, very often just a few steps from a bike rack with empty spaces.
Only one of the companies makes users photograph the bike to show it's been returned to a suitable spot.
Photographing bikes or electric scooters does nothing without enforcement through the city. It allows tracking down the person who placed it wrong, but in the absence of fines through the city, the rental companies surely won't start fining their customers and drive them away.
I doubt that. Across the street of our small organic shop around the corner is a bike parking spot. Still, I recently fall over a bike parked directly in front of the door of said shop. Bike people are lazy more often then not.
If someone parks a car in an illegal area, it can and should be towed. Same for bikes. Part of the needed "biking infrastructure" is proper policing and enforcement.
Why do you say that?
Do you think these people don't realize it's wrong, or that they do this kind of things during the 10 minute practical test?
If it is a thing that happened to them, why would you want them to not say it?
Also, the conclusion is sound from the experienced event.
> rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers.
Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconfident. I would be very surprised to find out they are above average drivers.
Per mile driven I expect it's true, just given their greater experience than most drivers. Not that I disagree with you that many Uber drivers are not actually great at driving, but neither is the average driver in North America. I expect we just notice rideshare drivers' mistakes more, and get exposed to them at a greater rate.
There's probably some sort of bias here when you observe someone else driving - it's like that joke - if someone drives slower than you - just curl up and die already boomer, and if they are driving faster than you - what an absolute psychopath.
Ride share companies use all kinds of techniques to off-board drivers that they deem unsafe. This can be as simple as tracking the driving record and accidents, but they also use the accelerometer in the driver app to assess the location of the car and what G-forces are being placed on it to figure out and predict high-risk (expensive) insurance.
I don't know how aggressive this filtering is, but it is a way to save money on the insurance costs associated with the gap insurance in rideshare. This filter alone would probably put rideshare drivers above average, but that's speculation on my part.
In my circle, everyone who's tried Waymo never wants to use Uber/Lyft with a human driver again. And, many of them wish they could own one or at least use one for much longer drives (100s of miles).
I would visit my mom (2hrs by car) more often if that 2hrs (each way) wasn't so stressful and exhausting and I could just be chauffeured by a self driving car while I browse the net, play a game, watch a movie, or talk to friends.
In the Netherlands were I live we use trains for this
Yeah, most places other than the US do. Good public transit is a far, far better solution than better cars. Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind. Fortunately there's progress, like in NYC and Seattle.
When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.
Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.
> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not necessarily trains or subways. Buses exist.
Only about 1 in 8 people globally lives in a large (> 10 million people) city.
Most people who live in cities are in cities with < 250,000 people.
Exactly how many live in cities at all is determined by where you drawn the cutoff at which it's no longer a city.
And my answer to that is, if your area where people live isn't able to support a bus line, it's not a city. That means there's a lot of reality big towns out there.
And here we get into details. The problem with buses is their rubber tires. The awesome thing about buses is also their rubber tires. Need to move the bus line around? No need to run new tracks, just have the driver drive a different route. But all the negativities to buses aren't small details. Because you can just up and move the bus route, it means that the cafe owner right by the stop is at the mercy of the city planning department to exist, which leads to obvious power issues aka corruption. After everything else is greenified, rubber tires are the biggest source of pylori pollution from buses.
With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.
Yes but they're worse than trams and trains.
It is perfectly possible to live in these places without cars as the primary means of transportation.
Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.
Many cities are doing it already with bike lanes which support both push-bikes and electric bicycles.
There's no practical reason we can't have good public transit AND better cars.
Well, besides the big three auto makers buying up all the public transit and decomissioning it.
No no the invisible hand of the market will fix it, you see. Car manufactures will become so big and pay so many taxes that we could pave every road with rail.
>Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind.
A former member of the Pinellas County[0] Sheriff's Department related a relevant story to me many years ago. It was the practice of sheriff's deputies to park near bars around closing time and wait for drunk folks to leave the bar, get into their cars and drive away. And these folks were almost always intoxicated.
One night, they waited outside the bar and a patron exited, stumbled a bit, dropped their car keys a few times, then got in their car and drove away.
Cue the lights and sirens and the deputy pulled the driver over and prepared to arrest them for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI). However, a field sobriety test[1] and a breathalyzer[2] showed the driver to be stone cold sober. When the deputy returned to the bar, all the other patrons had made their exits.
So, rather than having a designated driver, they had a designated decoy!!!
Good luck fixing that sort of attitude.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinellas_County,_Florida
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_sobriety_testing
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathalyzer
This is great until your city was built by a 50s urban planner. Past a certain amount of sprawl building functioning public transit becomes nearly impossible. LA and Santa Clara County come to mind here. LA can sort of work if you are on the metro and don't need transfers.
I kinda wish some day some dark wizard curses those two areas to lose 75% of their roads and parking lots and make everything a lot closer.
The US is ~263x larger than the Netherlands landmass wise. It would require a loooot more trains than we have or you have.
You put the trains where the people are, not in the middle of vast unpopulated stretches. Comparing land area is misleading and unhelpful.
Trouble is, when you need to get to the middle of nowhere is when you need transportation. If you stay within the densely populated areas where the people live you can walk. That's why people stopped living in rural areas after all; so that one didn't have to rely on transportation. Don't forget that rural areas had trains back before the urbanization movement! Passenger rail in the US died out because people moved closer together so that they didn't need mechanized travel.
The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of small cities etc. In the US you get maybe 5m in a contiguous city like Phoenix (which fills the circle) or the Bay Area. (LA is more dense and you might get 10m.)
Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. S the effective density experienced is much higher.
> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing.
Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have been woven into that after the fact to best support the rural-esq population shape.
Whereas America was built by the train. Established originally to support the same rural-esq shape idea, but, with little in the way of existing settlements, the train ended up enabling the people to purposefully congregate rather than simply expand outward, which allowed those congregations to be designed such that transportation was unnecessary; being the whole appeal of leaving friends and family behind to move into those settlements. The passenger train eventually started dying out at the height of the urbanization movement because there was no longer a mass benefit from it like the was, and continues to be, in Europe and other places that grew up in those earlier times.
Yeah thats a useful factor for all those "visiting mom in Portland" trips from Washington DC that a train is obviously meant to replace, not any of those "100 mi or less visits to mom" that de facto MUST be taken in a car regardless of the population density of the surrounding 100mi radius.
Also we should ignore the fact that the US already had a national rail network and STILL DOES for freight and had frequent regional rail service to even incredibly small podunk nowhere towns for decades. It's clearly impossible! We're too big! IT CAN'T BE DONE!
Where I live now to where my mom lives would take 24 to 30 hours by train and cost 400 to 500 usd. At 30mpg and $5/gal, the cost of driving is $200 and takes 12h. So I can take a train for double the time and cost or I can drive. Now consider round trip and passenger. It's 40 miles either side to get to a train. Neither side has a walkable city so being without a car sucks. Summer in one is hot as hell, winter in the other is frozen hell. Tell me again how trains are a viable option?
The vast size of the country sounds like an argument for trains, rather than against it? Trains are a comparatively cheap way to provide fast transportation between places where people actually live.
Not really. Over short-to-medium distances rail and air have similar door-to-door times, but as a country grows vast and travel is much more likely to happen over long distances then rail is much less compelling. Which means smaller ridership, which makes it difficult to support operations.
The US already had the nation-wide passenger rail system. At one time it was the envy of the world. It'd still be here if the riders were. But they moved on to newer technologies better suited to the landscape.
Now do China.
Technically a large landmass, but essentially nothing happens in the western half. For the sake of travel it is a relatively small country. Whereas NY->LA is the route the USA would need to most service if it were to get serious about such a thing. The short-run corridors are already reasonably well serviced.
Trouble is most people doing the NY->LA run are going to choose flight instead.
Trains or bikes, really (plenty of Waymo/Uber/Lyft trips aren't super far).
A 2h train ride is not a problem, but what is is the trip to and from the stations.
A 2h autonomous car ride removes that entirely.
In most places where train travel is an option, you'll probably be a 10-15 min walk from a station, or a 5 minute cycle, or a short connecting trip on a bus or tram. Multi-modal trips and short walks are normal in a lot of places - I know this isn't the case in America because of how American owned mapping apps like Google Maps go out of their way to hide routes with more than a 5 minute walk involved.
Meanwhile, my job commute is a 30 minute walk to the train station or... a 30 minute bus trip to the station (yeah, taking a bus literally saves no time at all). Plus a 50 minute train ride plus another 30 minute walk.
Honestly, I would 100% use a car for this if it weren't for the fact that doing so is literally 10 times more expensive. I'm sure this is the case for the vast majority of people that use public transport. And I just can't wait for a world of cheap electric autonomous cars where I don't need to waste my time and I can sleep comfortably on my commute.
Buddy buy a Tesla, as that’s definitely gonna happen in the medium term.
Self driving is coming to Teslas next year! [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Not only that, it's going to happen every year. Most achievements only happen once.
Enforcement, too, including the little things that "don't really matter". Letting people get away with minor infringements like parking where it's forbidden, idling with the engine running, close passes etc means the window of what's acceptable driving behaviour shifts.
We should return to the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right.
AFAIK there isn't data about fatality rate for rideshare services (I'm sure Uber has this data but I don't think they make it public). Without this data I wouldn't automatically jump to the conclusion that rideshare services are safer than the average driver, anecdotally at least I don't see any reason to assume this.
It's also extremely important to normalize this data per geo and driving type (urban vs freeway miles), which Waymo does do and you seem to ignore.
> It's also extremely important to normalize this data per geo and driving type (urban vs freeway miles)
Getting to be well beyond the range of “armchair HN statistician”.
Sounds like something the government should do as part of public policy deliberations.
In my dreams.
> It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
You already have it, people want this.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
> people want this.
Could you justify this? e.g. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2024.2325386 (N=1890):
"What first comes to mind when you hear the term self-driving vehicles?" (coded free-text) 17% positive, 34% neutral, 49% negative
"How would you feel about riding in a self-driving vehicle instead of the existing ways you travel?" 28% comfortable, 15% neutral, 53% uncomfortable
"How would you feel about using the roads alongside self-driving vehicles?" 29% comfortable, 20% neutral, 49% uncomfortable
That was a few years ago. I wonder if feelings have changed as more people get experience with self driving vehicles.
Looking at the companion reports it seems to me like boomers are bringing the numbers down. Once they die off we’re good to go.
> And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
Keep in mind the lesson of seat belts. Which is that the highest-risk drivers are also the least likely to wear a seatbelt.
Selective recruitment is a danger in this armchair analysis, too. I don’t think 18 year olds aren’t giving up the thrill of tearing down side streets at 60mph to use a self-driving car - they probably can’t even afford one. To be honest, I am just guessing at the profile of the biggest offenders but insurance rates seem to back me up.
A horrifying number of people flagrantly use their phones while driving. Im not talking about peaking at a text or google maps, but straight up scrolling tik tok while driving. At the end of the day there is going to be a lowest common denominator of selfish morons on the road, and the two practical solutions I see are 1) aggressive surveillance state grade distracted driving enforcement 2) self driving cars.
I used to bike to work in Chicago and it was surreal being able to look right into someone's car and see hardly anyone is paying attention.
I'll also never forget the first time getting hit by a car (car did left turn when I was biking straight through a green light) and right before impact seeing the driver's face illuminated by their phone while looking straight down driving into me.
It doesn't have to be a surveillance state for enforcement. Just preventing repeat offenders would practically remove that lowest denominator. For example, I knew a guy in high school who totaled 4 cars and had other minor accidents in 2 years. There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle. On the prevention side, we could require more training.
If you tried to enforce self driving cars, you'd still need some level of surveillance too.
> There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle
Doesn't much of america outside of cities also have the secondary problem of you physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything without operating a vehicle?
Sounds like a great incentive to make sure you don’t lose your driving privileges.
Or maybe - build a world where you don't need driving privileges just to exist
That is certainly something we have done horribly wrong in most of the US.
At some point the cost has to be high enough to get the attention of the offender.
I hope you wouldn’t be saying this if they had killed someone in one of their crashes. How about injured? They must have. Get some standards instead of saying everything is ok.
I am not saying anything is ok, where did you read that?
>For example, I knew a guy in high school who totaled 4 cars and had other minor accidents in 2 years.
Wait, he did all that in high school?
I heard something about "20% of drivers are responsible for most of the insurance claims" but it sounds like that one guy is jacking up the averages!
> Just preventing repeat offenders would practically remove that lowest denominator.
That requires enforcement which no longer exists in many cities.
I play the "who is staring at their phone" game as passenger sometimes. From my sampling, the number is pretty damn close to 100%.
> So would banning alcohol.
As in a full on country wide prohibition? Whatever amount of road deaths that would prevent would be offset by idiots dying via drinking industrial spirits.
National Safety Council says passenger vehicles are 0.46 per 100M miles, trains are 0.01 and busses 0.009.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
The best way to reduce driving fatalities is probably to reduce the amount of driving that people do. Excellent public transit, denser cities, better pedestrian / bike infrastructure, mixed-use zoning, etc.
My (simple, naive, etc.) solution is to ban young males from driving until they're 25. Immediate drop in the accident rate plus a clamour for better public transport / bike infrastructure that even the dumbest government couldn't ignore.
(Yes, I know this is completely unworkable, sadly.)
Per highway mile, now, I am not sure if overall is better or worse. But it seems to be a discrepancy to Waymo measurement.
Also not sure if Waymo data includes pedestrian deaths? (NSC seems not to)
Sorry, why would the baseline be their rideshare drivers instead of the average population? That seems like an arbitrary segment given that when talking about safety baselines, the average driver is what someone would reference. And why would waymo want to publish their own ride share driver safety data, especially if it is presumably not supporting their point, and what would anyone gain from them doing that? If they did do that, the counter argument would quickly be "they published ride share driver data because they know it makes them look better, why not compare to the average driver?" (Its equivalent because we do not have stats on waymo drivers vs the average driver and both statements are built off assumptions)
I believe their argument is weak but, I think it is a fair assumption that the average ride share driver is safer than the average driver. That is to say the average driver is unsafe due to the fact the average driver is the set of all people which includes the set of drunk drivers whereas we can generally assume that set of rideshare drivers don't, especially while on the clock.
Good point. Waymo is not comparing apples to apples here
"At-fault" Waymo crashes on 35mph city roads driven only in good weather vs. all crashes regardless of fault for on all roads including highways driven in all weather conditions
(Ex-Waymo) Waymo tries really hard to compare apples to apple miles, considering a number of dimensions (weather, speed limits of the roads the miles are on, the specific cities, and more). This is one of the things that they feel distinguishes them in the space.
The data on https://waymo.com/safety/ reflects these apples to apples comparison.
They’ve also, when possible, done comparisons of the Waymo driver to an ideally attentive human driver. https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/
The biggest challenge is in sourcing the data. A lot of these datasets don't exist or have to be developed.
(The article itself, mixes and matches stats which is a common thing in general media).
Do human drivers in the same "good weather" cities have fewer accidents than human in other places?
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
fault absolutely matters. and with two fatal accidents, it should be trivial to find out if waymo is at fault.
it is bad faith, otherwise.
You could have looked up the collisions instead of making vague accusations of bad faith. In one, a Tesla going 98MPH collided with a line of vehicles (including a Waymo) stopped at a light. In the other, a motorcyclist hit a Waymo from behind and fell off their bike, where they were struck and killed by another vehicle (that fled).
I am not the one saying "fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either".
And yes, I'm aware of the fault of the incidents.
Fault matters in general, but it's not captured in the stats so you can't make an accurate comparison.
No, but we can know that there are zero at fault for Waymo. That's important context.
Not sure if you meant to imply it, but you don't need to remove driver liability to incentivize the inebriated to use autonomous mode. That's a calculation even someone who's blackout drunk can easily make.
Removing liability might incentivize more people to, e.g., drive their car to a bar. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Maybe great for bars and restaurants, or possibly quality of life, but removing liability probably has other unintended consequences.
It's maybe too early tell whether criminal liability should be changed, or at least how it should be changed. If criminal liability had been removed when Tesla started making their extravagant self-driving claims, surely you'd agree it would have been too soon, and potentially resulted in more accidents. Few if any consumer autonomous driving modes are as reliable as Waymo
Absent statutory changes, common law tort will probably evolve in some states to take into consideration new incentives and norms, and that might help point the way for changes in criminal law. Those policy changes are typically driven by courts wrestling with real world cases, whereas de novo legislative changes are often driven by imaginations and lobbying.
Criminal liability aside, if I am in a wheelchair all my life, requiring expensive medical care, someone will need to pay for that. So civil liability will need to be sonewhere.
The manufacturer would still be liable, same as if the brakes malfunctioned.
Is that not precisely the point of the current discussion? Currently, the manufacturer is not liable. The liability can not be delegated by the driver.
The manufacturers of a self-driving car can be held and are held liable today, same as if the brakes were defective (strict product liability) or improperly marketed (negligence). That doesn't mean the driver might not also be liable. It all depends on why an accident occurred and a host of other factors. There's really nothing special about self-driving cars in this respect, except that litigation can be much more factually complicated. For failing breaks, it's relatively clear given X speed and Y distance, and assuming they were engaged, whether they worked. Then you work backwards from there. Negligent driving? Poor maintenance (driver or mechanic)? Defective design? But in driver assistance and automation systems there are many more questions about what was actually expected to happen, or what was reasonable to expect to happen.
But there is lots of money to be made by requiring FSD. No money to be made by banning alcohol. We know what the current administration cares about
And those CDL drivers go at speed limit because they have to cover as much distance as possible, meanwhile Waymo and similar driverless tech frequently go 10km/h below speed limit. I believe there would be much less incidents by humans if they too were to drive at those speeds.
These are great points. I would add that part of societal buy-in might involve driving the cost of hiring cars down by automating them, though I realize at the moment Waymo can charge a premium because people prefer to not have a human driver. Over the long term autocars should be cheaper than either Uber or owning a car yourself.
I was talking more about mandating or encouraging the tech in personal vehicles. I think there's plenty of buy-in for driverless taxis already. It's a perception thing - trust a stranger or trust an automated system. I think it's a much tougher sell to put it in person vehicles, especially due to cost.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol.
The biggest thing would be safer road/street design, but Americans are kind of allergic to that. Talk about traffic calming or road diets and a lot of folks get absolutely furious.
And an even bigger thing would be providing viable alternatives to driving, which would reduce the amount of cars on the roads, and help with those driving unsafely (because they're tired, not good drivers, "had a couple of drinks", etc).
Correct, part of safer street and road design is supporting transit, biking, and walking.
That said, it's essentially impossible to get rid of cars entirely, and you can see that just by looking at countries or even regions that have good transit and notice that they still have tons of cars. Even Singapore has lots of cars, and the entire country is a super-dense city-state!
So it's definitely worthwhile to develop self-driving cars and trucks, even if you have fantastic transit and biking and walking available.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data
You can't subsidise "better driver education" (to a meaningful sense, to my knowledge) or "banning alcohol." You literally can't do the latter. We tried, and I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
You can use direct poicy action to save lives through AVs.
So at the end of the day, we're deflecting from harm reduction to preserve a parochial mode of transport or not.
I took banning alcohol to mean lowering driving BAC to 0%, not banning alcohol society-wide.
It would be a lot easier for drivers to have the following thought process: "I drank tonight, I can't drive home" rather than "I drank two beers over the period of 3 hours, am I good? Yeah, probably, let's gooo."
> I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.
I barely drink, but the previous attempt to ban it was terrible for society. I totally understand their thinking on this.
From what I’ve been able to read it seems like it was a net positive public health intervention that’s been horribly dramatized.
Drink driving has stiff penalties in the UK. It is also socially unacceptable to drink and drive. The UK also has increased requirements on drivers, and the number of road deaths is far lower per capita than it was in the 60s when there were fewer people driving. There are numerous other measures, which are too numerous to list here.
My understanding is that in US states a DUI (Wisconsin) is nothing but a fine, and drinking while driving isn't taken seriously at all.
Insurance underwriters may make societal buy-in easier when rates are vastly different but that may take quite a while to hit critical mass so both drivers are self driven
That observed fatality rate, 2, is too low to give a precise estimate of the mean. If we assume fatalities follow a Poisson process, then it's plausible (at 5% significance level) that the true expectation is only 0.36 deaths, not 2.
So it's more useful to look at serious injury statistics as a proxy. For those, Waymo says that there is a significant reduction.
The CDL comparison seems misleading. Those are very large and safe vehicles that are mostly on the highway. Being close to that number is impressive to me.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Superman: I want to get rid of guns.
Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale. Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.
Superman: But most. You know we could.
Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.
Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Some would fight.
Superman: Let them come then, with sticks. Think of the lives we’d save. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Smoking.
Superman: What?
Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more. People keep smoking even though they know it’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die.
Superman: And?
Mr. Terrific: You want to save lives? Jail every smoker. Check. And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check. Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check. Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.
Superman: You’re not going to help me, are you?
Mr. Terrific: No, sir, I am not.
Banning drugs like alcohol imo is not a solution for any drug, people have their own reasons to consume them and the underlying cause should be resolved first
Does n=2 give any statistical significance? Or does that come from the miles?
With the miles you can establish a confidence interval of the true fatality rate.
So would reducing car dependency altogether...
Aside from the fact that I don’t see how you can calculate a rate off two data points (without really wide error bars), I also don’t understand how fault doesn’t matter. If neither of these were Waymo’s fault, then Waymo has never caused a fatal accident, whereas we can assume that nearly all of the fatal accidents that make up the rate you’re comparing it with were caused by a human, right? Well, at least the ones that were someone’s fault as opposed to random chance or something.
The form of the data pretty much forces this kind of analysis because fault is not reliably recorded (or even known, to be fair).
Worse human driving improves the number of lives autonomous driving saves
>you also have to have societal buy-in.
Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.
If fatality rates were higher, then maybe. But at 1.3 per 100 million miles, it seems like that would have low effect.
Waymo is better than it was last year. And next year it will be better than it is now. And every year after that it will continue to improve. Meanwhile, a thousand years from now humans will still be humans.
I don't know why you come across as so antagonistic to self driving cars. But even if they're only as good as humans today, then you have completely and flat out lost the argument already.
Don't forget the elderly. They are responsible for a crash in roughly $age% of the cases. So a 66 yo person is the reason for a crash in 2/3 of the cases... I hear Greece has a mandatory doctor visit after 65 of so every 2 years. Since that is hard to politically get through in other countries apparently, AVs might save some lives here if made mandatory of the elderly.
They make pensioners retake their driving tests here (UK) after a certain age and do basic health checks.
>It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
The lower auto liability and umbrella insurance premiums alone would drive buy-in.
It’s literally the riskiest thing people do with the costliest consequences.
If the most advanced ie FSD by Tesla still does not come with gurantee and the human has to babysit it ie stay alert at all time so they can take over in a moments notice or less , then shouldn’t the positive results be also attributable to the humans that drive those autonomous vehicles?
>Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace
"Interesting" is doing so much heavy lifting here.
Fully agreeing with your other points as well.
> The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Citation definitely needed.
The last couple of human rideshare drivers I have had were AWFUL. One was so awful that I gave them a one star with "Actively dangerous remove from road, please." I never give one star reviews.
> Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person... Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
LOL, we have a machine that can now drive much more safely than average humans, and comparable to professional drivers. Yeah, this is not impressive at all. C'mon people, wake me up when we actually make some real technological progress, will ya?
Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas.
(https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...)
The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad. Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad."
I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.
How many of those 64% had their accident because of phones/drugs/recklessness and claimed to be distracted instead? With all the liability and shame involved in fatal crashes there's absolutely no way people are going to honestly self report illegal behavior.
Phones definitely fall in that category. I’m guessing they are the majority, but I don’t know how to substantiate that.
Hopefully police are figuring out that one of the parties in the accident is high while they do the interview.
The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.
Seems at least somewhat comparable to walking through a forest full of predators, while, say, hunting/gathering.
Evidence that is is compatible with our psyche is the fact that we're at 1.19 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, and ~50% of those being booze and/or speeding.
That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.
At least they have simulators. Last time I saw a driving simulator I was a teenager.
Imagine you had to pass a simulator test involving responding to ANY crisis while driving before your license would be renewed. Rates of driving would plummet.
I bet most drivers don’t even correctly handle a flat tire on the expressway.
> The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while […]
The average one-way commute time in the US is less than half an hour:
* https://www.census.gov/topics/employment/commuting/guidance/...
If you can't pay attention for less than 30 minutes should you really be operating a multi-ton death machine?
Their point is that a “driver take over autonomous” mode is useless because nobody would pay attention to their surroundings at all.
The average person can't last even the length of an elevator trip without reaching for social media.
You can see it in what people say right after an accident, stuff like "He came out of nowhere".
As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint:
Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
Good here is in reference to the average crash statistics.
Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.
I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.
How is she able to get insurance coverage?
Most US states have some sort of assigned risk pool which makes minimum coverage available to even the worst drivers, as long as they still have a valid license. (I'm not claiming that this is necessarily a good public policy, just pointing out that it exists.)
https://insurify.com/car-insurance/knowledge/assigned-risk-a...
I'm happy to make the claim this is terrible policy that literally kills people. Every dollar spent on this should go toward transit funding instead.
But, when the (sad) alternative is that person keeps driving without insurance and the unfortunate victims are left with the full bill, I think the absurd insurance may be better than not?
Surely this problem is mostly solvable with ALPRs now. Every plate is attached to an owner and the insurance status can be checked. There's the situation where an uninsured driver is using someone elses car, but that's at least most uninsured drivers taken off the road.
1) What makes you think she has insurance coverage?
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science
With that many accidents, I'd assume bankruptcy if she didn't.
re: 2) yes that was the point. She'd have to be paying multiple thousands in an assigned-risk pool policy with that record of at-faults.
An estimated 1 in 6 drivers in Los Angeles don't have insurance. I know at least a dozen people who have been hit by uninsured drivers, and that's not counting hit and runs, who probably are also mostly uninsured.
The victim's own insurance will pay if they have uninsured motorist coverage (you'd be a fool not to have it, living in LA at least), but there is basically no punishment for the uninsured driver, assuming a fender-bender. The police won't do anything. The insurance companies don't think it's worth their time to try to squeeze out something from someone who probably has almost nothing anyway.
Unfortunately, if you make (or are born with) enough resources, you might skate for quite a while. Eventually you might get a lot of fines and even some jail time, but afterwards, some people just take their chances and drive anyway.
Strangely enough... Most US states do not require insurance. Yes, really!
In almost every state, you may post a bond in lieu of insurance, for an amount as low as $35,000!
You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.
Population level statistics let you look for statistical aberrations that you can’t detect at the individual level.
Further suppose you define “good driving” as a set of behaviors but failed to include narcolepsy or similar medical conditions in your definition, then some of your “good” drivers would represent a significant risk to the general public. Thus the actual criteria the defines good driver behavior is accidents.
It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).
I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".
A huge percentage of the cars I see on the highway are tailgating. People are awful drivers.
The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash.
The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven.
So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.
Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
> "~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes"
That's between fatalities, not between crashes. The reported injury rate is 62 times higher than the fatality rate, and the overall police-reported crash rate is 170 times higher than the fatal crash rate.
You are correct, I missed the adjective on my second use. As my points were exclusively about fatal crashes and I never mentioned the injury or crash rate at any point and previously used 5,500 years exclusively in relation to fatal crashes, it should be obvious that I intended to mean that and my point still stands with that correction.
My primary concern is with your treatment of "unsafe" as meaning nothing less than "dead".
80% of the data (for fatalities per km) in that table is missing
Remember, I'm responding specifically to how good people are at driving, not how likely they are to die while driving. How likely a person is to die is mediated by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how good they are as a driver, like airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones.
In thread context, you're conflating a bunch of things, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.
1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.
2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.
3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.
4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.
5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.
Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:
If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?
The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc
edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.
It's more of a category error to imply that robotaxis are 92% safer than human-driven taxis if it turns out that the raw accident rate they're baselining against is disproportionately caused by people who not only aren't full time professional drivers but shouldn't be allowed near a car [in their current state]...
The article uses robotaxis as its example self-driving group, but it's not an article about robot vs human taxis. It's an article about self-driving vs non-self-driving vehicles.
The nice thing about a future where all cars are self-driving (this probably will happen) is that it won't only be the taxis that get replaced.
The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.
I mean when comparing to machines though the only thing the machines are better at is maybe not getting distracted while humans tend to be better at adapting which is usually important for safety to put it mildly
After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
This is not supported by crash data. In Australia alcohol is involved in some 30% of fatal crashes. A lot of crashes are caused by a very small number of hoon drivers, distracted drivers etc.
Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise
So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, public safety concerns, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is insolvent, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as 100% nothing will change for the better in this regard, so then car driving it is. I didn't make it this way, it's the way the city management has botched it over the last decades, but it's still on me now to adapt to it, and cars are one of the ways.
I agree with you in spirit, that everyone should have great public transport ideally, but when cities are broke and that infra doesn't exist, then that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK cool, but with what money?
> So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
Huge amounts of insolvency is due to supporting this failed urban planning experiment. Urban centers are significantly more economically productive and significantly less expensive. Carism leads people into this trap when they should be advocating for significant expansion of dense cities and transit.
This is just learned helplessness. The US already spends unfathomable amounts of money and resources on car infra, and there's always some nonsensical defense like "it's just impossible to do it any other way!", as if cars are simply a law of nature. That lack of money can be solved by diverting some of the money going into roads into instead improving public transport infra.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".
No one said it is, and I even clarified at the end that better public transport infra makes life for drivers easier as well. More public transport means less people on the road since they're concentrated in buses and trains and trams, meaning for people who do need cars, they have to compete for less space on the road.
For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.
The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.
Unnecessary is a very strong word. It's also unnecessary to have your own private house, sharing it with other people would be more efficient.
The point is this: if you live in a city with bad/no public transport, then a car is necessary for going about everyday life. If you live in a city with good public transport, it's really not.
Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.
Private houses aren't killing tens of thousands a year.
You can argue all day whether cars are good or bad. That's not my point. My point is that pretending public transport is equivalent to cars if you have good enough infrastructure is silly. They are different experiences, each with their own tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs matter differently to different people.
I don't think anybody was suggesting getting rid of cars.
I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
> Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked.
How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh.
It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.
Does that skew really matter? Nearly all of those conditions are avoided by autonomous vehicles.
Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter.
The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety.
At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually.
literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere.
i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
My tesla has yet to ask for a road beer while in FSD.
Can of coke and a ciggy, fsd'll be right as rain.
> Life in USA is extremely car-centric
Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.
As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.
Even in New York City, a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
> Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers
> But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
It is 27%, but that's because of COVID. It used to be around 50% before and it's recovering to those levels.
So even now, during abnormal times, it's 27% plus walking around 40% and bikes are 5% and growing.
So non car transportation in all of NYC is 72%.
And the trend is only going one way, with transit on the way up and recovering post COVID and bikes also going up.
I wouldn't be surprised if 2030 NYC statistics put cars around 15-20%, so a quite small minority.
Pedantically true. By population density, NYC is essentially the whole state, or what matters anyway, to the huge majority of residents.
About 60% of New Yorkers are outside of NYC.
I don't live in NYC for the record, my point was more about not having to own a car than public transport, hence i gave a few options surrounding traveling through NYC.
It says a lot that 3 of the 4 options you gave involve cars.
You don't have to own the cars is my argument.
> The majority of drivers are good
Well, 80% of us believes ourselves to be above average, so there's that.
I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.
People always say this, but
a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and
b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason.
We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.
A better idea would just be to let drivers pay the real price for the infrastructure they occupy and their negative externalities.
Then people would likely not have a issue with public transit.
"Let's make car owners more miserable" is a typical sentiment held by young, healthy people who live in dense cities and ride an electric bicycle to work.
Not everyone can do that. Many areas also completely lack the public transit infrastructure needed to support a normal life.
E.g., a couple of days ago, I was shocked to learn just how bad the UK public transport system really is, apparently, outside of major metros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286)
Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited.
But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.
> the last mile it's pretty limited.
Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here (https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-...) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mountains.
It's certainly doable, if you wanted to have last mile public transport.
Another consideration that needs to be made before tossing out private transit because "public transit is better" is not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
If it is 2am and you need to get home as a woman, it would be a no brainer to get in an autonomous vehicle while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
If you have sensory difficulties that make public transit uncomfortable, private transit is always the better option.
The list goes on for many reasons and people that having only public transit would harm. The idea we can get rid of or otherwise push out private transit marginalizes everyone who isn't prototypical nor should we hand-wave that they can just rely on runs-on-other-people's-time disabled specific transports to get them into city centers because private transport isn't allowed in.
> not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
People on wheelchair do drive, often with hands control. I knew a guy who would drive manual, since in our country automatic didn't even exist at the time. All with his hands.
Also as a disabled guy myself, public transport here in sweden is NOT accessible (despite what the swedish propaganda will claim) but even if it were, you're not going to have a stop inside your apartment, and when there's roadworks or ice or whatever and they leave you stranded 1-2km away from where you were supposed to go, having a ramp on the bus isn't going to help you that much.
Also I've witnessed drivers picking up and literally throwing out a woman on a wheelchair because the ramp didn't work. It wasn't her stop, she didn't want to get off, they were simply fed up with trying to get it to work.
You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US.
Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want.
I'm in Austin, and Waymos rule. I walk most places, bike others, and rarely drive. I very, very rarely get a rideshare (and often get Waymo by way of Uber lottery). Autonomous vehicles exist, are real, and serve an actual need in this very low density city that most people on HN have heard of. I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second. I would even pay for that to happen.
If you're arguing about some idealistic society, that's one thing. In reality these things are way better than our public transit, and fixing public transit in a place this (not) dense is not as easy as you might think. The last mile is real, and people are coming from every direction and going every other direction and not willing to wait and transfers when these autonomous vehicles already solve the problems door to door so inexpensively.
> I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second.
Uh, what?
US cities are spread out due to policies enacted only 50–60 years ago to improve connectivity by car. New policies can (and will) reshape them again in the next couple of decades. For example, building transit creates environments where people's trips are well served by transit.
Since many commenters do not understand that "the last mile" is a term of art and not simply 5,280 feet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)#Usa...
Trains and subways, by definition, are not serving you in that "last mile". The "last mile" is where you disembark from the closest rapid/public transport, but you still need to travel to your destination.
Every time you make someone switch modes of transportation to complete their commute, the suffering increases exponentially in my personal experience. I much prefer going door to door and getting the benefit of resting my mind and body.
I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country.
Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable.
There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times).
I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?
> when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited.
That's like a 15 minute walk. And with sufficient infrastructure investments this can be 5 minutes.
And when folks are given that option or driving they will always take driving.
Obviously that's not true, but moreover it's meaningless – what counts as an option?
But it is. In America if you tell someone they are going to need to walk home for 15 minutes they will in the base case opt to take their car.
This type of convo has come up in a number of different ways on HN and folks just hand wave away the problems in the US all the time. Americans don’t want to walk outside for an extended amount of time and the last mile(s) problem is quite hard.
In most US cities you cannot economically solve the last mile problem efficiently with public transit and similarly most folks will already opt to take their car even if the public transit is great.
So what are you trying to say?
This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking.
Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space.
We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.
Sure just ping Tesla Connect. You dont even need to use the app or scan a QR code. It just reads your neuralink.
Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
>Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience.
Not so great for family trips, shopping around, etc.
Those (rare) occasions are when you rent a car. You can do it many times per year before it becomes a financially worse option.
Someone does not have kids.
It’s currently 95 degrees. No thanks
Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
They really should just open up letting you have a small vehicle everywhere in the country. Sometimes you visit some city or little rural area where they let you drive golf carts or atvs or snow mobiles on the roads, grocery store lots are more full of those instead of bigger vehicles as a result, and the sky doesn't seem to fall down either.
Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
>air conditioned bubbles on wheels.
You say it like its a bad thing.
I get it if you live in a dense metro. A car is not worth it in NYC, SF, etc. Other than that it's pretty abnormal for people not to want a car. It's usually some weird anxiety about driving. Not to mention - heaven forbid - you have a family.
They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
And ideally enough mass to violently crush their neighbors.
That’s the smart car
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
Because they are completely unsafe against a twice-the-height, multi-ton Ford pickup truck.
Let me guess… you live somewhere warm and mostly dry? Probably on the younger side and don’t have any kids.
I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too.
When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car.
I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
>I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co
When the bus (in your example) runs on a hourly schedule, while your car is always there when you spontaneously need it, then that freedom is real and not just propaganda.
I did this type of commute before where I had to catch the bus to work, which was also once every hour, and the anxiety during my early morning routine to not miss the bus was crazy since missing it meant one more hour of wait, compared to the freedom of jumping in my car without a fixed schedule while also saving 1h/day of time compared to the public transit, the difference was night and day, not propaganda.
Now if I had a train/subway to work, where I could sit down, and it ran every 15 minutes or less, then yeah, fuck driving and public transport all the way, but nobody sits in traffic for fun, but because of all options for their commute, driving is the better option.
Then let's keep on fucking the planet, and let's keep on moving 70kg of meat over 30km per day on average with 2500kg of steal, 400kg of battery, etc. super efficient and sustainable!
>we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
Didn't you just say you can get around fine on the bus? Can't you just get a car if it suits you?
For me personally it's nice to have a car. It would certainly be tough if I had less resources and public transit would be more appreciated.
Many things are "nice", a lot of these things aren't compatible with long term sustainable living on earth though
Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it.
I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
The famously warm and dry countries of Norway[1] and Finland[2]!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCedclz03uI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
The famously small conurbations and the reality that Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year. They have cars and public transit for the rest.
I'd add that these discussions tend to handwave the reality of safety when you're on an open platform movie at high speeds, the reality that not all people are physically able, and a lot of others issues that the vocal "cars are the devil" folks don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and it increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "kill all pitbulls" crowd.
> Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year.
They very much bike all year round, even in the north where it regularly gets to -20C(-4F) in winter. Biking in snowy sub-freezing weather is really not a big deal as long as you maintain the bike paths as well as the streets.
Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used. The only time I can recall where people I knew who usually commuted by bike didn't do so was during an unusually heavy snowstorm. They instead had to walk about half a kilometer to/from where the city had managed to plow the streets and take a taxi. That was decades ago.
I'd really recommend you watch the 2nd video about Oulu which addresses literally every single point you just made.
Scandanavians have been getting around without cars for millenia. Nobody had even heard of a car until just over a century ago.
Car dependent infrastructure is definitely not helpful for the physically disabled, as well as those too young, too old, and too poor to drive a car. This and a lot of other issues that the vocal and active "cars aren't the devil" crowd don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "Pitbulls make great family dogs" crowd.
"People have been giving birth since the first humans existed, why go to a hospital?"
"People have been living with viruses for all of history and beyond, why use vaccines?"
"People have been walking for millions of years, why use a bike or a scooter?"
Hospitals at the dawn of the 19th century in Europe were generally places only poor people in desperate situations went to give birth because they were hives of disease transmission.
The notion that doctors should wash their hands between treating one patient and the next was met with ridicule. Doctors were insulted by the suggestion that their hands might be unclean, so mortality rates for childbirth in hospitals were horrendous. The idea of handwashing emerged and died many times before it finally caught on, and then only at the behest of vigorous campaigning over a generation.
There is a long list of hidden costs and negative externalities associated with car dependent sprawl as well, they are well studied, but nobody want to hear that their hands are unclean. This idea one should be washing their hands a dozens times per shift is patently absurd. Physicians would be wasting hours a day just washing their hands! How would we be able to treat all these patients?
I can walk a mile. Rarely have to in the city.
I think you need to re-read the parent comment, specifically this part:
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
You're almost certainly an American, and you probably have no idea what public transit is like in countries that have been investing in it for decades instead of focusing 95% of their resources on infrastructure for cars.
The problem with transit systems is that they aren't designed for competition. They're costly to make, have few builder companies to choose from (who all know the game very well and go over budget as a tactic), and extremely difficult to overhaul/retrofit when more efficient tech becomes available.
They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long.
As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.
Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.
So at 2am you would have thousands of cars driving around empty?
Or would you still need a giant spot of land to park these things outside of peak hour?
The giant spot of land could be in a much less convenient (= valuable) location if the car can take itself to and from there.
No. That's false. Riders will want a car to be at their location ASAP, or they will try to call another company.
So the incentive will be to put/drive cars very close to where people are.
That whole "cars will be stored at the periphery" is propaganda.
Roads designed for buses (and trucks) also cost many orders of magnitude more than ones build for cars only.
If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.
It does. About the same amount of money was spent in funding for Waymo as funding SFMTA over the period Waymo has existed. So in SF we are putting in as much money on public transit as Alphabet et al. is on Waymo and we both have the results we have.
>If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros.
If we're talking about a small country then sure.
> The majority of the US is not inside a city.
I think this isn't true for the US any more, maybe it hasn't been true for decades?
WorldBank seems to have the ubranisation rate at around 80% for the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...
There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.
We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies.
I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.
> Public transportation must be built by the local government,
Amtrak is public transportation. Airlines are pretty close to public transportation. Local government doesn't need to be involved.
To my knowledge there are only a handful of public transit systems in the world that operate at a profit, let alone that operate at enough of a profit to recover construction costs. As in, maybe 5 if you squint really hard. Who do you expect to fund new ones if not the government?
Regional or state is better than local government. Local governments would struggle to raise the required funds for the costs of modern transit and would have a mandate to really support transit within their municipal borders vs a regional solution that is agnostic to the byzantine municipal borders.
Small self-driving busses would do exactly what you want. The cost of increasing bus service is overwhelmingly the cost of bus drivers. If the busses could drive themselves, cities could afford to deploy a lot more busses, especially smaller busses, running much more often.
As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile.
And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation.
It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.
[1]: https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit
That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
> And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
Self driving taxis have to be parked (or cruise around continuously), I guess, and that parking better be close cause ain't no one waiting for a self driving car parked 30 minutes away to get moving.
>all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.
Demand is based on time of day/week/month/year.
Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem.
The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult.
For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.
AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.
Building roads for buses are _few orders of magnitude more_ expensive than roads for cars only.
Unfortunately we still have trucking, but it's starting to feel we should build separate roads for them and for special cases only allow multi-axle delivery trucks on normal roads.
You’re right, we should!
We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficiency.
You can see where I’m going with this. ;-)
I don't. Railways are failing around the world, including freight.
You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?
No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.
I see. But Waymo investments are also vanishingly small compared to PT OpEx. If you for some reason could tap all of the Waymo money, operations and R&D and all of the rest of it, you could fund WMATA and that's it. Americans spend 100x more just on motor fuels than Waymo spends on itself. If you wanted to raise a similar amount of money you would need a mere 5¢ incremental gas tax. Private Americans furthermore spend $1 trillion every year just replacing and fixing their cars. You could double the public transit subsidy across the nation with a 5% car tax.
Cybercab is more efficient per rider mile than most public transit systems.
Public transit is too often a jobs program
The safest car is the one that is parked. I’m not anti-car but in terms of safety we should focus more on getting people using bus/rail/bike/walk especially for daily needs. It’s more cost effective too. Autonomous cars are cool and will be great for reducing crashes, but it’s an additive solution, not a subtractive one.
It’s okay to be anti-car. Even if you own a car and use it regularly. There’s more than enough reasons to be anti-car. Just pick your favorite.
Yes, instead of fixing the problem let's go back 100 years and start walking everywhere. It's easy for someone that works for home or an in office, but most people truly rely on their cars, otherwise they would lose hours everyday...
Most people in societies built car-first/only (USA) truly rely on their cars. The situation is not the same in big parts of Europe and Asia. We can go 100 years forward and fund public infrastructure which is better for the environment, more safe and gives a much higher socio-economic value (except for the highway lobby).
Public transit is not "100 years back". London, uk is not exactly backwards looking in that sense, and the vast majority of people use trains/metto to go to work.
I walk 10k steps a day on a normal day, only drive when necessary to go out of my normal routes. This has an added benefit of keeping me, an aging programmer, in shape (as well as other relevant activities).
Nothing dramatic about it at all.
It is healthy to walk. You should be walking probably an hour a day at least if we are being honest. You are made to hunt and forage all day, not sit down. Use it or lose it.
The most likely scenario at this point it:
- autonomous cars cause fewer accidents
- so either insurance will be cheaper for them
- AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up
- even if only one happens, the relative cost of insurance will change in favor of autonomous
- driving your own car becomes a kind of "prestige" thing where only really wealthy people do it (similar to owning your own plane etc)
> The most likely scenario at this point it:
> - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents
> - so either insurance will be cheaper for them
> - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up
If they were going to do that, they would have done it by now for those drivers opting into the insurance monitor device: they can literally tell that you're a driver that never took a risk, never got into a situation to brake hard, never drove recklessly, etc, and yet, the insurance cost with the device is only slightly less than the insurance cost without the device.
In any case, if this was strictly a financial decision, why would the human cost go up? The larger the percentage of SDVs there are on the road, the less likely a human driver gets into an accident, their risk goes down too, so their insurance should also go down.
It's a pool. If all the drunks switch to autonomous vehicles then we all win. If all the school teachers switch to autonomous vehicles then the drunks lose.
In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.
exactly this
Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?
Driving yourself will become like horse riding, something you do on private property for sport rather than transport.
> Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?
My understanding is that it is a legal and safety liability for them to drive. The driver is employed by and the car is owned by a company that the wealthy person founded and pays so if the driver hits & kills someone, the company gets sued for a bunch of money then the liability can be discharged in bankruptcy / isolated to the company's coffers rather than the wealthy person's.
It's the same gambit as their security. I am sure more than just Gates and Musk do it but I know that both of them own personal security companies who only provide security to themselves. It's all just shells of liability shielding.
Maybe I’m missing something. I can’t imagine that paying a chauffeur can be cheaper than umbrella insurance.
It's cheaper for the person being driven.
That's assuming people are rational with their money.
Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.
An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.
And the wage slaves lose even more freedom and autonomy.
If freedom is being shackled to an expensive appliance by a yearslong loan and autonomy is being trapped at home if it breaks or you lose the ability to operate it... I'll pass on both.
Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.
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As if the government does not control your license to drive today...
They'll never stop me from riding my bike at least.
Well, there is the alternative that prosecution is low enough in case of accidents that insurance payouts are low and consequently insurance is low priced. Also, the majority could easily vote for price controls on car insurance like they have on home insurance.
I can easily construct arguments along the lines of “cars are necessary to drive and insurance costs are regressive since they don’t scale with income so we need to have price controls on insurance for low-income drivers”. These will be quite popular.
I expected this to happen a few years ago, but I think I was over optimistic. Now, who knows? Maybe it will finally start to make a difference.
Waymo is already self-insured so if they have an advantage it's already on their balance sheet. In California nobody is going to get a discount for having ADAS software because we encoded into the state law in the 1980s, part of a long magical thinking campaign by boomers, that insurance companies can't use that type of thing to set prices.
> so either insurance will be cheaper for them
lol
Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.
That already is happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car_liability:
In 2015, Volvo issued a press release claiming that Volvo would accept full liability whenever its cars are in autonomous mode.
[…]
Starting in September 2023 in the United States, Mercedes-Benz takes liability for the Level 3 Drive Pilot as long as the "user operates Drive Pilot as designed," but "the driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times when prompted to intervene by the vehicle."
> Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.
There’s a lot of money to be made. Just look at the prices for travel insurance direct from the airline versus a third party. 2-3x.
It’ll be like BMW with the heated seat subscription fee.
The actual money will be made because the driverless car manufacturer is self-insuring and cutting out the insurance company. Competition among manufacturers will then pass most of those savings on to you.
Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.
> Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today.
This is an excellent point.
I have said for a while now that self driving cars do not need to be perfect. They will have accidents, of a different type than humans have, and sometimes they will be ones that most humans would avoid.
What they do need to be is better than humans overall, and then it would make sense for them to be allowed onto the road. When they get far safer than humans, phasing out of human driving will make sense.
They reached that point a while ago, now we just need legislation and public opinion to catch up.
They reached that point on very very limited scenario and conditions.
I would imagine that world running on fully autonomous cars would certainly be less error-prone than a world running on human-driven cars where each human has different intelligence, reflexes, emotions, moods e.t.c. A purely algorithmic system of autonomous cars is certainly safer, just needs to be fully adopted. The only drawback I suppose is the fear of these systems being hacked, something that is not so easy with biological humans.
>> In March, Waymo’s independent study showed 92 percent fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes, a 13-fold reduction versus human drivers in comparable city environments.
I can't progress beyond this point in the article. How is Waymo's study "independent"? I don't understand.
Of course they do, an 8 bit PC rigged up to an old Nintendo Duck Hunt sensor would drive more safely than some of the morons in my neighborhood. I've ceased to be annoyed at them, and instead just shrug at the idiocy.
ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers.
Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.
There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers:
> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]
I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.
1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...
I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.)
If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
Overtrust looks like people sleeping or not even bothering to stay in the front seats of the car. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patr...
Sure, but I'm failing to see how an autonomous driving system without a steering wheel or brake fitted is safer than one with a steering wheel and brake fitted but the human driver ignoring it and sitting in the back seat.
The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.
You are correct but I think previous comment hung on specific word you used: "semi-autonomous". What that would mean is a system that still requires attention / supervision. What I believe you meant is an AV that still has human controls but is capable of unsupervised driving.
If you aren't familiar with SAE AV levels, check them out. It is a common refrain that L3 AVs are a SUPER bad idea because they would be 99.9% perfect at driving but could still mess up so 'drivers' of them would become too trusting and minimally attentive which would cause accidents.
The common thing is that L3 needs to be skipped entirely so a car should either be L2 and wouldn't be good enough to drive entirely on its own for long periods (lane assist, low speed traffic jam chauffeur, etc) or L4+ where the car can drive on its own but if conditions degrade where it can't continue it is capable of finding a safe spot to stop rather than aborting in the middle of driving suddenly.
The controls vs no controls isn't really an argument. Like you said, it will basically be fine either way if the system is sufficiently advanced especially if autonomy can't be disengaged while moving.
Failing to see or refusing to look is not evidence that something is not there.
The human part is the failure point IMO. The problem is when the human is not in the back seat, but overriding the car.
A car with no wheel, and the human in the back, is not different to one with a wheel and the human in the back, it is when the human is sat in the front only partially controlling the vehicle. That is when it is less safe.
So 2 situations, one where the human can sit anywhere and the car is just as safe, or one where the car is less safe if the human sits in one of the seats.
One of those situations is less safe than the other.
I think the argument for autonomous is that human intervention is, generally, wrongly rather than rightly.
At this point, I won't agree or disagree, but it's getting more interesting all the time.
There was research some years ago in Sweden that cars with 4WD get into accidents 20% - 30% more often than cars with 2WD. And cars with 4WD averaged 10% higher speed at the moment of the crash.
The cause was found to be drivers with 2WD losing a little traction early in their drove and subsequently slowing down, while drivers with 4WD just kept driving like normal until they were suddenly off the road.
Another statistic is that intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers cause more than half of all fatalities. So making a solution with machine learning and cameras that could retrofit into any existing car and just deny starting the car for such drivers, and having insurance companies cut premiums for having such gadgets installed, would be much more effective than any form of self driving or similar.
https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011....
The gadgets would have to meet an impossibly low false-positive rate and they'd need to be mandatory and non-removable for this to be effective. Constantly impaired drivers won't voluntarily install the devices, and any non-impaired driver who is falsely prevented from using their car will get rid of the device and not care about the insurance discount.
Also, they really need to be able to detect the other really bad cause of impairment: mobile phone usage.
A tampered car won't pass inspection.
It's like those approval prompts in coding agents. At the start you are reading the commands intently but after being bombarded with them for days you just hit accept on them.
Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
>Automatic braking alone is a huge deal
Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.
I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.
Any time I crossed a bridge near me that is kind of steep and has a structure over it, the automatic braking engaged HARD. Like hard enough that I nearly caused accidents until I figured out how to turn it off.
Not great.
Fords seem notorious for this but usually can be fixed. Have you tried driving it to a dealership and trading it in?
Multiple times actually, lmao. Unfortunately its only worth $19,000 currently (sticker price of $67,000 three years ago)
I wonder if there will be some extra liability if the driver kills someone and the logs show automatic braking would have engaged. Something similar happened near me where a lamborghini driver disabled traction control, spun out and killed a girl on the way to school. They had to add new laws increasing the liability if you disabled TC.
Good news, everyone. Soon you won't be able to switch it off.
I suspect this will just lead to people pulling the ABS fuse and losing ABS and ESC along with AEB.
Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
Some years ago, I was in a major crash. The traffic in front of me stopped, I braked hard and stopped in time, the truck behind me rammed me into the car in front. Nearly killed me.
Some time later, I was on a snowy road. The cars in front of me stopped, I stopped, and checked my rearview mirror. There was a truck, who clearly wasn't going to stop. I pulled off to the side, and he hit the car in front of me.
>was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives
To be fair, if the cars behind you had automatic emergency braking you would be at much lower risk of getting rear-ended when there's a false positive.
Pretty much, they would have been getting chimes about being too close to start with.
Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely?
I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
Never hear of someone who was rear ended being liable. Guy behind should keep a distance that allows him reacting in time and he is responsible for keeping that distance.
The same for skiing you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, one behind you is responsible for not crashing into you.
In car you have rear mirrors but if you have something in front of you and breaking you are not going to look in the mirrors.
> The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
Yep. ADAS should be mandatory like seat belts and airbags. A regulatory body should be able to come up with a minimum standard for it.
Even airbags were phased in over decades. Front-seat airbags were first available in the early 70s and didn't become mandatory until 20 years later.
Automatic braking can also be hazardous! In a front-wheel drive car, understeer is a fact of life. When you're approaching a bend in the road with your foot in the accelerator, you're going to be pointed at the guardrail, since the car's going to rotate around the bend when lift your foot off the gas. Now imagine you're driving a car with AEB and it slams on the brakes while you were lightly accelerating towards the guardrail, right before you were going to lift your foot off the gas. What was a perfectly routine curve just turned into complete loss of control, and there's a very good chance your car's going straight into the guardrail!
Even when it doesn't slam on the brakes, if you were concentrating on the road, those jarring beeps can just as easily break your focus on driving as they can break your focus on a distraction. I think it's better to avoid distraction by keeping cruise control off, and you can compensate for having human-level reaction time by following at a safe distance and staying in an appropriate gear or setting an appropriate level of regenerative braking to avoid mindlessly getting too close to the car in front of you.
I think that too often, driver assist features are being added to cars to compensate for the other features (like adaptive cruise control) that encourage drivers to mentally disengage from the task of driving. There's also the fact (well, opinion) that driving a car without electronic assists and nannies is fun and engaging (especially on back roads with the windows down and the radio up). Riding in an autonomous vehicle is just as dull as riding on public transportation, all while being less efficient, less social, and worse for the environment.
It would be interesting if we could somehow test how the reduction in crashes with the introduction of driver assists would compare with if we had just banned cruise control, introduced minimum visibility and minimum suspension stiffness standards, and mandated manual transmissions.
This is the perfect expression of chronic windshield brain. If you are driving anywhere near the limits of dynamic stability on a public road, then you are already driving dangerously. Also, computerized stability control works better than 99.99% of human drivers.
The limits of dynamic stability go down drastically when the brakes are locked up. You can be _far_ from the limits of dynamic stability when going around a bend in the road, but if your car locks up the brakes mid-bend, you can unexpectedly go from nowhere close to those limits to exceeding them in the blink of an eye. A human driver would wait until they've straightened out to brake hard, but the computer in a car is entirely at the mercy of whoever programmed it. Hopefully it would do the same, but do you really trust Tesla (or whomever) with their move-fast-and-break-things additude?
Then there's the fact that automatic emergency braking requires the software algorithm to make decisions based on data that is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the data used by electronic stability control and ABS systems. It's much easier to detect steering angle and wheel slippage than it is to detect how an object in the distance is likely to behave.
Confirmed: you don't understand this subject. Any readers who find themselves needing to stop a modern car in an emergency are advised to stand on the brake pedal with maximum force while the computer sorts the situation out.
i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.
As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.
Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.
Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.
The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.
It doesn't help when manufacturers call their mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous systems Full Self Driving
A manufacturer.
An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally.
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip.
Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.
The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.
I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.
It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.
It could, but maybe not if your motto is, "Move Fast and Break Things."
Article is short on data instead referencing a bunch of aggregated IIHS studies.
Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
Didn't they just launch autonomous Ubers in London last week?
Which autonomous vehicle company has that as their motto?
Stop asking relevant questions! I have a narrative to push and you are getting in the way.
That’s a Facebook motto but Facebook (now Meta) isn’t in AVs. I suppose that excludes Facebook of pre 2016 from participating in AVs? I think everyone is fine with that.
"Move fast and break things" looks obviously bad for an autonomous vehicle ...
Waymo's mission is literally "to be the world's most trusted driver"
They put safety above all else and actually goal to it.
This is a stunning attempt to rewrite history.
> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.
> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
One thing I'd like to see modeled is how many excess deaths they cause in, for example, London.
Driving in London is already very safe because the street design prevents people going very fast. American roads are, by comparison, unsafe. That probably means AVs in those countries had a lot of low-hanging fruit, so they could have a significant impact by staying within the speed limit, for example. Without such low hanging fruit, will there be so much benefit in London?
London has excellent and very safe public transit, far safer than even professional drivers. If AVs are cheap and convenient enough to pull people off transit, that might expose enough people to higher risk that makes them overall kill more people than if they'd stayed on the tube.
Likewise, more driving (even EVs) generates more asphalt and brake pad dust, which cause respiratory illnesses. If they cause a drop in transit ridership compared to no AVs, how does that affect the excess deaths in the city?
My gut says that, in London and other cities with safer streets, they're going to have more difficulty getting such headline-grabbing numbers. Combine that with the potential to take people off safe transit and put them on the road and the balance might slightly tip against them.
Of course. This seems so obvious.
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue. No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
Fyi. Long robotaxis.
But they still cannot drive cars. All this stuff can do is react very slowly, maybe, if it detects it, to a change in the environment.
Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.
FSD avoiding a deer at night at highway speeds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWAmZBEK2Wk
FSD driving in decently heavy rain (this is mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKePEavEhv
Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.
I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.
An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd find and post the one where my Tesla slowed down to a stop at a red light, lulling me into a sense of security, and then without warning lurched forward and broke the red light.
And this is not an isolated incident because that is one of the things Tesla is being investigated for: https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/tesl...
That is not even a perception issue (I've already had multiple very close calls because of that, and I think Elon was extremely negligent in pushing for vision-only;) This is a damn bug in the planning logic. That's Elon's "move fast and break people" philosophy shining through.
I would trust autonomous cars if they're Waymo. I would not trust Tesla.
That is either an old story or you are on v12 because mine used to do it often and I haven't seen it in at least a year from my recollection. The newest versions are really good.
Waymos aren't without fault either, they smash the front off cars, run into static poles, block emergency vehicles, etc; just the nature of AV development.
> Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.
Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.
So can 100% public transport, non-autonomous. But there is less lobbying money for award winning journalists.
It's also easier to do shared housing but part of it is just that people like having their own personal dedicated space to exist in even if it's not the most efficient answer.
That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.
Depends at the scale you're looking at. How much money is wasted by 30 people driving 30 cars when a bus could take them all? Taking into account car wear, gas, etc.
Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political
If the bus service is good and available, people will use it eventually including in off hours. Induced demand.
I can not imagine that the cost of busses can ever approach the cost of the equivalent amount of cars (for the same amount of passengers).
It is, at least in a place like LA. Fares are like less than 10% the actual total cost of an average bus ride. https://www.reddit.com/r/LAMetro/comments/1orftnt/should_you...
Now if you’re ONLY serving high density and high passenger volume times, buses are incredible.
Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?
I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars.
The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.
It's not that simple, road damage is famously non-linear in axle load: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
> The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
That doesn't really math, because axle weight is a large factor in road wear. There's details and it doesn't always apply, but the commonly used rule of thumb is that "road wear increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load."
If a transit bus weighs at least 25000 lbs and has two axles [2] and a F-150 has an average weight of 5000 lbs with two axles [3], you get a lot more road wear from putting a bunch of people on a bus compared to all of them driving their f-150s by themselves. The power rule says the wear from one bus is equivalent to 625 F-150s. Although if people rode around in classic Beetles (~ 2000 lbs), there'd be even less road wear, and things would be a lot groovier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
[2] https://phoenixtransportationsf.com/how-much-does-a-bus-weig...
[3] https://www.fordoffeasterville.com/2025-ford-f-150-weight-gu...
> Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?
Because late stage capitalism brain rot doesn't allow for nuanced things such as "public services".
They'd rather have everyone spend 50k on a car and Xk per year on insurance and maintenance than $100 of their taxes going to public infrastructure
Hundreds of buses on the road. Amazing!
And trucking. But jobs.
So your contention, then, is that Google>Waymo and the other companies should have invested billions not into AV, but instead into funding trains and paying for buses?
Slightly besides the point, but I love seeing people in massive modern SUVs, clearly completely overwhelmed by them, barely able to tell where it starts and ends, probably distracted by the screen.
Its especially funny in parking here lots in Europe, where they barely fit. If you drive such an SUV, I have a suggestion: Let the computer do the parking, you can't park and you can't drive well either. Just let the clanker figure it out, it'll save everyone time.
I have a feeling that once everything goes EV and autopilot, they will start phasing out regular cars or will make it more difficult to obtain the license.
This will be a gradual process. But probably getting a drivers license will become a lot less common for people over time. There won't be any need once cars drive themselves.
Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers.
This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer.
As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.
Yes, I'm thinking the same, good write up.
And it'll negatively impact all but the upper classes. Automakers would rather everyone use their autopilot taxi services for the higher profit margins, so autopilot EVs will be prohibitively expensive to outright buy.
I think it would positively impact lower classes because car ownership is by far the biggest financial drain you can take on.
Only if there's affordable transportation available.
There's a large percent of people who have their daily commute possible by public transport, but the weekend or odd trips are not well covered. A cheaper uber powered by self driving would cover the odd trips and save people the massive expense of owning a car.
Also, the autonomous car companies will have their vehicles coordinating to make it difficult for humans to drive, such as holding a long convoy with close following distance in a single lane.
At least I'd be able to cut them off with impunity and know they won't try and follow me for it
Definitely. They'll be like the obnoxious people on public transport who play music and videos out loud, people who don't give up seats to the elderly etc
I think the vast majority of voters will have something to say about that.
Doesn't
``less cars, more X, where X is bikes and trains''
save more lives than autonomous cars?
Also: We have 580k direct deaths a year due to a top pollutant society cross-funds for those who buy them? This is insane.
After ten-thousand years, nearly six billion humans died in car-related accidents, i.e. one population of earth when I was young? How is a personal level risk of one in ten thousand each year acceptable? Ban at least human-driven cars, not (only) AI/AGSI!
As for driving in full automation: seems impossible outside clear-weathered rectangular cities, for now. But perhaps that does not stay this way for years, and in some places, we can could either adopt this tech, pragmatically, or build liveable, walkable/bikable cities instead in the more long term.
Who's saying they don't? One good thing doesn't negate another
Driver assistance and self-driving cars are probably one of the cheapest and low-effort band-aids to the infrastructure mistakes made in the US.
They are, of course, not as good as more enlightened city planning, but they’d be an improvement to the status quo I expect, especially the way the quality has made some serious strides lately.
I get a sense that traditional automakers are done chasing Tesla on the technology and that’s unfortunate. Those traditional automakers figured out that their buyers don’t care that much about it, and the ones that do care already left for Tesla. Plus, the self-driving that really works best relies heavily on serious AI technology.
Isn't it... quite a well known thing?
The articles I've read on this have said it's murky because of obfuscation of reported data by self-driving companies.
The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."
My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.
I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?
I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.
They can also massage the numbers by only driving on the safest roads, then making a comparison based solely on miles driven.
The comparisons I've seen are with the general population, not professional drivers. How might that comparison look, since this is a paid service?
From a policy standpoint…I wonder about creating a rule that anyone who got a DUI could get an amended license where they could legally operate only autonomous vehicles. First DUI is a permanent AV-only license.
Since 7 million people have DUI’s, that one policy change would completely reshape the industry.
Why would you need a license to sit in an autonomous vehicle?
You don’t need a license for that.
Calling something that kills people but just does it less as "saving lives" is batshit crazy. Looks like people in the US got so brainwashed by the toxic car culture that not killing feels the same as saving lives. It's like calling it a saving when my girlfriend decides NOT to buy something. This whole article is a joke, right? Right???
It is correct to compare to average drivers because that is ultimately what they are going to replace. AVs are coming for the whole market, and if they are significantly safer than the average driver the average driver shouldn’t drive. I intend to stop driving when possible.
Hopefully the people that find autonomous cars great are the bad drivers of today. They will transition into that and leave the better drivers of today to drive in peace.
Can someone remind me why we need autonomous cars? What's wrong with paying someone to drive?
Autonomous cars is an inefficient solution anyway, I don't see how it benefits the rider.
Yeah sure!
In theory they should be cheaper one day because you don't need to pay someone to drive. This means you can use them in situations where for cost reasons you would have driven yourself - e.g. for long journeys, in the countryside, for commuting etc.
Getting people out of their own cars and into autonomous cars is better for several reasons:
1. We need to own fewer cars collectively, which is better for the environment.
2. Don't need to waste a ton of space on car parks.
3. It's safer (at least for Waymo). Not just for occupants but also for pedestrians and cyclists.
Having a cheap option for last mile travel also makes trains more attractive.
All of this of course rests on them actually ending up cheap, which hasn't been the case so far but we'll see.
They won't be cheap until there's competition to drive down the price, which will otherwise be as high as possible to justify the initial investments. It's only a matter of time, but likely on the scale of decades.
But I wanted to add on the future benefits front - as more vehicles on the road become autonomous, they could communicate with each other and reduce the buffer distances between them, allowing for faster travel and improved saturation while still being safe.
This article is malarkey.
Title includes "autonomous cars" - url includes "self-driving" - I smell what you are selling.
Meanwhile, the article never gives a share, but as far as I can tell, nearly all the lives are saved by basic ADAS: auto-braking, which is really cool and should be the focus.
If you want to click-bait, fine, but then at least tell the truth after the user clicks.
Yeah but just one automatic update away from becoming a horror show.
I’ll risk sounding crass to state the quiet part out loud:
Majority of car accidents outside of the occasional genuine freak accident are self-inflicted. Call it FAFO or Darwinism, whichever you prefer.
I’m saying that having done that myself once in the early days of holding a drivers licence and feeling heroic with my speed and a corner. I was lucky to walk away with minor bruises, mostly to my ego. And wallet.
That day I learned how a car behaves when it loses traction.
15 years later accident free, minus one person bumping the rear left side because they’d thought it would be a good idea to cross over into my lane over a solid line.
Having watched how autonomous driving is “developing” over the same span of time - I’m not convinced, the last decade was spent more on “trust me bro” targeting lawmakers than genuinely trying to have a breakthrough in the technology and we’ve hit a wall (no pun intended).
The correct answer to this problem is better driver education, and a higher bar for entry.
Lest we let the idiots take over and we as a society accept a lower standard.
People run the stop sign all the time by my house. The highway sounds like a fast n furious movie every night. There's no education shortcoming. They know what they are doing. They know how to go the speed limit and stop for a sign for the DMV test. They know when no one is looking and they can get away with dangerous bullshit.
Certain drivers just need their privileges revoked, cars crushed, and some nights spent in jail if we are being honest.
It'd be really nice to have bolt-on after-market automation. I'm not sure if the car companies will want to accommodate this, but I'd really love to make my old Honda self-driving.
I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.
OpenPilot and comma.ai are very close to a bolt-on after-market solution; not FSD 14 quality but you can get a lot of autonomy and intelligence with a $1000 Android device and thirty minutes for installation.
This requires a fully drive by wire car I would guess
It isn't truly stick-and-go, you need to have existing ADAS and other sensors already in the vehicle. As people are now holding onto cars for an average of 15+ years, the bolt-on kits are about 10 years ahead of the average driver's car.
Probably won't happen for many years, they need quite a lot of power to use the current AV tech.
Was surprised that article mentions Waymo, Rivian, Zoox, but not Tesla.
Yeah, so would investment in reliable, nice public transportation. I know it doesn’t solve the last-mile-problem.
Either way, fewer drivers means fewer deaths.
Looks like we're over the biggest engineering hurdles. I used to tell people we'd see self-driving cars take off in the 2030s, (with them generally starting to appear mid 2020s) and now this looks like the case.
I wonder to what extent this effect comes from the fact that robotaxis don't get drunk.
I seem to recall a paper showing that human crash frequencies surge up to 6x between midnight and 4am on weekends, despite that traffic accounting for only a miniscule percentage of vehicle miles traveled.
Considering two groups, FSD and non-FSD, what are the shares of full-sized SUVs in them?
Pretty sure whatever the FSD vehicle you can think of, none is a full-sized SUVs, and those are the most lethal kind of vehicle.
Is there a standard that these cars have to meet?
Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
Such a standard for motor vehicles would result in the loss of licensing for a large majority of Americans. Most people would fight against such testing standards as a condition for driving on public roads. It might not be a bad idea. I just don’t think it’s feasible.
There's no legislated standard in the US, nor pre-sale verification that a vehicle has met most of the other automotive standards. That's just not how the US regulatory environment works.
There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
China is going for what's sometimes called "L3.5" - hands off wheel, eyes off road, driver may have to take over if alerted, but if the driver doesn't, the vehicle must safely stop and pull over if possible.
The trouble with "driver assistance" systems is the handoff to the driver. That's not reliable. Results from the aviation community indicate that it takes about ten seconds after an autopilot disconnect before the pilot has stable control of the aircraft. "L3.5" accepts that. The < 2 second response required by some L2 systems does not.
Real world data results are so much more important than an obstacle course to overfit for.
While I would like to see that just for the data, from a regulatory standpoint all we really need are the manufacturers being liable in a crash if their cars were driving. The insurance savings of their cars being safer will create the incentive they need.
If it’s anything like my San Francisco DMV driving test, they did a loop around Fell and Oak St (both one way streets with no opposing traffic).
I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.
I'll be sad when I'm forced to give up driving my old cars.
The loss of the joy and satisfaction of driving a proper drivers car with a firm feeling manual transmission will be hard to explain to future generations for sure.
But the bigger fear is the loss of autonomy in movement that having everyone become beholden to a botnet for transportation will bring.
"Drive me to the anti government protest. I want to make my voice heard."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
Even in the far future of AV highways, I expect that tracks will exist where you can drive your car for leisure.
You're old enough that isn't a worry for you. If your grandkids have cars as a hobby they might have to use a track rather than public roads.
IMO the benchmark to pass will be to show it has better safety than the average sober, non-speeding, non-phone-using, seatbelt-wearing driver.
IDK how that could even feasibly be shown but that's when people will actually start going all-in on it. Otherwise I will simply meet those criteria myself for free.
Bordering on zero human drivers fit that profile. The competition to AVs isn’t a mythical race of flawless humans. It’s the drunk, speeding, distracted idiots who currently operate motor vehicles (e.g., us).
You know what actually saves lives? Fewer cars.
idk if this was even part of the conversation tbh
The question was if they could remain secure
Also I saw people suggest rc cars as an alternative to autonomous vehicles which... is another consideration entirely as well
Autonomous vehicles don’t drink and drive. That alone will save millions worldwide yearly.
Most people don't drink and drive.
It's really only in the US where people still seem to think it's acceptable to drive drunk.
2nd cause of deaths in cars in the world and in the US too. Top of the list is speeding.
Taxis also save lives. The lives of those who drive drunk.
In the modern USA, "saving lives" is anti-correlated with policy, so let's see how this plays out.
It has been, from the start and even before FSD had any basis in reality and was just sci-fi stories, obvious that FSD would eventually get here. The only question has been when. We clearly aren't there yet but it is pretty obvious we aren't as far away as the naysayers make out.
I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake.
You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.
Agreed.
I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar).
I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider.
They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.
Self driving can be safer even if it's less competent because it can just be programed to be more risk adverse, always keep safe stopping distances and slow down when the conditions are adverse. A human driver _might_ be more skilled in driving through a snow storm but the self driving car just slows down and ends up safer.
Most drivers take absurd risks that negate any possible skill advantage.
We've done(ish) the first 80%: long straight roads and grid cities in south USA getting 350 days of sun per year.
The last 20% will be tough. There are 1.3b vehicules in the world, most of the aren't in the US, most places will need a complete infrastructure revamp before autonomous cars can even dream to drive there
People kill and hurt others in cars for many reasons but the main ones are:
-being dangerous on purpose (speeding, ignoring signs, tailgating etc.)
-being inattentive (phones, screens in general, being tired, being sleepy)
-road raging in many forms
As evidenced by comments in this thread and elsewhere people also have terrible judgement about reality on the roads - blaming cyclists, justifying speeding etc.
Self-driving cars remove all those from the equation. It would be shocking if they didn't save lives. We put too high a bar on them. It's a life saving tech and we should put them on the road yesterday and go from there.
It doesn't really matter whether autonomous cars crash less than human drivers. A computer can never be punished, so a computer must never be allowed to kill any humans.
How does punishing someone make crashes better? I would rather have fewer crashes because of a system that can't be punished than more crashes with punishment.
Being able to punish someone doesn't change the fact that a crash happened and it doesn't change the fact that someone died. There is a difference between punishment and justice, there is rarely ever perfect justice in life.
The best we can do is mitigate harms as much as possible, and it seems self-driving might be the best mitigation of traffic accidents compared to human drivers.
Suppose human drivers were killing 1 person every 100 miles driven, and software was killing 1 person every 10 billion miles driven. We should just accept that the human population will be decimated each day for accountability reasons?
I do think that currently we're at the stage where Waymo is trying to convince most of the world of the _quality_ of its offering, so for the moment, things are well aligned.
But in 5 years if there are multiple self-driving offerings competing on things like price, door-to-door time, OPEX (e.g. does a camera-only system with no moving parts need less skilled maintenance?), then someone may try to be the cheap but good enough self-driving service that cuts corners -- and we should want some execs to actually go to prison rather than just some cost-of-doing-business fines.
Where do you live that humans are punished for "accidents"? You can run someone over in America and it's basically an "oopsie, do better next time!"
* 12 deaths per 100,000 per year, but 4 people go to jail for it
* 2 deaths per 100,000 per year, but no one goes to jail
Because apparently going to jail is important for some reason?
Honestly, choosing jail is somewhat dystopian IMO
obviously true, and it has a lot of other benefits, such as being able to take a nap while driving.
Growing proof that PR for autonomous car companies has aligned on a strategy of painting you as a bad person if you want to drive your own car, and therefore you should pay them money to continue being a good person.
Growing proof that comment sections from tech forums have been overrun with unhelpful negativity unrelated to the actual posts they're commenting on.
You are dismissing this as "unhelpful negativity", but are not addressing in any way the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
>the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
The author Lawrence Ulrich references research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Why would it be "obvious" that they are paid PR shills for Tesla/Waymo?
I'm jaded and cynical so I can accept that they may be secret PR mouthpieces but isn't it reasonable to expect a little evidence rather than just throwing out a random accusation?
IIHS works for the insurance industry who will happily throw you under the bus if it makes things more predictable on their side. Not better, not lower claims, more predictable.
The alignment between what is good for you and good for the interests they answer two is not all that much.
But of course, they work very hard to market themselves as peddlers purely of safety, after all only a barbarian would be against safety <mockingly clutches pearls>
This isn't to say that some people they don't care, but giving a crap isn't gonna change the incentives.
How do using autonomous vehicles benefit their claims-settling? Wouldn't it make it unpredictable- in an accident between two self-driving vehicles, who is liable? What if both vehicles are from the same company? Doesn't this lead to extreme variability?
Whould they? If things are too predictable they would be out of job.
Can you actually define what the kool-aid is here? Because AV companies are saying "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually. Not once, not even the usual one or two crazy people you can find to support almost any other crazy statement.
Where is the kool-aid from the robotaxi side that's so visible? Keep in mind that "kool-aid" implies that something is factually incorrect.
> I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually
Just read further in this thread, will you?
Yeah I have. I still don't see it, I do see a lot of unwarranted cynicism and extremely sloppy arguments against these cars.
> "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
A lot of these are true about other things like pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, and mass rail transit. The kool-aid is that the robotaxi people act like they are the first one to solve this problem.
No, dammit.
Pedestrian friendly streets are great! You can't walk that far, and I love walking places when I have time and energy.
Bike lanes are great! I bike to work. If I'm not careful I'll arrive sweaty, and that inherently limits when and where I bike.
Mass rail transit is great! It cannot get directly to every door or frequently even to within walking distance of every door (I take a train to the office when I don't wanna bike).
I really do understand that it's trendy to hate on cars. There are a lot of bad things that come with car dependence.
All of that is true AND YET cars make us more productive and allow us to do things that would be impossible otherwise.
Robotaxi companies are not trying to replace any of those things. That makes no sense because they don't need to do that to succeed.
So I will ask again: what is the kool-aid that I'm supposedly drinking?
"everyone" still drives -- the problem has very much not yet been solved.
Could it be solved in other ways? Sure, but it hasn't. Why it hasn't is an interesting question but that's out of scope.
Saying an article is just PR, without addressing the specific article is not helpful.
Argue how the author was funded by such and such a group with ties to this other group. Say something about the methodology used. Say literally anything about the actual post.
This would be the equivalent of me just calling you a "shill" with no other context. The burden of proof is on you since you're making the claim that this is misleading PR.
Yeah, and it should not be understated how bad only having autonomous cars would be for privacy and security conscious folk.
A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.
If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.
Given the state of cybersecurity, the car goes wherever anyone with sufficient motivation wants it to go. Including into pedestrians. And, such a scenario could happen at the scale of a botnet swarm. In other words, hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be simultaneously hijacked.
"If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go"
I think privacy conscious folks like yourself consistently overrate how much purchase this argument has. I am perfectly happy to forgo this in exchange for a sufficient increase in convenience / safety (for myself and others). This is not because I have been brainwashed by autonomous vehicle company propaganda, it is because I have different values and concerns.
So you mean to tell me that when I called a Waymo a few weeks ago at 1AM because I was drunk at a bar and wanted to go home, it was actually because my government and Google wanted me to go home?
Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! Next you'll tell me that a taxi ride requires mutual consent between me, the taxi driver, and the dispatch company!
You cannot deny the evidence though, driverless cars are safer per-mile than human drivers on average. 1/100 deaths in the United States are due to car accidents, even shaving off 10% of those would save ~4000 people per year.
But.. what if it's true? It's like not wearing a seat belt, or smoking, or drinking while driving. If AV are widely available it becomes similarly opt-in high risk behavior.
Using SUVs are definitely worse for safety as well, and it does not require a huge overhaul of the transportation infrastructure, a few new technologies to be invented, replacing ~all the existing cars, etc. etc. But no-one takes the comparatively basically free steps to remove/reduce SUVs.
Lets not forget that its all about the profits, and if we truly want to save lives there are more cost-efficient ways than what some tech sales-people peddle.
Your us vs them mentality regarding cars is really strange. You've previously said you think bicyclists are the "worst people".
If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
I hadn't thought about it like this, but I think I want the grassroots version of the PR campaign. Society was finally able to rein in smoking when we collectively realized how dangerous secondhand smoke is. People who smoked indoors and exposed loved ones to an early death weren't bad people, but creating societal pressure to feel bad about doing that has saved a lot of lives.
You are more likely to kill someone driving your huge SUV than you are taking a Waymo. Driving your own car certainly doesn't make you a bad person, but I hope self-driving cars will be ubiquitous and safe in the future. When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now.
At a systems level, transportation is something we have to be very, very careful about, because if you get it wrong, you start excluding entire groups of people from being a functional part of your society just because they are different from you in where and how they live.
"When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now." Really? I drive on logging roads a few times a month to get to some property. This is pretty sketchy even in good conditions and there's always the chance of getting stuck and having to hike a mile or two the rest of the way up to go get the tractor and sort it out. I'm probably not buying a self-driving car any time soon, if ever.
Now, is having self driving taxis a fantastic idea in a very dense city? Of course. There's huge benefits in keeping the average car as safe, efficient in both energy and pollution, and highly utilized as possible. Are these also a good retrofit to dense-ish suburbs where a bus/rail network isn't quite enough (and the costs to build it in already-developed land are unpalatable)? Also yes. But that's not ubiquitous, that's just part of a larger system that needs to be able to serve all users.
And if your point is that "move out of the mountains and into a city because that's the less-selfish option"... that's a certain kind of political statement, I guess.
Reminds me of that scene from I Robot where Will Smith was not supposed to drive his car himself.
Didn't this just happen in an internet company's self driving car with couple kidnappings in the past month? (They were done according to the companies terms of service is what the internet company says if I remember reading correctly)
There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
Why? Insurance companies use detailed risk data. If they discover that letting you drive your own car is a much higher risk than an auto-drive, why should they not be allowed to account for that?
Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
Yes, I definitely trust insurance companies to do the right thing here.
Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.
But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.
I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.
> Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
If pricing risk was an exact science, you'd get the same quote from all providers (given similar coverage). Yet if you try that, you'll find that the quotes could vary as much as 2-3x. Therefore no, we shouldn't blindly trust "the algorithm".
>Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
Insurance companies you are required to interact with by law are absolutely political.
I meant they aren't political in their pricing. They don't charge less or more for something because it is considered liberal or conservative.
I agree with your first statement but certainly not with the second. Rates for human drivers should and will skyrocket. Individual states may try to push back with regulation but it won't succeed in the long-term
Rates for human drivers are currently at the correct level for insurance companies to pay for damage and make some profit.
If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
> If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
Wouldn't the accident rate for humans go down as well as the percentage of SDV increase? After all, the humans won't be exclusively having accidents with each other.
I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road.
We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.
Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today.
Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?
Because traffic volume.
Autonomous cars won't panic and cause pileups.
The way to prevent pileups is not to assume that everything will work correctly, including every system on every car.
It's to assume that every single thing that could break, will break, and design enough resiliency in that you have to stack up as many failures as possible before things truly go off the rails.
So to do this without killing people, you add the new systems with the same safety thresholds, then gather quite a few years of statistics, then, slowly let things become more efficient if that's both warranted by data and also warranted by simulation of events that you do not yet have data for.
Skipping steps in this because you want to put more cars on the road immediately is foolish and dangerous.
I agree with all that. Robot cars will take time and we shouldn't skip steps. Tort lawyers will continue to keep companies inline.
They have a reason: profit.
This is testable. The profits of car insurance companies should rise (let’s say substantially) in real dollars as accident payouts decrease as a result of the inevitable dominance of autonomous vehicles.
Why should they skyrocket? As more autonomous vehicles appear on the roads, incidents with non-autonomous vehicles will go down. Driving will become inherently safer.
In the long-long-term, self-driving will get good enough and people will be relying on it so thoroughly that allowing people to drive on their own, with barely any practice, will probably be more risky than it's worth. In say, idk, 100 years (probably sooner), I doubt people will be able to drive their own cars in the way they do today.
The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving.
Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point where I'm not actually sure that robotaxis can reliably beat them yet.
Yeah, a hundred years from now fewer people will drive themselves, but considering how many people DESPISE driving and only do it because it's required of them, that isn't bad.
There should be laws taxing people who insist on driving themselves. And the money should be used to subsidize people who switch to self-driving or install automatic assisted systems on their old cars. That'd partially mitigate the externality generated by human drivers.
How about prison for attempted murder?
I've lost enough friends to drivers who made a mistake. If self driving is better in just that, but worse every other way: I'm for it.
That might be a big if above, but of true them I support it. Drive on a private track or a video game if you must. Leave the real world to safe.
Incumbent rent-seekers want regulatory capture to insulate them from externalities. Dog bites man.
No there should not. Human drivers kill a million people every year. WW1 killed 15-22M.
The law put into place would be that the people who put autonomous cars on the road would risk their freedom and safety just as much as a driver if that car causes an accident through their neglect.
This will never happen, because the entire purpose of the corporate structure is to avoid responsibility.
How selfish. Why should I, someone who wants a safer AV, subsidize those who are riskier drivers?
Extremely selfish.
Is this your first introduction to an insurance pool?
Not the same at all.
This happens in insurance all the time. Healthy people who eat right and exercise subsidize people with poor habits.
It appears to some degree that we as a society do not want risk priced optimally to each individual.
It is understandable that you think this is the case as someone who is not above the age of 50. You will see that health and life insurance premiums rise precipitously once you reach certain milestones. Once you reach 90 years old, you will find that car insurance companies will discontinue your policy based on a single traffic ticket.
We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.
Many boomers hated antilock brakes, but insurers gave discounts for having them on your car anyway. I think it’s likely going to be a similar thing with self driving.
Even today, I don’t like the intrusiveness of the insurance monitors you can install on your car today and I am willing to forgo that discount to keep my privacy.
Thanks for clearly stating the danger - your point is reasonable
<posted from phone while driving through red light>
Tesla did something sneaky just few days ago. They added crash avoidance even when FSD is not enabled, but purchased. So in future if they add pay-per-mile option (great for road trips) you'll likely still keep paying for monthly since it offers additional protection even if you prefer driving yourself (which is lol).
Thats too much of an honest assessment. An age old playbook. I'd like the tech do actually do things that are hard for me, like taking control of the car in a high stress situation. Sub-milisecond reactions to correct for a mistake. Something, anything more useful than a fancier cruise control.
Your car does that already. It has a superhuman braking system that saves a lot more lives than cruise control, though not quite sub-millisecond in its reaction time.
The knee-jerk conspiratorial reactions to new technology is depressing to see on HN. Do better.
If your knee is just now jerking, you've got a problem with your reflexes. Discussions like this have been happened for 15+ years.
The promise of tech has been that if we let it rip, we'll have a better democracy and living conditions for all. That promise has failed to materialise, for a variety of reasons. There is increased surveillance, enshittification, huge subscription fees, and upward pressure on climate change (directly linked to bitcoin mining then AI data centres). Then you get Musk lobbying against a city's plans to build a public transport network, so he can build an unsafe single-car tunnel for the rich.
I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.
Sorry, "tech" is not some catch-all for all the new things. "Tech" has given us wonderful new medicine and safer cars and faster internet.
Subscription fees? So "tech" should make producing a film ... free now? What exactly is your point?
Who exactly promised all these so-called benefits you keep saying you were lied about? The companies make products and services. Many, many people buy those things. Both sides are happy, transaction over. What "greater good" are you complaining about, exactly and who promised it to whom?
Yeah, it's just "new technology". Like those Flock cameras, I guess.
Do you care to elaborate further or would you like to just join the nebulous cynicism club and keep on making irrelevant comparisons?
Well, Flock is great and has caught many murderers. What's your point?
The article sensibly asks if the (intentionally or not) cherry-picked stats about automated driving (fair weather only, limited to specific areas that aren't especially difficult) is valid then cites a study that really massages those stats in a dubious way (e.g. only counts as a crash if the airbag triggered, no mention of weather). Hmmm...
Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?
Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives in cherry picked temperate and clear environments that don't get things like snow. The article mentions this point and acknowledges it is a serious problem and then just leaves it at that as if it doesn't completely demolish the entire argument they're making. They don't try to refute it or anything.
>How Does Limited Fair-Weather Data Compare to Traditional Crash Statistics?
>A key question is whether Waymo’s robotaxis, currently limited to fair-weather operation in a handful of cities in the U.S., are directly comparable to humans driving a wider variety of roads in much more variable conditions.
That's literally all they say about the subject before moving on to talking about incomplete sampling of true crash rates.
The lack of transparency and misinformation coming from the industry players and the NHTSA cast serious doubts on any "science" around autonomous car safety being possible.
If it was really known the full extent of the cover up it would probably be termed a conspiracy between the autonomous car companies, the state DMVs and the federal authorities.
It will take many years and many more unnecessary deaths before we know the truth. THEN give me science based on real and complete data.
Having worked in more than one of the big AV players, I can tell you that your fears of cover-ups or conspiracies with the government, is completely wrong. It'd be interesting if you have to first-hand experience otherwise, though...?
Growing proof that driving attentively, sober, not playing with your phone, and not speeding saves lives. Actually, we've known that for a long time.
The System loves leaning on the Cult of Safety to justify taking away people's autonomy and freedom of movement
Didn't save Elaine Herzberg.
A vision of a possible future where capitalism might go with the rise of self-driving cars: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0
This is real and good news. Autonomous driving systems have gotten very good and safe (well, Waymo and Tesla FSD).
Taking vehicle out of the hands of humans WILL save hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.
Yet most comments here want to complain that we should be building public transit instead. Glass is always half full on this topic for some reason.
what about when an autonomous car kills someone, and the car company remotely deletes important onboard logs to avoid culpability?
What about whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I love this conversation as the death spasm of driver culture. On the one hand, a lot of hard data. On the other hand, myths.
Honestly, mount a front and back dash camera, and allow people to submit tickets for speeding and tailgating themselves.
I’m not kidding excessive speed and not keeping a safe distance equates for some 50% of all deadly traffic incidents. It’s because a small and vocal minority drives like absolute fucking assholes and they will rally lawmakers not to introduce speed limits and to loosen grip on enforcement. The ADAC (German motor association) is a perfect example. When they announced after decades that they support a 130km max speed limit members jumped by the doves.
The only vastly meaningful improvement I can see in FSD is faster reaction times when it comes to assholes. Coincidentally those are the people who insist on driving petrol and will never upgrade to FSD because they like to drive like assholes.
IMHO it’s time for strict enforcement. Let’s ban them from the road finally. Set fines in percent from income. Allow self reporting via dash cams. Add stricter penalties for recurring offences, if you’re caught speeding 5 times in 2 days your licence is suspended.
That’ll have a much bigger impact than FSD. Maybe we can rally our representatives making them all giddy with all the extra cash they can earn from these offenders?
A hope (fantasy?) I have is that fleet robo taxis will (as part of regulations) get standardized “black box” recorders that can be admitted as evidence. Both for incidents, but also general traffic enforcement.
I feel like we never get real data on autonomous cars as we never do with data centers. It’s hard to tell if bad stories are anecdotal or rooted in truth. I hear the vast majority of accidents would be things that no human could avoid either - but then I’d also be anecdotal.
Tesla has tons of data to the same. Elon ftw.
You have to remember that this is data from the US, where the road death rate is just about level with Somalia, something like 30% of road deaths involve drunk drivers, and something like 50% of fatalities overall are because the casualty wasn't wearing a seatbelt.
Driver training is non-existent, vehicle safety inspections are frankly comical.
I have been driven in a car by an American colleague, supposedly trained to a high standard (former public safety) and frankly I think you could train a pigeon to peck buttons to control the car better.
We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.
> The cars know where they are
not if they're in a tunnel or a highrise canyon, or there is weather-related interference, or the maps have not been updated to reflect reality, or there is a detour for construction, etc.
GPS not nearly that reliable. There's a reason drones are moving towards computer vision rather than purely relying on GPS. The physical signs won't glitch out and show 100m offset because a tall building was reflecting GPS signals.
Maybe in a 100% automated system we would replace the icons with QR codes or something but physical markers will likely be here to stay.
I was reading about autonomous cars being better then people 6 years ago ... along with cries about the cars are treated unfairly.
Cool, now show the public transit safety numbers.
Epstein class pays a "journalist" to lie, so that one day, you will have no choice but to purchase their drivable iphones.