Waymos crash less than human drivers

If only it were easier to get the stats in the form of "damage in property/lives in the form of dollars per mile driven", that would let us kinda-combine both big tragic events with fender-benders.

(Yeah, I know it means putting an actuarial cost on a human life, but statistics means mathing things up.)

How?

isnt it a bit odd they always seem to be at the scene of a crash but somehow always a victim?

I don't really find this to be the case at all. I've had Waymo for ~2 years now (since the private program), and I've never noticed it being quicker or cheaper than an Uber. I have several hundred rides; I prefer the service - but I've never once told people it's cheaper or faster.

Currently, on Wednesday March 26th at 8:34 a ride from Bar Part Time in the Mission to Verjus in North Beach is $21.17 with a estimated 8 minute pickup time. The same ride on UberX has an estimated 2 minute pickup time at a cost of $15.34. I could see it being cheaper if you top 20% - but I don't tip nearly that high on Uber rides.

I will admit that I could possibly be self-selecting to peak times as I own a car in the city, so I only use ride share in the evenings; so it may very well be the case that the price/wait is more competitive at off-peak hours.

Furthermore, it's quite surprising to me that it seems that the human labor cost doesn't affect the price at all. The only price controls seems to be demand and the latent demand is enough to create a price floor where there is always a human that is willing to drive. It also seems like plain old logistics and traffic will prevent Waymo from providing enough supply to offer dirt cheap rides. The fact that a ride that would have cost me $5 in 2016 is almost 4x as much with "magic self driving technology" is not something I could have told my 2016 self.

I've taken Waymo only twice (I try to avoid SF), from the ferry building to Chinatown, then back. Both times it was more expensive than Lyft with tip, but only by $2-3. It's good to know it can be cheaper.

Still, it kind of sounded like any trip involving the highway would be advantage Uber.

I generally find that Waymos are cheaper than Uber/Lyft including tip.

I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.

The number one tech bro blind spot is the assumption that everything in the physical world scales with software and that every business and type of cost benefits greatly from economies of scale and the removal of human labor.

There are a great number of examples where that’s not true. Cookie store chains like Crumbl are a really good example. All the economies of scale stuff with them backfires. The product is too low price and too simple to make in batches, so the businesses with the best margins are ones that avoid traditional brick and mortar rent and don’t hire employees.

In the same way, an uber or taxi’s labor cost seems like it’s a huge scaling problem that needs to be resolved but really think about the costs involved with creating that scale to replace them.

Let’s not forget that at Waymo they still need a human to clean, fix, and charge/gas up, interact with customers and police, resolve driving edge cases, etc, all costs that a human driver essentially includes with their pay and does for “free.” Then you’ve got car storage and the capital expense of the vehicle that the uber driver heavily subsidizes and splits between business and personal use.

Basically, Waymo is looking to compete using their very complex and sophisticated solution in a market where its competitors are hiring lowest bidder temporary contractors.

Will it change?

Uber drivers are already paid low wages and any price competition can lower their wages further.

Waymo has to pay for things that “come with” uber drivers: the cars, storage for the cars, employees to clean and maintain the cars, extra infrastructure to support the self driving cars like cellular data for each car, data centers, engineers, customer service to interact with police and resolve edge cases (will never go away). Waymo also has to pay all these people healthcare benefits and pay W2 payroll, not a thing for Uber.

Waymo is like a professional moving company competing on price with an army of lowest bidder independent contractors who already have a beat up graffiti van.

I've also had an Uber driver talking about butchering various farm animals. I vastly prefer Waymo because it's a much calmer experience.

Waymo is significantly more expensive than UberX nowadays. People are happily willing to pay for the better experience (and tourists probably the novelty)

And uber is profitable. Waymo burns $2 billion a year.

The misconception here is that technology just magically runs on its own.

No, it’s created by and maintained by humans. You’re shifting the cost of a driver to software engineers, data analysis, people mapping out roads, etc.

This is why Uber doesn’t make any money, despite being more expensive for the customer as compared to traditional taxi services. Coordinating Ubers across the country costs a lot of servers and a lot of engineers. Sure, the system is automatic - maintaining it isn’t.

So you end up with a lose-lose-lose scenario. The ride is more expensive for the customer. The driver makes less money. And Uber bleeds hundreds of millions a year.

Technology is neat, yes, but often we don’t stop and think “wait… does this make sense?”

We don’t know if autonomous cars make any economic sense. They could end up not. It doesn’t help that 99% of tech companies in the transportation space are just making trains with extra steps. Like, guys - have we even done feasibility analysis?

I've used Waymo in both LA and SF and lived it. However, wait times in LA varied hugely. Downtown LA one evening was over twenty minutes and a few hours later less than five. I wonder if they just don't have enough vehicles there and because it's such sprawl it can easily happen that no car is nearby.

Having taken a closer look, it's at least a mixed bag. There doesn't seem to be a definitive policy to manage demand by keeping the price high.

This has been my experience also, especially considering no tipping.

Lower income people, in the U.S., tend to live in cheap areas and use a car to access employment in an hour+ radius. Making driving expensive for them simply means limiting their employment or cutting them off from it entirely.

Driving should not be a privilege exclusively for rich people. Poor people cannot afford to pay an Uber to drive them around and can’t afford to buy some Tesla with FSD either. Waymo would be grossly unaffordable for a 120 mile daily round trip commute.

In Australia I met people with even longer commutes - going 150km to get to a job, mostly due to how unaffordable housing has become.

If you want to take away people’s cars, you need to make sure they can access employment and have affordable, safe housing. Remember that half the population makes less than the median income.

> Autonomous driving removes the economic necessity of having one.

...Once autonomous cars can go everywhere human-driven cars can, in all the conditions humans can drive in.

Remember that Waymo is still very restrictive in where they choose to operate.

>>Nah, just revoke their licenses and make it much harder to get one to begin with

I 1000% agree with you, but unfortunately in some countries like the US that kind of argument leads to nowhere, because people think driving is a human right and also the entire country is built around having a car so you are actually truly screwed if you don't have one.

>> Autonomous driving removes the economic necessity of having one. Just get a proper car that can drive you to work.

Sure, except it doesn't exist and I honestly doubt it ever(in the next 50-100 years) will. If you need autonomous driving that takes you to your destination that already exists though - it's called a taxi.

Someone from Germany could confirm or correct this, but I have been told that if you get a DUI in Germany, your driver’s license is toast —for good.

Yes something like free bus card and N kilometers of taxi fares per month, so that :

1. People who normally take the bus are not incentivise to get their driving license /make a big accident

2. People already driving are still blt rewarded ,just not blocked

3. One may argue that if some of the borderline "not that dangerous but still..." driver do it on purpose to cross the line it still may benefits soxiety economically wise

Hang on, why are brits suddenly being mentioned?

> If they break the law and drive anyway, put them in jail.

They are going to drive anyway, because in most of the USA, you need a car to get basically anywhere, including to work. So now instead of just being a bad driver, they're also unemployed and sitting in jail, which taxpayers are paying for. There are people with dozens of DUIs, totally uninsurable, their licenses pretty much permanently revoked, and they still drive every day.

It really depends on whether there's shame attached, which isn't easy to control.

A private chef sounds good to me; having to go and collect specially marked "safe" meals at the supermarket with a card that's only given to adults the state deems incapable of looking after themselves, not so much.

Not sure if insurance is mandatory in the US or not

It's mandatory and requiring proof when you register your car. Your insurer also has a line to the DMV (car registration government) to say, "FYI this guy is not insured" and the DMV gets mad.

It's a known problem, particularly with undocumented peoples, that they are often uninsured. California studied the issue: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/105-type/95-guides...

In the report California states up to 13% of the US residents of some areas do not happen to possess documentation documenting their legality of being in the US. Often they came from countries with no insurance requirement, so they are unaware of American culture and policies in this regard. The report also states 10% of drivers are uninsured. I'm not sure why the DMV isn't getting mad in this case, being informed the car is not insured. So it's "mandatory" but 10% of drivers are not insured. Similar to how in California retail theft is technically "illegal" but a lot of people will do that without consequences. Honestly if you ask me we need to be waiving the insurance requirement for cultural reasons and take a verbal Spanish-first policy to help accommodate people who have undocumented English skills or are without documentation of being literate.

1 issue is insurance doesn't pay out much for road deaths.

Government generally budgets deaths at $3M-$30M per person killed. Yet a car accident that kills someone usually doesn't result in any payout at all.

That in turn means insurance companies are offering risky people lower rates than economists would suggest for the societal cost/risk.

If you're having an accident costing $10k twice a year, your insurance ought to cost at least $20k/year.

But for whatever reason, it seems such people end up with far lower (yet still expensive) insurance quotes at more like $4k/year.

It’s mandatory. That doesn’t stop people from driving a relative’s car with no insurance. Or driving with expired tags.

Good luck if such a person hits you; they’ll simply drive off. Recently a friend of mine had a fender bender with someone else, most likely his fault. That person didn’t have a valid registration or insurance and wasn’t at fault but begged to just go without calling the police. My friend handed them the cash out of his pocket since he felt bad for damaging their car, but they did NOT want to see the police.

The only way to enforce not having expired tags/no licence/no insurance is strict police enforcement. A lot of Americans don’t like that and so police agencies end up being lenient, preferring to focus on more violent crimes instead of just trying to pull every car with expired tags over.

Wait until you hear about the post-COVID rates of lawlessness in the US with uninsured and/or unlicensed drivers on the road..

> At some point you become prohibitively expensive to insure.

This would probably just cause more uninsured drivers. For California, that's around 17% [1]!

[1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsure...

Waymo definitely operates on bad weather. In fact, that is when I use it most since I don't want to walk or bike in the city when its pouring. The wait times are longer on those days.

City driving is very chaotic. Though speeds tend to be lower so likely accidents would be just fender benders. They don't operate on freeways.

Waymo claims to operate in fog and rain since 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog

Stupid behavior is not exclusive to being on drugs, heart attack or equipment malfunction though.

While I like watching those videos I suspect a fair share of them has a deeper explanation than "being an idiot”. But it’s a lot less fun to watch when you imagine the guy driving may be in a desperate position.

Btw the meaning of idiot is “someone ignorant". As contextless external watchers of a crash, the real idiots are probably you and me, the YouTube watchers.

Your report matches many other real world reports I've read. I'm pretty good at day dreaming or thinking while driving, so having to keep my hands ready to take over while being completely alert that FSD might error would be a big downgrade in my driving experience. I'd rather drive myself where my subconscious muscle memory does the driving so my conscious mind can think about other things. Having to pay attention to what FSD was doing would be a drag and prevent me from relaxing.

And you trust that you will ALWAYS have the awareness of intervening if and when FSD does something life threatening? You are braver than I am.

I am willing to experiment in many ways with things in my life, but not WITH my life.

It’s saved hundreds of millions at minimum. LiDAR is incredibly expensive hardware which is why they’re making it work well without it - it would make the cost of the cars really uncompetitive while also looking incredibly silly like Waymos. No one would buy them

The first tweet I linked to is Mark Rober's unedited video of the crash. The second tweet I linked to is a video of someone trying to reproduce the Wile E. Coyote test. Unless you think the videos are faked (one of which was posted by Mark Rober), I'm not sure what objection you're making.

Videos on YouTube are also not a reliable source. But your demand for rigor seems rather isolated.

Reviews of the wall gimmick video also make it clear that the LiDAR car stopped because it detected the water, not the wall. And there are tons of videos of LiDAR cars coming to a complete stop in traffic because of steam from a manhole or light water spraying just off the side of the road. Also don’t get me started on the manufacturer of the lidar car being mark’s close friend, and had previously given mark millions of dollars for another project he did

I think the correct response for FSD would have been to stop in the situations presented in the video. That wasn't anything like normal fog, rain, or light obstruction. The situations they created were so extreme you simply couldn't operate a vehicle safely. That being said, the effectiveness and precision of lidar should be a legal requirement for autonomous vehicles.

Worldwide stats from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...:

> Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes.

> Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years.

Falls from a ladder/roof do not come close to that as far as I've been able to find. They'd be a subset of falls from a height, which is a small subset of unintentional falls/slips, which is still globally under road accident deaths.

It's true that diabetes, strokes, heart disease, flu, etc. do cause more deaths, but we're really into the absolute biggest causes of death here. Killing fewer than strokes is the lowest of low bars.

I think there's also the argument to be made in terms of years of life lost/saved. If you prevent a road accident fatality, chances are that person will go on to live many more healthy years/decades. If you prevent a death by stroke, flu, or even an at-home fall, there is a greater chance that person is already in poor health (to have potentially died from that cause) and may only be gaining a few extra months.

"1000C is not that hot, the Sun is hotter!"

If you have to reach that hard to make your point, it's not a great point.

Adding to the sibling's statistic of 40k deaths a year:

> Motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, representing 20% of all deaths.

(https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/)

Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot?

IMHO it kinda is. It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11

I think I might, and I'm surprised by how confident you are that you wouldn't.

> I wouldn't

Of course, that's why traffic accidents are called 'accidents.' Drivers wouldn't crash their cars, but they do.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same as humans, drive slow enough that you can stop when you see something ahead. As demonstrated Lidar doesn't work in rain either.

HW4 Tesla stopped before the painting of a road https://futurism.com/someone-else-tested-tesla-crash-wall-pa...

I have a very wide definition of novel - any exact environment you have not yet traversed. First time taking that right turn? Novel route.

Out eyes, ears, voice and hands are quite useless when operated consciously.

Remember that what matters is the general driving populace, and there will always be people who drive better and who drive worse.

Also, a very significant portion of drivers overestimate their driving skills, in particular older drivers. Having only been scared once in 20 years would likely make someone lenient and dull their senses as nothing requiring notable effort or attention ever seems to happen to them.

Up to 30% of cars on city streets at any given time are looking for parking [1].

Cars are also the least utilized asset class, being parked 95% of the time [2].

AVs, by virtue of being able to coordinate fleet-wide and ability to park anywhere rather than only one's home or destination, would be able to gain incredible efficiencies relative to status quo.

Atop those efficiencies, removing both the constraint of having a driver and the constraint of excessive safety systems to make up for human inattentiveness means AVs can get drastically smaller as vehicles, further improving road utilization (imagine lots of 1- and 2-seaters zipping by). And roads themselves can become narrower because there is less room for error with AVs instead of humans.

Finally, traffic lights coordinating with fleets would further reduce time to destination (hurry up and finish).

Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities.

[1] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf

[2] https://senseable.mit.edu/unparking/

Every city street would have 4 lanes without the need for free car storage. Maybe make one of them a bike lane or widen the sidewalks and have 3 lanes for 30% more capacity. Also, traffic engineering could be optimized to a much greater extent since you wouldn't have to worry about all the affordances which keep humans from getting confused, keep them from getting aggressive, keep them from speeding, etc. Also, most congestion is caused by drivers causing turbulence by switching lanes, stopping each other from switching lanes, getting in the wrong lane, etc. A city of only AVs would probably flow much more smoothly.

We've been improving front seat safety systems for years while not adding much in the back seat. The result is obvious in the fatalities data and many institutions have involved themselves in this problem. Here's one:

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-crash-test-spotlights-l...

There are _so many_ bad assumptions about vehicle safety it honestly drives me nuts. Especially on Hacker News. The data is available from NHTSA in a database called FARS. I encourage everyone to go look through the data. You almost certainly believe several wrong things about driving and fatalities.

I think Elon Musk is exceptionally irresponsible for using these statistics in a flatly dishonest and misleading way. He wants to sell vehicles not truly educate you about safety. People should double check.

The only way for this to cause tens of thousands of death by self-driving alone is for people to suddenly need to drive the cars themselves, and not being able to do it well. Unless I'm missing something.

Of course you are the best kind of correct but to instead advance the whole discussion I think we can agree that there is no trail of carnage in the wake of waymos leaving only them unscathed.

I live in sf. Waymos are far more predictable and less reckless than the meatwagons. They do not cause accidents with their occasionally odd behavior.

And to add another perspective - as a cyclist and pedestrian I put waymos even further ahead. I have had crashes due to misbehavior of cars - specifically poor lane keeping around curves - but waymos just don’t cause those sorts of problems

> There is a crossover point somewhere.

I think his point is explicitly that that crossover point is rather high.

And let's not forget that crashes, in addition to their other costs, do cause significant delays themselves.

> I suppose the argument is that while the robot itself might not have run over anyone, it might have caused someone else on the road to do it.

And I repeat, that's a contrived enough scenario that I think you need to come to the table with numbers and evidence if you want to make it. Counting crashes has been The Way Transportation Safety Has Been Done for the better part of a century now and you don't just change methodology midstream because you're afraid of the Robot Overlord in the driver's seat.

Science always has a place at the table. Ludditism does not.

Back when I used to pay attention to this stuff, the vast majority of crashes occurred when the Waymo vehicle was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.

I'm confused by your comment. We shouldn't expect that Waymo accidents should budge overall accidents (which seems to be what you are talking about), but it wouldn't be crazy for Waymo, even if it was much safer overall, to be responsible for some non-trivial amount of all the accidents it has.

For example, imagine that Waymo is (somehow) far far far superhuman in it's ability to avoid other cars doing dumb/bad things. It has a dramatic reduction in overall accidents because it magically can completely get rid of accidents where the other driver is at fault. But, in some very specific circumstances, it can't figure out the proper rate to slow down at intersections, and it consistently rear ends vehicles in front of it. This specific situation is very rare, so overall accidents still are low (much lower than human drivers), but, in our made up, constructed (and extremely non-sensical) hypothetical, nearly 100% of Waymo accidents are Waymos fault.

So I don't think it's ridiculous to ask how many of the accidents Waymo has been involved in are the fault of the Waymo vehicle. It turns out that (assuming Waymo's side of the story is to be trusted), almost none of them are their fault, but it didn't have to be that way, even in the case where Waymo accidents were more rare than human accidents.

I think if you swap a million humans into other humans at random you're going to get some road carnage as well, to be fair. If someone suddenly puts me on some icy road in Minnesota I'm gonna have a bad time.

I think it's the inverse. The people who are left lane camping in their Fiat 500 because the right lane has merging and that's scary will be the early adopters. The people who really "get it" will keep driving themselves because they can do better.

This is basically the same adoption path as every other labor saving tech.

Even in self-driving, Telsa's behavior proves there is a market for cars that are programmed to speed and roll through stop signs. Waymos are safer than the average human, but the average human also intentionally chooses a strategy that trades risk for speed. Indeed, Waymo trips on average take about 2x as long as Ubers: https://futurism.com/the-byte/waymo-expensive-slower-taxis

What happens if an upstart self-driving competitor promises human-level ETAs? Is a speeding Waymo safer than a speeding human?

Over the next decade or two, insurance will solve a chunk of this problem (it'll be way more expensive to drive yourself), regulations will solve another chunk, but the biggest thing that will solve it: we're lazy.

We might drive every now and then, but come on, do you really think once this is ubiquitous and you can get in a (or your) car and then play a video game, take a nap, text on your phone, or doomscroll, that we're still going to want to drive all the time?

Nah.

>You say that and yet many places have an order of magnitude less car "accidents" per population than the US currently.

Nice Freudian slip there.

Rich western europe has less car accidents because they, broadly speaking, don't let poor people drive and work harder to cultivate a law abiding populace.

The best bucket insurance companies can use is based on age, car choices, and past behavior etc. Yet, a percentage of such people still end up in deadly accidents because they drove drunk, or while looking at their phones and such.

Insurance companies can’t know your future behavior so must hedge for a percentage of future idiots being in any bucket. On the flip side some people in the multiple DUI bucket end up driving sensibly over the next 6 months.

Waymo does not have remote operation capability. Here's a blog post from them explaining how "fleet response" works:

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

It's possible to put the car in manual mode, but that requires a human behind the wheel.

I have a Tesla myself, and while it's a great car, it's a long, long way from actual autonomous driving and their own stats bear this out: it can manage 12-13 miles without driver interruption, while Waymo is clocking ~17,000. Hell, where I live, Autopilot can barely stay in lane.

How do you get yours to drive into a parking lot and park correctly? My HW4/v13.2.8 gets indecisive and ignores lines when getting to a destination. I always have to disengage before I can use parking mode.

Had lots of tight curves on it and quite a few places where you’d stop for a stop sign and then start up again. Fast engine = rocket off from those starts. Good handling = don’t need to decelerate in the curves.