Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos that aren't even moving.
I’ve been thinking a lot about autonomous vehicles as I prepare for next Wednesday’s Ride AI Summit in Los Angeles.
I’ll be moderating two panels. One features three companies—Waabi, Bot.auto, and Torc—that are working to automate long-haul trucking. The other features Nuro and Wayve, two of the leading companies developing next-generation driver asssistance systems for customer-owned cars.
We still have some tickets available, so if you are involved—or interested—in the AV industry, you’ll want to join us in Los Angeles.
The first ever fatal crash involving a fully driverless vehicle occurred in San Francisco on January 19. The driverless vehicle belonged to Waymo, but the crash was not Waymo’s fault.
Here’s what happened: a Waymo with no driver or passengers stopped for a red light. Another car stopped behind the Waymo. Then, according to Waymo, a human-driven SUV rear-ended the other vehicles at high speed, causing a six-car pileup that killed one person and injured five others. Someone’s dog also died in the crash.
Another major Waymo crash occurred in October in San Francisco. Once again, a driverless Waymo was stopped for a red light. According to Waymo, a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction crossed the double yellow line and crashed into an SUV that was stopped to the Waymo’s left. The force of the impact shoved the SUV into the Waymo. One person was seriously injured.
These two incidents produced worse injuries than any other Waymo crash in the last nine months. But in other respects they were typical Waymo crashes. Most Waymo crashes involve a Waymo vehicle scrupulously following the rules while a human driver flouts them: speeding, running red lights, careening out of their lanes, and so forth.
Waymo’s service will only grow in the coming months and years. So Waymo will inevitably be involved in more crashes—including some crashes that cause serious injuries and even death.
But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.
Federal regulations require Waymo to report all significant crashes, whether or not the Waymo vehicle was at fault—indeed, whether or not the Waymo is even moving at the time of the crash. I’ve spent the last few days poring over Waymo’s crash reports from the last nine months. Let’s dig in.
Last September, I analyzed Waymo crashes through June 2024. So this section will focus on crashes between July 2024 and February 2025. During that period, Waymo reported 38 crashes that were serious enough to either cause an (alleged) injury or an airbag deployment.
In my view only one of these crashes was clearly Waymo’s fault. Waymo may have been responsible for three other crashes—there wasn’t enough information to say for certain. The remaining 34 crashes seemed to be mostly or entirely the fault of others:
The two serious crashes I mentioned at the start of this article are among 16 crashes where another vehicle crashed into a stationary Waymo (or caused a multi-car pileup involving a stationary Waymo). This included ten rear-end crashes, three side-swipe crashes, and three crashes where a vehicle coming from the opposite direction crossed the center line.
Another eight crashes involved another car (or in one case a bicycle) rear-ending a moving Waymo.
A further five crashes involved another vehicle veering into a Waymo’s right of way. This included a car running a red light, a scooter running a red light, and a car running a stop sign.
Three crashes occurred while Waymo was dropping a passenger off. The passenger opened the door and hit a passing car or bicycle. Waymo has a “Safe Exit” program to alert passengers and prevent this kind of crash, but it’s not foolproof.
There were two incidents where it seems like no crash happened at all:
In one incident, Waymo says that its vehicle “slowed and moved slightly to the left within its lane, preparing to change lanes due to a stopped truck ahead.” This apparently spooked an SUV driver in the next lane, who jerked the wheel to the left and ran into the opposite curb. Waymo says its vehicle never left its lane or made contact with the SUV.
In another incident, a pedestrian walked in front of a stopped Waymo. The Waymo began moving after the pedestrian had passed, but then the pedestrian “turned around and approached the Waymo AV.” According to Waymo, the pedestrian “may have made contact with the driver side of the Waymo AV” and “later claimed to have a minor injury.” Waymo’s report stops just short of calling this pedestrian a liar.
So that’s a total of 34 crashes. I don’t want to make categorical statements about these crashes because in most cases I only have Waymo’s side of the story. But it doesn’t seem like Waymo was at fault in any of them.
There was one crash where Waymo clearly seemed to be at fault: in December, a Waymo in Los Angeles ran into a plastic crate, pushing it into the path of a scooter in the next lane. The scooterist hit the crate and fell down. Waymo doesn’t know whether the person riding the scooter was injured.
I had trouble judging the final three crashes, all of which involved another vehicle making an unprotected left turn across a Waymo’s lane of travel. In two of these cases, Waymo says its vehicle slammed on the brakes but couldn’t stop in time to avoid a crash. In the third case, the other vehicle hit the Waymo from the side. Waymo’s summaries make it sound like the other car was at fault in all three cases, but I don’t feel like I have enough information to make a definite judgment.
Even if we assume all three of these crashes were Waymo’s fault, that would still mean that a large majority of the 38 serious crashes were not Waymo’s fault. And as we’ll see, Waymo vehicles are involved in many fewer serious crashes than human-driven vehicles.
Another way to evaluate the safety of Waymo vehicles is by comparing their per-mile crash rate to human drivers. Waymo has been regularly publishing data about this over the last couple of years. Its most recent release came last week, when Waymo updated its safety data hub to cover crashes through the end of 2024.
Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.
Using human crash data, Waymo estimated that human drivers on the same roads would get into 78 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag. By comparison, Waymo’s driverless vehicles only got into 13 airbag crashes. That represents an 83 percent reduction in airbag crashes relative to typical human drivers.
This is slightly worse than last September, when Waymo estimated an 84 percent reduction in airbag crashes over Waymo’s first 21 million miles.
Over the same 44 million miles, Waymo estimates that human drivers would get into 190 crashes serious enough to cause an injury. Instead, Waymo only got in 36 injury-causing crashes across San Francisco or Phoenix. That’s an 81 percent reduction in injury-causing crashes.
This is a significant improvement over last September, when Waymo estimated its cars had 73 percent fewer injury-causing crashes over its first 21 million driverless miles.
The above analysis counts all crashes, whether or not Waymo’s technology was at fault. Things look even better for Waymo if we focus on crashes where Waymo was determined to be responsible for a crash.
To assess this, Waymo co-authored a study in December with the insurance giant Swiss Re. It focused on crashes that led to successful insurance claims against Waymo. This data seems particularly credible because third parties, not Waymo, decide when a crash is serious enough to file an insurance claim. And claims adjusters, not Waymo, decide whether to hold Waymo responsible for a crash.
But one downside is that it takes a few months for insurance claims to be filed. So the December report focused on crashes that occurred through July 2024.
Waymo had completed 25 million driverless miles by July 2024. And by the end of November 2024, Waymo had faced only two potentially successful claims for bodily injury. Both claims are still pending, which means they could still be resolved in Waymo’s favor.
One of them was this crash that I described at the beginning of my September article about Waymo’s safety record:
On a Friday evening last November, police chased a silver sedan across the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The fleeing vehicle entered San Francisco and went careening through the city’s crowded streets. At the intersection of 11th and Folsom streets, it sideswiped the fronts of two other vehicles, veered onto a sidewalk, and hit two pedestrians.
According to a local news story, both pedestrians were taken to the hospital with one suffering major injuries. The driver of the silver sedan was injured, as was a passenger in one of the other vehicles. No one was injured in the third car, a driverless Waymo robotaxi.
It seems unlikely that an insurance adjuster will ultimately hold Waymo responsible for these injuries.
The other pending injury claim doesn’t seem like a slam dunk either. In that case, another vehicle steered into a bike lane before crashing into a Waymo as it was making a left turn.
But let’s assume that both crashes are judged to be Waymo’s fault. That would still be a strong overall safety record.
Based on insurance industry records, Waymo and Swiss Re estimate that human drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix would generate about 26 successful bodily injury claims over 25 million miles of driving. So even if both of the pending claims against Waymo succeed, two injuries represent a more than 90 percent reduction in successful injury claims relative to typical human drivers.
The reduction in property damage claims is almost as dramatic. Waymo’s vehicles generated nine successful or pending property damage claims over its first 25 million miles. Waymo and Swiss Re estimate that human drivers in the same geographic areas would have generated 78 property damage claims. So Waymo generated 88 percent fewer property damage claims than typical human drivers.
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Comments
Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo is almost certainly better already.
Honestly, at this point I am more interested in whether they can operate their service profitably and affordably, because they are clearly nailing the technical side.
For example data from a 100 driver study, see table 2.11, p. 29. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/37370 Roughly the same number of drivers had 0 or 1 near-crashes as had 13-50+. One of the drivers had 56 near crashes and 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles! So the average isn't that helpful here.
Hmmm, perhaps a more-valuable representation would be how the average Waymo vehicle would place as a percentile ranking among human drivers, in accidents-per-mile.
Ex: "X% of humans do better than Waymo does in accidents per mile."
That would give us an intuition for what portion of humans ought to let the machine do the work.
P.S.: On the flip-side, it would not tell us how often those people drove. For example, if the Y% of worse-drivers happen to be people who barely ever drive in the first place, then helping automate that away wouldn't be as valuable. In contrast, if they were the ones who did the most driving...
the nature of the accidents also makes a difference tho.
A small fender bender is common in human drivers. A catastrophic crash (like t-boning into a bus) is rare (it'd make the news for example).
Autodriving, on the other hand, almost never makes fender benders. But they do t-bone into busses in rare occasions - which also makes the news.
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.)
It is easy, if you run an insurance company. Knowing that data is literally how they price auto insurance policies.
Sadly for the rest of us, it's not exactly easy to get that data from the insurance company.
By steveBK123 2025-03-2711:371 reply Putting aside Waymo specifically for a second (whom I believe is the leader in the space, but also self operates their own custom cars).
If the current state of commercially available ADAS was dramatically reducing accident rates, then Teslas etc would have lower insurance rates. And yet they instead have higher insurance rates.
By iamacyborg 2025-03-2711:463 reply Is Tesla’s higher insurance rate not related to them being more common targets of vandalism?
By tonyhb 2025-03-2712:33 AFAIK, it's due to things like single frame construction and expensive + backlogged parts which you order directly from Tesla (as opposed to, eg, a drivetrain that may be made for 3 separate manufacturers).
Or, when you do have an accident it's typically more expensive to repair.
By steveBK123 2025-03-2711:51 That is entirely new issue and insurance does not respond this quickly.
Tesla's have had higher insurance for 5+ years. Some of which is due to wait times on repairs, costs of repairs, and also accident rates.
By aussiegreenie 2025-03-2720:19 No, Teslas are hard to repair. The insurance rates were always higher than similar ICE vehicles. Any extra problems are marginal.
By Eavolution 2025-03-279:011 reply I think my car insurance policy actually does detail what they believe every part of your body + your life to be worth, it might be my old policy though. From memory an arm was £2,000
[Edit]: found the policy: death: £2,500 arm or leg: £2,000 blindness in one or both eyes: £2,000
By elromulous 2025-03-279:383 reply Wow. Is that a typo for death? Not only do they not value human life much at all, losing multiple limbs is more than dying?
Death is cheaper in our legal system than taking care of some one disabled for many years.
By throwaway48476 2025-03-2711:281 reply China too, that's why you get... those videos.
By Fricken 2025-03-2710:40 It costs more than dying.
By ethbr1 2025-03-2712:06 As my father quipped to me when I was younger: 'You know the best thing about a three-legged dog? It's not sad about the limb it's missing: it's happy for the three it still has.'
By potato3732842 2025-03-2710:021 reply If the data made their rates look like a fair deal they'd be plastering it on billboards.
Their competitors would also know, and specifically know which category to compete in to do the most damage.
By potato3732842 2025-03-2713:49 I don't think that's possible. I don't think this is a "cooperate greed, nobody wants to end the gravy train by starting a price war" situation. I think it's a "the myriad of stuff you have to do to run a compliant company sets the price floor" situation. The fact that there is no nuclear "well I guess I just can't afford insurance, if I lose my house so be it" option available to customers prevents it all from caving in.
By tsimionescu 2025-03-277:09 Perhaps the best way to address this would be to look at property damage for car-car or cat-object collisions, and a separate stat for car-pedestrian accidents.
In collisions that don't involve pedestrians, the damage to the car/object is generally proportional to the chance that someone was badly injured or killed in those cases - the only thing you get by adding human life costs is to take into account the quality of the safety features of the cars being driven, which should be irrelevant for nay comparison with automated driving. In collisions that do involve pedestrians, this breaks down, since you can easily kill someone with almost 0 damage to the car.
So having these two stats per mile driven to compare would probably give you the best chance of a less biased comparison.
By Panzer04 2025-03-276:29 You could just keep life and money separate, it's technically possible for the ratios to be different.
By asielen 2025-03-2715:50 It may be more fair to compare them to Uber drivers and taxis and at least on that comparison haven't ridden in thousands of Uber and taxis and a couple dozen waymos, it is better than 100%.
Anecdotal of course but within my circle people are becoming Waymo first over other options almost entirely because of the better experience and perceived better driving. And parents in my circle also trust that a waymo won't mow them down in a crosswalk. Which is more than you can say for many drivers in SF.
By seizethecheese 2025-03-275:242 reply With a distribution like this, percentile would be misleading, though
By david-gpu 2025-03-279:58 How?
isnt it a bit odd they always seem to be at the scene of a crash but somehow always a victim?
No? If they cause less accidents then people will hit them more often than they hit other people.
My car has been involved in more fender benders while parked in perfectly legal spaces than when I was driving it.
However, such a pattern can also occur if the Waymo cars are stopping more abruptly or frequently than a human driver would be expected to.
In such a case, they might not be considered legally at fault, but they would still be, in practical terms, a significant cause of the crash.
By saalweachter 2025-03-2713:302 reply No, tailgating would be a significant cause of the crash.
A driver -- legally, logically, practically -- should always maintain a safe following distance from the vehicle in front of them so that they can stop safely. It doesn't matter if the vehicle in front of them suddenly slams on the brakes because a child or plastic bag jumped in front of them, because they suddenly realized they need to make a left turn, or mixed up the pedals.
Oh, I fully agree—like I said, legally they're not at fault, because you'd more or less have to be tailgating and/or inattentive to crash into them just for braking unexpectedly.
But if there's an existing system and culture of driving that has certain expectations built up over a century+ of collective behavior, and then you drop into that culture a new element that systematically brakes more suddenly and unexpectedly, regardless of whether the human drivers were doing the right thing beforehand, it is both reasonable and accurate to say that the introduction of the self-driving cars contributed significantly to the increase in crashes.
If they become ubiquitous, and retain this pattern, then over time, drivers will learn it. But it will take years—probably decades—and cause increased crashes due to this pattern during that time (assuming, again, that the pattern itself remains).
By saalweachter 2025-03-2718:322 reply Tailgating causes a great number of accidents today, no autonomous cars needed.
While tailgating is tiny slice of fatal collisions -- something like 2% -- it accounts for like 1/3 of non-fatal collisions.
We're already basically at Peak Tailgating Collisions, without self-driving cars, and I'd happily put a tenner on rear-end collisions going down with self-driving cars because, even if they stop suddenly more often, at least they don't tailgate.
And it's entirely self-inflicted! You can just not tailgate; it's not even like tailgating let's you go faster, it just lets you go the exact same speed 200 feet down the road.
By quinnirill 2025-03-299:02 Assuming a driving culture where other people won’t instantly insert themselves into the empty space in between, yes, it’s the exact same speed. I’d very much like that.
By danaris 2025-03-2811:54 > You can just not tailgate; it's not even like tailgating let's you go faster, it just lets you go the exact same speed 200 feet down the road.
Preach.
I was coming home a few evenings ago in the dark, and both I and my passenger were getting continually aggravated by the car that was following too close behind us, with their headlights reflecting in the wing mirrors alternately into each of our faces.
They kept that up for at least 10 miles.
As a pure hypothetical what you propose is possible, but there’s actual crash data to look at so there’s no need to guess.
Waymo’s crashes that I’ve looked at have just been fairly typical someone else is blatantly at fault no unusual behavior on Waymo’s part. So while it’s possible such a thing exists it’s not common enough to matter here.
By potato3732842 2025-03-2714:03 This is dumb circular logic though.
Sure, the current system won't make those bad drivers pay up for that behavior, but dumping a bunch of them onto the roads is a net negative overall.
By trainsarebetter 2025-03-2713:08 This.
I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber while having a longer wait time for a car.
It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double.
One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. It’s not like Uber drivers make a ton of money. Uber drivers often have zero capital expense since they are driving vehicles they already own. Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees and have them drive them home and to the grocery store.
I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service.
Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Last number I found on that was over one person per vehicle but I’m not sure if anyone knows for sure.
I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber, had a longer wait time for a car, and cost about double.
That's literally an edge case. For shorter trips, I've found it to be slightly cheaper (especially factoring in the lack of tips) with maybe a slightly longer wait.
By nemothekid 2025-03-273:381 reply 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.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-274:11 You are also comparing Way-mo to UberX when it is more comparable to Uber comfort, but that’s often only a few dollars difference. Really, Waymo needs to come to Seattle, our uber costs are sky high and it would be easy to actually be cheaper than most uber rides here when it’s already $40 to go a short distance.
By fallinghawks 2025-03-2623:151 reply 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.
By brokensegue 2025-03-273:332 reply lyft charges more for nicer cars so a fair comparison might be to lyft's more premium service
This comparison doesn’t work.
Not all Waymo riders actually want the premium cars and we can’t assume that’s why they are choosing Waymo.
We have to assume that some and perhaps most riders would prefer to pay less to ride in a cheaper car but are mainly choosing Waymo because its autonomous (cool factor, the no-human factor).
Also, California mandates autonomous vehicles be fully electric by 2030. So Waymo literally has to be driving some kind of EV to comply very soon.
Jaguar’s I-pace was a poor-selling EV SUV from a struggling company with a lot of leftover inventory, so it’s almost a guarantee that Waymo got a great fleet deal on them.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-274:143 reply The cars are comfortable, even if they aren’t popular. If I had to choose between a beat up Prius uber-X or a Jaguar for a few dollars more, I’m definitely choosing the latter. I had a Mercedes (older cheaper model with mechanical issues) Uber-X fall apart on my ride in Orange County last month (my son and I were dumped near a nice mall at least), also I bet the Waymo doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke.
To me the consistency in Waymos is so valuable. If I take a Waymo in SF or LA it's gonna be the same type of car, it's very well kept, the driver has the same driving style and the same conversation preferences.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-275:032 reply Unfortunately I’ve only used it a few times in SF, but I would really love that. I don’t prefer human drivers much anymore (like I want to use self checkout at a grocery store). I’m going to Beijing in a couple of weeks and hope to try whatever they have going on there.
From a quick search, you might need a local to book it, i.e. register the journey with the state apparatus.
(This is a city where buying a simple 40¢ metro ticket requires showing identification.)
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-295:02 It’s really not that hard to buy a metro ticket. But we pay/alipay will make it easier, or I could just get a couple of IC cards that have been around since forever.
This amuses me, because if you’re going to Beijing you can just use the way-better-than-America public transportation.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-284:451 reply Not always and not everywhere. I lived in Beijing for 9 years on a subway line (well, after line 10 opened) that would have taken me almost straight to work, but it was so packed I still took a taxi. Maybe the extra lines/capacity makes it more comfortable now, but it wasn’t Tokyo when I was living there.
By dangus 2025-04-0214:13 Beijing: “I could take the train but the public transit is so useful and frequent that it’s crowded so I took a taxi :’(“
My medium sized American city: “what train? What bus? What taxi?
By steveBK123 2025-03-2711:41 Worth noting how much the quality of each tier of Uber has degraded as well. In 2025, Uber Black car/driver quality is like Uber-X of 2019. Not unusual to get in an Uber Black with blown out shocks, smelling of cigarettes and streetcart food. Reminds me of yellow cab days.
By dangus 2025-03-283:37 It’s great that you and the other contrarians in this thread value that, but my point is that the general consumer likely overwhelmingly chooses to pick whatever is cheapest save for specialized selections like XL or pet.
I think the best evidence of that is how uber/lyft has to use grey-ish patterns to get you to choose upmarket options. They don’t list the fares sorted by price or even list the options in a consistent order, they will strongly suggest upsells like comfort or black or whatever tier they think gives the best chance of convincing you to pay more than the bare minimum.
They also upsell faster pickup which I have to think is a way better value proposition than sitting in a nicer car temporarily.
By fallinghawks 2025-03-2822:44 I always pick the cheapest Lyft available; I'm not spending a whole lotta time in it so a luxury ride isn't a priority.
Still, it kind of sounded like any trip involving the highway would be advantage Uber.
By krupan 2025-03-274:22 Yes. For now
The wait times have gotten better, they're getting freeway approval shortly which will be nice, the price is still at a premium (but worth it imo). I only take Waymo in SF now.
The only time I take Uber in the bay area is to the airport (and when they approve Waymo for SFO I won't take Uber then either).
By BurritoAlPastor 2025-03-2621:532 reply 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.
By fossuser 2025-03-2622:23 Ah I guess I almost never tip uber (unless something exceptional happens) - holdover from the Travis era.
>>Uber/Lyft including tip.
The real question is why tip on either of those? You pay through the app, the driver is compensated for their time, why tip extra? If you feel that Uber/Lyft are mistreating their drivers, stop using their service, not pay them on the side?
Fascinatingly, every argument you make is wrong.
> it cost twice as much as an Uber
Surely incidental since the typical price per ride is about the same. Generally though, the relationship between the cost to operate a service profitably and the price presented to the user is very complex, so just because the price happens to be x right now doesn't tell you much. For example, something like 30% of the price of an iPhone is markup.
> while having a longer wait time for a car
Obviously incidental?
> It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double.
Obviously easily fixable?
> One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are.
There's nothing to underestimate, human drivers don't scale the way software drivers do. It doesn't matter how little humans cost, they are competing with software that can be copied for free.
> Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees
They can share parking space, cleaning services, maintenance, parts for repair, etc.
> I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical.
Obviously, they're in the development phase. None of this matters long term.
> They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service.
"The stock market went up 2% yesterday so it will go up 2% today too and every day after that."
> Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that.
Said operators are shared between all vehicles and their number will go down over time as the driving software improves.
---
To sum up, every single part of what Waymo is trying to do scales. Every problem you've mentioned is either incidental or a one-off cost long term.
By dangus 2025-03-283:48 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.
By agildehaus 2025-03-2622:021 reply Both the longer wait time and the double price can likely be explained by the lack of highway.
Highway is coming.
And scale will make it cheaper. It's only cheaper than Uber sometimes currently. That will change.
By dangus 2025-03-2813:31 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.
My experience using Waymos in SF is that they are a little less expensive than an Uber. The other advantage is that you aren't stuck with a driver who hits on you or wants to share his opinions on the best way to slaughter goats.
By muchosandwich 2025-03-273:552 reply I've also had an Uber driver talking about butchering various farm animals. I vastly prefer Waymo because it's a much calmer experience.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-274:16 I had an Uber driver fall asleep on me while driving. I can’t wait for Waymo to come to Seattle.
By Mistletoe 2025-03-274:02 Hopefully you guys are giving bad ratings to these insane people that think talking about slaughtering methods is appropriate cabbie talk?
By acchow 2025-03-276:49 Waymo is significantly more expensive than UberX nowadays. People are happily willing to pay for the better experience (and tourists probably the novelty)
By dangus 2025-03-2813:31 And uber is profitable. Waymo burns $2 billion a year.
By TulliusCicero 2025-03-274:11 I mean yeah, right now they've hit the point of being quite safe, but they're not necessarily as fast as human drivers. They'll keep making incremental progress and will get there eventually, probably.
So far, every time there's been self driving car progress, someone's been like, "okay yeah, but can they do <the next thing they're working on> yet??" like some weird gotcha. Tech progress is incremental, shocking I know.
By Ferret7446 2025-03-276:441 reply > One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are
That's such a silly statement. One shouldn’t underestimate how UNeconomical real humans are.
In the past 12,000 years, human efficiency has improved, maybe, 10x. In the past 100 years, technological efficiency has improved, maybe, 1,000,000x.
Any tiny technological improvement can be instantly replicated and scaled. Meanwhile, every individual human needs to be re-trained and re-grown. They're extremely temperamental, with expensive upkeep, very short lifespans and even shorter productive lifespans.
In fact, humans have improved so little, that every time, they scoff at the new technology and say it will never take off, and they're still doing it 12,000 years later, right now, right above this post.
By consteval 2025-03-2714:00 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?
By VirusNewbie 2025-03-2622:041 reply In LA, wait times were the same as Uber and the price was the same as well (for a nicer car some of the time).
By ajmurmann 2025-03-274:56 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.
Waymo rides are also potentially slower because they strictly follow speed limits. Not really problematic in downtown SF but it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be received by riders when they expand to highway driving where most people generally expect to drive over the speed limit.
By thot_experiment 2025-03-2622:401 reply On most trips people do speeding saves an irrelevant amount of time. If somehow you encounter zero traffic from Palo Alto to SF and you go 15mph over the limit the whole way it makes the trip about 5 minutes shorter.
You have about 50% more KE at 80mph as you do at 65mph btw, if you find yourself needing to dissipate that energy rapidly.
Sure, there’s the math, but there’s also the human nature part of it. If you’re sitting in the right lane doing the speed limit, watching dozens of cars consistently zip past, it feels like you’re “falling behind” all of that traffic. I wonder how that will be received by the riding public.
For the opposite experience, take a taxi in a low- or maybe middle-income country.
There's a good chance the driver will zoom past everything else, weaving between lanes accordingly, and you'll wish you were one of the slow vehicles. Although I'd be less concerned if the seatbelts worked.
By Zigurd 2025-03-2713:15 You mean like Boston? More than once I've had to tell an Uber driver I'll pay them more to slow down.
By potato3732842 2025-03-271:093 reply When I'm traveling substantially below traffic speed I'm also decently concerned about becoming the scene of the accident. Sure it won't be me paying for the accident but I'd just rather not risk it.
By riskassessment 2025-03-274:281 reply This is often repeated, yet despite the studies on speed differentials being dangerous I am still skeptical of the more specific claim that driving the speed limit specifically when others are speeding increases your risk of getting in an accident.
By jdyer9 2025-03-275:50 It's likely often repeated because if you try driving 55 in a 55mph zone where people are driving between 62-70, it'sterrifying, it feels like you're stopped. Whether the stat is true or not remains to be seen, but intuitively, it makes a lot of sense. Sure, your risk of rear ending someone at that point is probably negligible, but the odds of being rear ended? Hard to say
By dwighttk 2025-03-275:31 When I’m driving the speed limit and everyone is going much faster I feel fine… they all just flow around me… if they weren’t able to flow, they wouldn’t be flying past.
By tonyedgecombe 2025-03-279:211 reply In the UK the speed limit for goods vehicles is 10 mph below the limit for cars on motorways so there are plenty of vehicles driving below the limit.
The real risk is the opposite, cars bunched together at the same speed. This is where pileups occur, somebody at the front does something stupid and the people at the back end up colliding.
The US used to have different speed limits for trucks. Oh the benefits of deregulation!
By gnarlynarwhal42 2025-03-2717:10 Speed limits are set by the states, and most have lower limits (and other restrictions) for large vehicles.
Unless you have a specific claim and source for your claim?
By burnished 2025-03-279:25 I think it'll be fine as people get used to being a passenger. If you're not staring at the speed gauge already you tend to not think about it
By jonathantf2 2025-03-2622:14 Miles?
That's the correct indicator to look for: the number of Waymos on the road is still very small compared to the number of other vehicles. Alphabet wouldn't risk the cost of expanding to the current number of cities without very strong confidence that they're not going to lose their shirt doing it.
The evidence so far is that they are throttling demand by keeping the prices above that of an Uber. It's definitely still an experiment. If the experiment is successful, expect to see more cities and more vehicles in each city in expanding service areas.
There are step changes that have to be made to keep waymo expanding. The tariff situation is blocking plans to have dedicated vehicles from China. That has to get sorted out. The exact shape of the business model is still experimental.
Of course it's got to be safe. But there are dozens of dull details that all have to work between now and having a profitable business. The best indicator of a plausible success is that Waymo appears to be competent at managing these details. So far anyway.
By happyopossum 2025-03-2719:312 reply > The evidence so far is that they are throttling demand by keeping the prices above that of an Uber.
I've only been in a handful of Waymo rides, but in each case it's been about half the price of an Uber.
By londons_explore 2025-03-276:185 reply > One of the drivers had 56 near crashes and 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles!
There would be a strong argument to simply banning the worst 1% of drivers from driving, and maybe even compensating them with lifetime free taxi rides, on the taxpayers dime.
By jillesvangurp 2025-03-277:414 reply Nah, just revoke their licenses and make it much harder to get one to begin with. Autonomous driving removes the economic necessity of having one. Just get a proper car that can drive you to work. No need for you to do anything. Catch up on lost sleep (a common cause of accidents is people being to tired to drive) or whatever.
Expect to pay for the privilege of driving yourself and putting others at risk. If you really want to drive yourself, you'll just have to skill up to get a license and proper training, get extra insurance for the increased liability, etc. And then if you prove to be unworthy of having a license after all, it will be taken away. Because it's a privilege and not a right to have one and others on the road will insist that you are competent to drive. And with all the autonomous and camera equipped cars, incompetent drivers will be really easy to spot and police.
It will take a while before we get there; this won't happen overnight. But that's where it's going. Most people will choose not to drive most of the time for financial reasons. Driving manually then becomes a luxury. Getting a license becomes optional, not a rite of passage that every teenager takes. Eventually, owning cars that enable manual driving will become more expensive or may not even be road legal in certain areas. Etc.
By trollbridge 2025-03-2713:144 reply 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.
Driving is not a right, it is a privilege.
Someone's individual economic circumstances are irrelevant. You can either drive safely or you can't.
By trollbridge 2025-03-2718:131 reply No one said it isn’t a privilege.
I don’t agree with making driving something only the wealthy do, though.
By pc86 2025-03-2813:00 False equivalency. Even taken to extreme ends nothing here can be construed as suggesting "only the wealthy" should be allowed or able to drive.
The moment someone suggests enforcement of a law someone comes running in yelling about how it's regressive and will disproportionately affect the poor, and by extension "only the wealthy" will be able to do whatever.
Everything disproportionately affects the poor because it's very hard to be poor.
And the moment you say we shouldn't enforce laws because it will make poor peoples' lives harder you are saying that something is no longer a privilege. That poor people should be able to break the law with lesser or no consequence because they are poor.
By Breza 2025-03-2817:12 I wonder if there should be a two-tiered structure to replace the traditional drivers license. In flying, you can get a Private Pilot License, or you can get a Sport Pilot Certificate, which is easier to get but has fewer privileges. It would be interesting to see a state replace a drivers license with the Sport level license, which would only let you drive a vehicle up to 6,000 pounds (Cadillac Escalade), have other restrictions, and have a higher insurance rate. Then the higher level license would require additional training (somewhere between current DL requirements and the monthlong requirement for a CDL) and let you drive the full limit of 26,000 pounds and you'd get discounted insurance.
By Y_Y 2025-03-2717:39 If you stop one person then maybe it becomes impossible to get from their give to their job. If you stop all the poor people from doing it then what happens? The jobs don't evaporate. Maybe it becomes economical to run a bus, or open more businesses outside the CBD.
By mannykannot 2025-03-2714:38 In the vast majority of cases, being a bad driver is a lifestyle choice, not an incurable condition. No-one should be granted a right to present a significant danger to other people as a consequence of making bad and avoidable lifestyle choices.
> 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.
By Breza 2025-03-2820:57 I wonder if there will be a gap between (1) AVs being so common that driving for Uber doesn't make financial sense, and (2) AVs being able to operate in all driving conditions. I imagine people at a concert all fleeing for AV taxis after receiving alerts of unexpected fog coming.
>>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.
By nradov 2025-03-2718:33 The type of people who frequently cause collisions are the same people that will drive without a license. And because they're also judgment proof deadbeats they often don't have liability insurance either.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-03-279:203 reply 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.
You can banned for a longish time and then have to do an "idiot" test (as they call it) to get your license back. In addition you have to supply hair samples so that you prove you've not been taking any further substance (in recent history).
Generally you have to do a lot to get banned for life - remember Germany is run by car lobbies, they are not interested in banning people from driving,
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-03-2710:381 reply Thanks! That makes more sense, to me.
> you have to supply hair samples
That seems like an idea that could be useful, over here, but we have a pretty strong sin lobby, so it's unlikely to happen.
By Towaway69 2025-03-2713:52 > pretty strong sin lobby
Sin is ok here, that's why our policitians have little or no hair ;)
By suyjuris 2025-03-2714:02 If you are caught driving above the legal limit of 0.05% you are fined roughly $570, are prohibited from driving for 1 month, and receive 2 “points”. Points accumulate and once you reach 8 you lose your drivers license. In this case you would keep the points for five years. Many different driving offences give you points.
For comparison, to get a similar penalty by speeding you would have to exceed the speed limit by 51 km/h (32 mph).
There are many additional related offences you could commit, with different consequences. Repeat offences to the above, for example, are punished more severely: you get 3 months instead of 1 and the fine is doubled and tripled for the second and third offence, respectively. Already with a blood alcohol level of 0.03% you risk legal consequences, e.g. if you make an error while driving. If you endanger someone else (or property) with that level you are committing a crime, will lose your license, and can go to prison. If you are in your probationary period (two years after acquiring your license), any nonzero level is an offence.
Losing your license is generally temporary. You are blocked from re-acquiring it for some time, depending on the offence (at least 6 months, but can be multiple years). You have to complete an MPU, which certifies your ability to safely drive. For alcohol based offences, this would include demonstrating that you have reduced your consumption significantly. This can be quite harsh; you may, for example, be required to show complete abstinence for a period of one year. Of course, you are also looking at costs close to $1000 for the MPU alone. It is possible to get permanently blocked from driving, but it's quite difficult, I believe.
By juntoalaluna 2025-03-2711:371 reply My impression from the internet is that the US is particularly weak on this - people talk about tickets for DUIs like it's not a big deal.
In the UK you get a minimum 12 month ban, an unlimited fine (which are based on income and have been quite big in the past (Dec of Ant and Dec got an £86000 fine). I don't think this approach is uncommon in Europe.
By trollbridge 2025-03-2713:101 reply It’s not. Yearlong suspension where I live, major fines, and you basically need to get a lawyer to navigate the process which is generally at least $10k. You become almost uninsurable and have to show proof to the court you carry insurance, or else you go straight to jail and your car gets impounded if you get pulled over.
With a valid employment reason (such as snow plow operator) you can get an employment only permit. Your insurance will easily be $1000 a month just for basic liability. I’ve known a few guys in this situation.
The bigger problem is people who are judgment proof and don’t mind spending some time in jail. They just drive drunk over and over and don’t care if their car (which is often a relative’s) gets impounded. They have no valid licence and no insurance. Short of permanent incarceration, there isn’t much they can be done about such people.
By ryandrake 2025-03-2716:57 > The bigger problem is people who are judgment proof and don’t mind spending some time in jail. They just drive drunk over and over and don’t care if their car (which is often a relative’s) gets impounded. They have no valid licence and no insurance. Short of permanent incarceration, there isn’t much they can be done about such people.
Yep, when you get down to this root fact, it's nearly impossibly to _actually_ stop someone from driving a car. If you make insurance mandatory, they will still not buy insurance. If you revoke their license, they will keep driving without it. If you fine them, they just won't pay. If they go to jail for it, they'll resume driving when they get out.
Perverse incentives will just balloon the bad driver population. Funny, since the brits have a history with these kinds of things.
By allan_s 2025-03-277:03 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
You don't have a right to free transportation.
I'd immediately donate money to and vote for any politician stupid enough to say we should revoke licenses from the worst 1% of drivers.
Revoke their licenses, let them figure it out. Get a ride from friends. Take the bus. Move closer to work. You're a danger.
If they break the law and drive anyway, put them in jail.
> 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.
By pc86 2025-03-2717:39 Yes, people will break the law. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished for it, and it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do things that are good for society (telling bad drivers they're no longer allowed to drive) because some percentage of those people will decide of their own volition to break the law.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-03-2719:541 reply > They are going to drive anyway
Honestly, arrest them. Someone willing to operate a motor vehicle without a license is one step away from manslaughter.
> Someone willing to operate a motor vehicle without a license is one step away from manslaughter.
I suspect there are plenty of undocumented immigrants in states that don't have the equivalent of AB 60 licenses who are perfectly safe drivers. Perhaps even safer than licensed drivers, since they have more to lose from moving violations.
By pc86 2025-03-2813:01 We're not talking about people who are here illegally, we're talking about people who have already proven they are incapable or unwilling to operate a motor vehicle safely, get punished for it, and decide to drive anyway.
By HamsterDan 2025-03-2711:501 reply Great idea. And people who start fires while cooking should be given free private chefs too.
By akoboldfrying 2025-03-2712:32 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.
By mattlondon 2025-03-279:395 reply It kinda works already without outright banning them: the mandatory insurance will get more and more expensive the more accidents they have.
So they price themselves out.
Of course, they may then decide not to have insurance at all. In most countries that is illegal and doing that in a premeditated way is criminality and something else entirely.
Not sure if insurance is mandatory in the US or not - I assume instead you just get into a gunfight with the other party instead?/s
By amy_petrik 2025-03-2717:36 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.
By londons_explore 2025-03-2710:001 reply 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.
By potato3732842 2025-03-2710:09 Just because it costs the government 10mil or whatever when they have an oopsie and kill someone doesn't mean anyone outside the .gov is actually seeing a cent. It's mostly overhead of cleanup, both physical and legal/process.
I bet the actual payouts to families are similar for normal deaths that don't result in a media spectacle and the court of public opinion being involved.
By londons_explore 2025-03-279:541 reply 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.
By potato3732842 2025-03-2710:302 reply They can't charge $20k/yr because that costs more than buying a POS, not registering it and getting it out of impound a couple times and then abandoning it.
With numbers like that you're fundamentally running against the people's willingness to comply (which includes the cop's willingness to enforce).
By steveBK123 2025-03-2711:39 Precisely - even insurance doesn't have the fat tail of awful driver data because they are disproportionately driving around uninsured illegally.
That doesn't make any sense. The insurance company willingly loses money just to avoid the possibility of someone driving illegally?
By potato3732842 2025-03-2713:321 reply They're not losing money. They're taking it from everyone else.
"oh you hit a mailbox during an ice storm that we paid out $50 for after your deductible, that'll be a $400/6mo increase in premiums for the next five years"
Still doesn't seem to add up. Consider someone that causes accidents at a rate of £20k/yr, and whose insurance is £4k/y. Either they're insanely wealthy and are paying the repair costs themselves via deductibles, or the insurance companies are losing money.
By potato3732842 2025-03-289:521 reply You don't understand. Insurance is using that person as a pretext to jack up the rate of everyone who shares demographics with that person. Even if that person is only paying in 80% of what they cost on a 5yr basis a bunch of cheaper people are getting screwed into paying 200%. It works better for insurance company this way because at least they're getting 80% out of the guy rather than zero.
By n4r9 2025-03-2814:18 Demographic risk pooling makes sense for moderate-risk individuals (despite being ethically horrendous). But for extreme outliers like this, the insurance company has a very high expectation that they're going to lose money in the coming year if they offer a premium below 15-20k. It just doesn't make financial sense to do so. At least in the UK you're obliged to declare the last five years of accidents and claims when applying for insurance, and I'd be surprised if they're not looking out for red flags like this.
By trollbridge 2025-03-2713:23 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.
By steveBK123 2025-03-2711:38 Wait until you hear about the post-COVID rates of lawlessness in the US with uninsured and/or unlicensed drivers on the road..
> 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles
Sorry if you're having a car crash every 6 months or less, you shouldn't have a license.
Driving a car is privilege granted to you by your state, and this state is negligent in its protection of everyone else by letting this idiot continue to drive. Sell your car, take the bus, move closer to work, I don't care.
More than 3 at-fault crashes in a year or more than 10 at-fault crashes ever and you should permanently lose your license forever. That seems more than generous enough.
By derf_ 2025-03-2714:54 > Sorry if you're having a car crash every 6 months or less, you shouldn't have a license.
Actual traffic enforcement does not seem to produce this result. This woman is fairly famous on Reddit for her erratic driving, and was reported in 2019 as having been involved in 31 crashes since 2000: https://www.wral.com/story/lawyer-stayumbl-driver-a-victim-o...
She is still driving (with a new license plate after 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/bullcity/comments/1ji3y82/jesusdos_...
By eightysixfour 2025-03-2716:361 reply There is already a mechanism for this that the government doesn’t even have to be directly involved in - insurance. At some point you become prohibitively expensive to insure.
However, the government still has to do its part and actually enforce insurance requirements.
My pet hypothesis is that there is a tipping point where the feedback loop between driver safety, ai advancements, and insurance costs will doom manually driven cars faster than most people think.
> 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...
By eightysixfour 2025-03-2719:49 Yes, that’s why I said
> However, the government still has to do its part and actually enforce insurance requirements.
By magicalhippo 2025-03-2717:55 Here in Norway we've got a point system[1], and I'm sure we didn't invent it.
Each point lasts for 3 years, and if you accumulate more than 8 you lose your license for 6 months.
A speeding ticket is at least two points, and running a red light or tailgating is three for example. You get double points the first two years after getting your license.
[1]: https://www.vegvesen.no/en/driving-licences/driving-licence-...
By potato3732842 2025-03-2714:26 It's probably some old "bingo and church" driver who has a 50-50 shot of winding up in the ditch if it snows during Bingo and that "20k" is actually "8yr", the kind of thing insurance would never know about if you're not getting towing coverage through them.
By jonplackett 2025-03-279:081 reply Is Waymo doing ‘easier’ miles than an average human in any way? How limited is their range and types of roads they’ll use?
Yes, vastly easier.
As I understand it, they limit their range to a few cities in the American Southwest and West Coast, and don't operate in bad weather.
By mdeeks 2025-03-2718:20 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.
By Zigurd 2025-03-2713:13 Waymo claims to operate in fog and rain since 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog
By nickvec 2025-03-2621:58 Interesting. Pareto principle in action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
> Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo is almost certainly better already.
I would wager that those 20% of drivers also are disproportionally under the influence of drugs, impaired in any way (i.e., stroke, heart attack, etc), or experiencing sudden unexpected events such as equipment malfunction.
Defensive driving is risk mitigation.
You forgot "being an idiot" and it's strange, because the vast majority of the accidents are caused by that. Have you never watched "idiots driving" videos on YouTube?
By aziaziazi 2025-03-2710:49 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.
By timewizard 2025-03-277:59 You'd be correct. At least as far as fatalities are concerned. 50% of all fatalities involve drugs or alcohol. Around 50% of all fatalities are single vehicle accidents though. 15% are motorcycles. 15% are pedestrians.
And of course around 80% involve youth, testosterone and horsepower in some combination. The rest are almost always weather or terrain related in some way. Massive pileups on the highway in the winter and upside down vehicles on waterways in the summer.
Very rarely does a fatal accident happen without several factors being present.
By michaelmrose 2025-03-2621:533 reply What about the benefit to the 80% if the 20% were obligated to use software instead of their own wetware in a hypothetical world where this was feasible in all respects. Imagine if you transitioned to most new drivers for instance being issued only permits to use self driving vehicles and older drivers being obligated to switch at 65.
As someone getting on towards 65 I have to point out that insurance rates are less for the 65-70s than for any group younger that 55, and claim rates are lower than for any of the under 65s. My relatives didn't really start crashing into stuff till they got to about 90. And then it was kind of slow motion. (for this data https://www.abi.org.uk/products-and-issues/choosing-the-righ...)
By potato3732842 2025-03-271:063 reply Is that because you're better or because you're less exposed?
Not a lot of 65yo people working 80hr weeks, slogging out 50-100mi commutes or plowing into moose while blinded by the 6am sun on their way back from 3rd shift.
Insurance rates have a mileage component that should address that, although the smallest mileage category may be too large to really capture that. But if you're doing a 100 mile commute 5 days a week, that's likely beyond the lowest category.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-274:081 reply There is talk of per-mile insurance becoming a thing, maybe when per-mile registration taxes finally are? This would benefit a lot of us that come way under the lowest band.
Per-mile insurance has existed for a while, from companies like metromile.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-03-274:541 reply Yes, I’ve seen a few but so far never cheaper than per mile insurance, at least where I live. I’ll talk to my agent next year to see if my current home owner insurance company has one that works that way. My current policy uses my phone to track and reward driving habits, but it tracks my bus rides as car rides as well, which sucks. Can’t they come up with an Apple car app or something?
I’m so tempted to use a car insurance app, but in the end I don’t want to run a tracker
I don’t want to be penalized if I come to a sudden halt on a remote back road, with no one around, to remove a turtle, or a tire, or a bedframe from the road.
(Yes, I’ve done all of the above, multiple times.)
By dwighttk 2025-03-2711:14 Good point. I hadn’t even thought of getting pinged for non-wrecks.
By watwut 2025-03-278:24 They are more careful. They drive more slowly. They are more afraid. They are safer drives considering outcomes. The problem here is that people say "better driver" can be evaluated in various ways, safety only one of them. Many people think, for example, that if you get there faster, you are better driver. Or if you can show quick thinking by sudden movements.
> Not a lot of 65yo people working 80hr weeks, slogging out 50-100mi commutes or plowing into moose while blinded by the 6am sun on their way back from 3rd shift.
People who drive in that state are one of two things: irresponsible or poor with no other choice.
Driving regularly while tired and sleep deprived is a big factor in accidents ... and that many people are somehow seeing it as heroship rather then being irresponsible is a cultural issue.
By tim333 2025-03-279:05 Personally I'd say a mix of factors. Experience, a bit more cautious / laid back as in driving slower / leaving more distance, and probably less miles overall.
New drivers become better drivers by driving and gaining experience. This is why some states implement a mandatory minimum practice duration before you can get a license. Mandating they don't practice would be detrimental to the driving culture as it would skew in favor of AI by preventing learning in the first place.
By timewizard 2025-03-278:011 reply Some Australian provinces give you "P-Plates." These limit your privileges even after getting your license. Limits on number of passengers, times of day you can drive, and a horsepower limit. All of which are from many bloody lessons.
Tbf, like with many things in that country, I think it's fair to say Australians take this way too far. You're a grown adult who can drink alcohol, go fight for your country, get married etc etc....but god forbid that you drive after dark.
While Australia does take things too far, I’m actually on their side here. Driving has been too normalized. You’re operating a 2 ton chunk of metal at 60+ mph inches away from other people. Australia has far fewer pedestrian deaths per capita than the US does, and enforcing a higher skill bar for more difficult situations must be part of that.
Saying you can't drive with 2 passangers at night has nothing to do with skill - if it did, you could pass a test to demonstrate that you can do this safely. Instead it's just another "you're not mature enough to do this" restriction which is bonkers. Again, you can drive this 2 ton chunk of metal, but at night? With passangers?? Phwoar, we can't have that.
By potato3732842 2025-03-2710:25 Most of the time with obviously nonsensical stuff like that they're doing it to appease certain demographics or stakeholders.
They needed Karen's support to get the whole thing passed so they added a "and we won't let them drive after dark" clause to get it.
"you're not mature enough to do this"
Isn't it rather saying that you're not experienced enough to do this. Speaking only for myself, I passed my driving test no problem and after a couple of month of driving I thought I was a great driver. Yet looking back now with the benefit of experience I know for a fact I did some really stupid things that first year of driving and it was only luck rather skill that led to me not getting into an accident.
By gambiting 2025-03-2712:45 Again, that would make sense if it applied equally for all new drivers - but if you're over 25 then there is no such restriction, even if you got your licence a day before. You have zero experience behind the wheel but you're fine to drive in a car full of people, but someone who has been driving for 7 years but is one day short of 25 can't do it - who is the more experienced driver there?
So yeah, it's all about "not being mature enough".
By timewizard 2025-03-2719:331 reply The majority of pedestrian deaths take place at night.
By gambiting 2025-03-2814:00 Do people under 25 carrying 2 or more passangers on average kill more pedestrians when driving at night?
By akdor1154 2025-03-2710:01 To clarify, the rule is intended to stop party cars full of drunk teens at 2am. The actual rules are like (NSW):
> If you're under 25 and are on your red Ps, you must not drive with more than one passenger who is under 21 between 11pm and 5am.
(Red Ps means the first year of being able to drive unsupervised)
By dwighttk 2025-03-275:23 Interestingly that’s the same thing that’s happening to school in general
By michaelmrose 2025-03-273:04 I think the theory would be that they never get practice and never manually drive ever. You know right after we solve the cost issue.
By threatofrain 2025-03-2623:181 reply Perhaps drunk drivers should be obligated to use automatic cars for some duration.
By shadowgovt 2025-03-270:081 reply The main reason we don't revoke licenses more aggressively right now is that America's infrastructure is so car-oriented that forcing people to never drive again can be a disruption on-par with being added to the sex-offender registry (1).
If self-driving cars became prevalent, I can absolutely see it leading to an increase in license revocation as a punishment for unsafe driving.
(1) Setting aside one's personal opinion on which is more dangerous to society: people on the sex-offender registry or drunk drivers.
By Scoundreller 2025-03-277:071 reply Iunno, doesn’t stop Canada from issuing 1yr driving bans for 1st offence DUI, and that starts at 0.08
(And a lot of provinces do bans measured in days if you hit 0.05)
By Zigurd 2025-03-2713:20 America is different and becoming more so.
By sharken 2025-03-2719:16 I think that no matter how good Waymo is doing, there is still the problem of who is responsible when a self driving is involved in a serious accident.
The only solution to that is probably to only let self driving cars onto the road, in an all-or-nothing solution.
I was initially skeptical about self-driving cars but I've been won over by Waymo's careful and thoughtful approach using visual cues, lidar, safety drivers and geo-fencing. That said I will never trust my life to a Tesla robotaxi that uses visual cues only and will drive into a wall painted to look like the road ahead like Wile E. Coyote. Beep beep.
Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot
I started digging into this rabbit hole and I found it fairly telling how much energy is being expended on social media over LiDAR vs no LiDAR. Much of it feels like sock puppetry led by Tesla investors and their couterparties.
I see this whole thing is a business viability narrative wherein Tesla would be even further under water if they were forced to admit that LiDAR may possess some degree of technical superiority and could provide a reliability and safety uplift. It must have taken millions of dollars in marketing budget to erase the customer experiences around the prior models of their cars that did have this technology and performed accordingly.
I use FSD every day and it has driven easily 98% of the miles on my model 3. I would never let it drive unsupervised. I honestly have no idea how they think they're ready for robotaxis. FSD is an incredible driver assistance system. It's actually a joy to use, but it's simply not capable of reliable unsupervised performance. A big reason, it struggles exactly where you think it would based on a vision only system. It needs a more robust mechanism of building it's world model.
A simple example. I was coming out of a business driveway, turning left onto a two lane road. It was dark out with no nearby street lights. There was a car approaching from the left. FSD could see that a car was coming. However, from the view of a camera, it was just a ball of light. There was no reasonable way the camera could discern the distance given the brightness of the headlights. I suspected this was the case and was prepared to intervene, but left FSD on to see how it would respond. Predictably, it attempted to pull out in front of the car and risked a collision.
That kind of thing simply can not be allowed to happen with a truly autonomous vehicle and would never happen with lidar.
Hell, just this morning on my way to work FSD was going run a flashing red light. It's probably 95% accurate with flashing reds, but that needs to be 100%. That being said, my understanding is the current model being trained has better temporal understanding such that flashing lights will be more comprehensible to the system. We'll see.
By labrador 2025-03-2717:05 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.
By nilkn 2025-03-2721:41 I've used FSD a lot. Supervising it is a skill that you actively develop and can get very good at. Some argue that if you have to supervise it, there's no point, but I disagree. I still use it for much of my daily commute even though I have to supervise it and occasionally intervene. It's still a significant net positive addition to the driving experience for me overall. I would legitimately consider using it a skill that improves with practice; there's a threshold of skill where it becomes a huge positive, but below that threshold it can be a negative.
Tesla sold a million Model Ys last year. So having a safety increasing part like lidar would reduce the profit by hundreds millions. Removal of ultrasonic sensors saved Tesla tens of millions. Ok, model Y is a big car and I don’t aim for tightest parking spots anymore. But basically removal of anything is very profitable for Tesla. And vice versa adding something useful is very expensive.
By whamlastxmas 2025-03-2711:261 reply 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
By IshKebab 2025-03-2713:28 Which is why it makes more sense for driverless cars to not be individually owned. At least for now.
It would be like owning your own bus.
By labrador 2025-03-279:55 "It's a feature, not a bug!"
I suspect it would be a major undertaking to add LiDAR at this point because none of their software is written to use it
By rangestransform 2025-03-282:30 Just because Tesla uses shitty 2MP sensors of 2013 vintage (at least for HW3) doesn’t mean that robotaxi levels of safety can’t be achieved with just modern cameras and radars (plural)
As someone in the industry, I find the LiDAR discussion distracting from meaningful discussions about redundancy and testing
By whamlastxmas 2025-03-2711:28 We all see our perspectives as getting quashed. I see the opposite of you - people pushing arguments that make no sense to me in terms of criticizing Tesla for not using lidar, which is an argument that seemingly deliberately glances over the very real and valid reasons for Tesla choosing not to use it
Mark Rober's video is misleading. First, he used autopilot, not FSD. Second, he sped up to 42mph and turned on autopilot a few seconds before impact[1], but he edited the Youtube video to make it look like he started autopilot a from a standstill far away from the barrier. Third, there is an alert message on his screen. It's too small to read in the video, but it could be the "autopilot will not brake" alert that happens when you put your foot on the gas.
In the water test, Rober has the Tesla driving down the center of the road, straddling the double yellow line. Autopilot will not do this, and the internal shots of the car crop out the screen. He almost certainly manually drove the car through the water and into the dummy.
One person tried to reproduce Rober's Wile E. Coyote test using FSD. FSD v12 failed to stop, but FSD v13 detected the barrier and stopped in time.[2]
Lidar would probably improve safety, but Rober's video doesn't prove anything. He decided on an outcome before he made the video.
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.
My objection is Elon Musk and Tesla superfans will go to great lengths to spin events in Musk and Tesla's favor and X is their mouth piece. I looked at the replies under Mark Rober's video and it's the typical flood of Musk and Tesla super fans raging at him. Someone needs to explain why Mark Rober would post a misleading test. He seems like a solid guy. People I respect follow him, such as Palmer Luckey, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Andrej Karpathy.
Let's get back to my main point, that Tesla's not having Lidar is stupid and I don't trust a self-driving car that can't adequately detect solid objects in it's environment
It's much harder to determine motive (which only exists in Mark Rober's mind) than to determine whether a video is misleading. You can look at Rober's Youtube video, compare it to the unedited video (which he only posted on Twitter), and see how he edited it so that people didn't realize he accelerated the car to 42mph and engaged autopilot a few seconds before impact. You can also watch the bit in his Youtube video where he explains that he tests autopilot, not FSD, despite the title of the video being Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?. And you can watch the video posted by the other guy who showed that the latest version of FSD passes the Wile E. Coyote test.
I'm not defending any of those replies to Rober. In fact I find it quite annoying when dogmatic, sneery people happen to share my views. But the content of those replies does not change the content of Rober's videos, nor does it change the content of the video showing FSD passing the test.
> Let's get back to my main point, that Tesla's not having Lidar is stupid and I don't trust a self-driving car that can't adequately detect solid objects in it's environment
In the video I linked to, the self-driving car did adequately detect solid objects in its environment. My main point is that your main point is based on a video that used non-self driving software engaged seconds before collision, edited and published to make people think it was FSD engaged much farther back from a standstill. And at least one other test (the water test) didn't even use autopilot, just manual driving. I don't know why Rober did that, but he did, and it tanks his credibility.
Again, I'm not arguing against lidar. I already said that lidar would probably improve safety. But Rober's video does not show that, as he didn't use Tesla's FSD software. The person who did showed that it stopped successfully.
In a world where lidar greatly improves safety, we would see the latest version of FSD go through the Wile E. Coyote barrier. That didn't happen, so we probably don't live in that world. In a world where lidar improves safety, though not as much, we'd see FSD stop successfully. And in a world where lidar doesn't improve safety (weird I know, but there could be issues with sensor fusion or lidar training data), we'd also see FSD stop successfully. Right now we don't know which of those worlds we live in. And we won't know until someone (probably Tesla) launches a vision-only robo taxi service. Then we can compare accident rates to get an idea of how much lidar improves safety. And if Tesla doesn't have a robo taxi service within the next year, that indicates that cameras alone aren't safe enough to run a robo taxi service.
By labrador 2025-03-270:32 Points well taken. My personal preference is to not ride in a self-driving car that relies on visual cues only. To each his or her own. I predict that some trusting individuals will have to die before Musk decides to add Lidar or similar.
I followed Mark Rober on X to learn more about him and possibly understand more about his Tesla tests. Maybe he's a Musk/Tesla hater like Thunderf00t, I don't know. (yes, I'm on X - for entertainment purposes only)
By UltraSane 2025-03-276:45 Visual only FSD is a dead end.
By renewiltord 2025-03-275:371 reply Videos on YouTube are also not a reliable source. But your demand for rigor seems rather isolated.
Other entertainment sites don't claim to be the source of all truth like Elon Musk does of X and Grok. Just 4 hours ago he posted what he said on Rogan.
"Grok is aspirationally a maximally truth-seeking ai, even if that truth is like politically incorrect”
Meanwhile, he deletes your account if you offend him
By concordDance 2025-03-2710:221 reply > Meanwhile, he deletes your account if you offend him
Willing to bet this is not true.
By labrador 2025-03-2716:12 I asked Grok to "please give me a list of X accounts Elon Musk has suspended because he did not like their content"
The result is too long to post here but here's a sample
"Chad Loder - Suspended November 2022. A left-wing activist identifying January 6 participants, Loder was banned after Musk reportedly pressured X’s trust and safety head, per Bloomberg. The content—exposing far-right figures Musk has since aligned with—may have clashed with his views, though no public Musk comment confirms this."
To be fair, I'm sure there's a few humans that would crash into a giant painted road in the middle of a straight road in the middle of nowhere. Humans crash due to less.
By ndsipa_pomu 2025-03-2710:41 There's a fun thread available here: https://road.cc/content/forum/car-crashes-building-please-po...
It's where a bunch of cycling nutters (I'm one of them) post local news stories where a driver has crashed into a building ("It wasn't wearing hi-viz!")
Well, I wouldn't and neither would a Waymo, but a Tesla did, which means it's no better than a bad human driver
I think I might, and I'm surprised by how confident you are that you wouldn't.
By jjav 2025-03-279:30 If you watch the video, it would be blatantly obvious to any human that it is just a big poster across the road, completely fake. No human would fall for that but tesla does.
By zeroday28 2025-03-276:40 > I wouldn't
Of course, that's why traffic accidents are called 'accidents.' Drivers wouldn't crash their cars, but they do.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By ourmandave 2025-03-279:49 To be more fair, some humans will drive into rivers if the gps map tells them to. =\
By Ferret7446 2025-03-276:513 reply A wall painted to look like a road would likely cause human accidents and the painter would be very much criminally liable for them.
That said, I do think using only visual cues is a stupid self-imposed restriction. We shouldn't be making self-driving cars like humans, because humans suck horse testicles at driving.
The painted wall was just a gimmick to make the video entertaining. What’s more concerning is the performance in fog, rain and other visually challenging conditions.
By whamlastxmas 2025-03-2711:31 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.
By teeray 2025-03-2713:17 > That wasn't anything like normal fog, rain, or light obstruction
It does happen on occasion. Seasonally, sublimating snow banks can create fog that intense for hours if conditions are right. Also heavy smoke can create similar conditions.
By consteval 2025-03-2714:07 In addition, humans have a lot of senses. Not just 5 - but dozens. A lot of them working in the background, subconsciously. It’s why I can feel someone staring at me, even if I never explicitly saw them.
By timewizard 2025-03-278:053 reply > because humans suck horse testicles at driving.
Hardly. We drive hundreds of billions of miles every month and trillions every year. In the US alone. You're more likely to die from each of the flu, diabetes or a stroke than a car accident.
If those don't get you, you are either going to get heart disease or cancer, or most likely, involve yourself in a fatal accident; which, will most likely be a fall of a roof or a ladder.
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.
By Zigurd 2025-03-2713:27 Initially, I was enthusiastic about FSD because it really would have a positive social impact like curing malaria if it worked.
But, like curing a dread disease, it's often a long, difficult grind and not something that will for sure work by the end of this year for the last 10 years. No pharma company would get away with that hype.
By timewizard 2025-03-2719:271 reply > Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years.
That's not telling you what you think it is. A lot of those deaths are that person in a car on their own. Usually involving drugs or alcohol. It intentionally folds in "deaths caused by others" and "death caused by self" into the same category. It's not an appropriate statistic to base policy on.
> If you prevent a road accident fatality, chances are that person will go on to live many more healthy years/decades.
Chances are that person is going to kill themselves in a vehicle again later as you have failed to examine MODE of accident. Your analysis is entirely wrong.
By Ukv 2025-03-2723:51 > That's not telling you what you think it is. A lot of those deaths are that person in a car on their own. [...]
Sure - going off of NHTSA figures it looks around 35%. There's also a lot of car passenger deaths (~15%), pedestrian deaths (~20%), and deaths of car drivers with passengers (~15%).
Not entirely sure the point of breaking it out like this, though. These are all still deaths that self-driving cars could in theory prevent, and so all seem appropriate to consider and base policy on.
> Chances are that person is going to kill themselves in a vehicle again later [...]
Unsafe drivers (under the influence, distracted, etc.) are disproportionately represented in fatalities, but that neither means most road accident fatalities are unsafe drivers nor that most unsafe drivers will have a fatal car crash. As far as I can tell, even a driver using amphetamines (increasing risk of a fatal crash 5X) still isn't more likely than not to die in a car crash (a very high bar).
Further, if the way the initial fatal crash was prevented was by prevalence of safe autonomous vehicles, the future crashes would also be similarly mitigated.
By Mawr 2025-03-279:27 "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.
Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot?
IMHO it kinda is. It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11
By timewizard 2025-03-279:353 reply > Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot?
No. It's 1.25 per 10,000 per capita. Most people understand the risk ahead of time and yet still choose to drive. They clearly don't think it is.
> It's 13x as many people as died in 9/11
And 50x 9/11 many people die of accidental self inflicted injury. This is an absurd metric.
The US car fatalities per mile is double than the UK. It would at least be useful to ask why that might be. That's 40,000 people a year who have their lives cut short.
By timewizard 2025-03-2719:33 The UK is far more serious about impaired and drunk driving than the US is.
The majority of those people who had their lives cut short cut it short themselves and didn't take anyone with them.
Likewise, that 40k includes 6k pedestrians and 6k motorcyclists.
You can't just take the 40,000 figure and do _anything_ with it because there are so many peculiar modes of accidents which /dominate/ that data set.
By Qwertious 2025-03-2711:59 It's street design. If you prioritize car throughput at any cost, even safety, then your streets will be less safe.
By consteval 2025-03-2714:10 > yet still choose to drive
Obligatory “almost nobody in the US chooses to drive” comment.
Driving in the US is a lifeline. It’s closer to food and shelter than a product or action. Remaining economically afloat in the US without a car is extraordinarily difficult. Many people, especially poor people, would much rather lose their job or health insurance than their car.
By dagw 2025-03-2710:09 Is 40,000 deaths every year a lot?
The only meaningful way to say is to compare it to other countries. Pr vehicle mile it is a lot more than many Western European countries and Canada, and a lot less than Mexico.
It is truly astonishing how much Musk hypes up the robotaxi when no Tesla has ever driving a single mile autonomously while Tesla was liable for crashing.
By mavhc 2025-03-308:38 Every new Tesla drives a single mile autonomously while Tesla is liable for crashing
By labrador 2025-03-2823:37 My conclusion: If Tesla drivers are comfortable with vision-only FSD, that’s fine — it’s their responsibility to supervise and intervene. But when Tesla wants to deploy a fully autonomous robotaxi with no human oversight, it should be subject to higher safety requirements, including an independent redundant sensing system like LiDAR. Passengers shouldn’t be responsible for supervising their own taxi ride.
By jksflkjl3jk3 2025-03-275:331 reply > That said I will never trust my life to a Tesla robotaxi that uses visual cues only and will drive into a wall painted to look like the road ahead
If you can visually detect the painted wall, what makes you think that cameras on a Tesla can't be developed to do the same?
And are deliberately deceptive road features actually a common enough concern?
By mavhc 2025-03-308:42 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...
Waymos choose the routes, right?
The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.
In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.
Here, without any confidence intervals, we're told we've saved ~70 airbag incidents in 20 mil miles. A bad update to the fleet will easily eclipse that impact.
> The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments
That's also an issue with humans though. I'd argue that traffic usually appears to flow because most of the drivers have taken a specific route daily for ages - i.e., they are not in a novel environment.
When someone drives a route for the first time, they'll be confused, do last-minute lane changes, slow down to try to make a turn, slow down more than others because because they're not 100% clear where they're supposed to go, might line up for and almost do illegal turns, might try to park in impossible places, etc.
Even when someone has driven a route a handful of times they won't know and be ready for the problem spots and where people might surprise they, they'll just know the overall direction.
(And when it is finally carved in their bones to the point where they're placing themselves perfectly in traffic according to the traffic flow and anticipating all the usual choke points and hazards, they'll get lenient.)
People have eyes, ears, a voice, hands, etc.
You've a very narrow definition of novel, which is based soley on incidental features of the environment.
For animals, a novel situation is one in which their learnt skills to adapt to the environment fail, and have to acquire new skills. In this sense, drivers are rarely in novel environments.
For statistical systems, novelty can be much more narrowly defined as simply the case where sensory data fails a similar-distribution test with historical data --- this is vastly more common, since the "statistical profile of historical cases, as measured, in data" is narrow.. whilst the "situations skills apply to" is wide.
An example definition of narrow/wide, here: the amount of situations needed to acquire safety in the class of similar environments is exponential for narrow systems, and sublinear for wide ones. ie., A person can adapt a skill in a single scenario, whereas a statistical system will require exponentially more data in the measures of that class of novel scenarios.
By arghwhat 2025-03-277:08 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.
I travel and drive in a lot of new places and even the novelty of novelty wears off.
At some point you’ll see a car careen into the side of the curb across three lanes due to slick and you’ll be like ehhh I’ll just cut through with this route and move on about your day.
After driving for 20 years, about the only time I got scared in a novel situation was when I was far from cell service next to a cliff and sliding a mountain fast in deep mud running street tires due to unexpected downpour in southern Utah. I didn’t necessarily know what to do but I could reason it out.
I don’t really find “using a new route” difficult at all. If I miss my exit, I’m just going to keep driving and find a U-turn — no point to stress over it.
By arghwhat 2025-03-279:42 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.
Generalizing across novel environments is optimal, but I'm not sure the bar needs to be that high to unlock a huge amount of value.
We're probably well past the point where removing all human-driven vehicles (besides bikes) from city streets and replacing them with self-driving vehicles would be a net benefit for safety, congestion, vehicle utilization, road space, and hours saved commuting, such that we could probably rip up a bunch of streets and turn them into parks or housing and still have everyone get to their destinations faster and safer.
The future's here, even if it still has room for improvement.
>congestion
I'd think congestion would go up as AVs become more popular, with average occupancy rates per vehicle going down. Since some of the time the vehicle will be driving without any passengers inside. Especially with personally owned AVs. Think of sending a no-human-passenger car to pick up the dog at the vets office. Or a car circling the neighborhood when it is inconvenient to park (parking lot full, expensive, whatever).
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
By xboxnolifes 2025-03-2622:582 reply > 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.
The first part is mostly describing taxis, so the incredible efficiencies relative to the status quo can be loosely observed through them. Just subtract out wage and a slight "technological scale" bonus, and you can estimate what it would be. Then add in the expected investor returns for being a technology company and see the improvements disappear.
The second part, I wonder. Cars already average under 2 occupants, with most just being the driver. If this is what is was needed for significantly smaller cars, we would already have them. Lack of smaller cars is mostly a cultural issue, not a technical one.
By jcgl 2025-03-2710:10 > Lack of smaller cars is mostly a cultural issue, not a technical one.
And an economic/tax policy issue. Some increases in size are due to legally mandated safety features, while even more of the increased adoption of SUVs in the US is indirectly due to the CAFE standards.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'd like to think there's more efficiency to be gained when the scale is city-wide rather than a small subset of demand being attended to reactively.
Ideally this would be a municipal fleet and transportation just another utility like water, electrical, and broadband. Admittedly this would require strong political power and vision, as anything that remakes physical infrastructure does.
Agree small cars are a cultural/identity issue tho usually a rather rational one as well, given safety vis-a-vis 7000lb SUVs. However, I don't think people's aversions to spend $20k+ on a city-only vehicle has any bearing on whether they would be willing to be being taken places in one when its the most convenient/safest/fastest way to get places. A city-wide transportation utility obviates most of the need/desire for individual car ownership.
To put it in tech biz terms, everything in tech is bundling or unbundling. Ownership of cars is the unbundled version of transport, and took over due to convenience and creature comforts. Now a new tech has come out that swings the pendulum toward bundled being more convenient & optimal.
By Mawr 2025-03-279:41 > A city-wide transportation utility obviates most of the need/desire for individual car ownership.
chuckles Yes, yes it does...
By EdwardDiego 2025-03-274:133 reply Why are we using self-driving vehicles as a panacea for historical underinvestment in public transport?
Not saying that they wouldn't play a role in a functional public transport system, they'd be invaluable for the last two miles from your station to your destination.
But while our people transporting systems prioritise roads and cars, we will never have the high quality and safe public transport that high quality of life cities thrive on.
(And while I write this from NZ, with only limited experiences of LA and SF, we copied America, we went for sprawl and freeways, and it's strangling our largest city.)
I know and spend time with people who live in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, that don't own a car, because they don't need to own a car.
They might rent one for a holiday into Italy, or they might use an app like Lime / Bird etc. to rent very short term a tiny car like a BMW i3 for a big grocery shop.
But because their cities are dense, and mix commercial with residential (e.g., ā bunch of 5 storey apartment buildings with the ground/first floor being commercial, depending on where you are), they can often buy groceries at the local market on foot on their way home from the U-Bahn, or head down to the local Getränkhandel on a bike with a basket or two to buy their beer and bottled water.
Centralising commerce away from residential, especially with big box shopping areas, is predicated on car culture, and bakes in the need for cars.
TL;DR self-driving vehicles alone are a band-aid over an unsustainable transport culture and strategy.
But they'll form a critical part of a sustainable one.
By dlivingston 2025-03-277:111 reply The reason we need self-driving cars is because we need cars. The reason we need cars is because of the way our cities are structured. The reason our cities are structured the way they are is due to large land availability & zoning laws, leading to massive spread.
Public transit will work for some of the people some of the time. (That is, if it can even be built - highly recommend Ezra Klein's new book Abundance on ways to get out of this).
For the people that public transit won't work for, you need to come up with a new solution if you want to see cars go away: a solution that makes going from A to B some combination of easier, cheaper, faster, more convenient than driving. Or, a solution that brings B closer to A (like changing zoning laws or building cheaper housing in metro areas).
By bpt3 2025-03-2812:48 You missed a critical (last?) step in your reasoning: The reason we have massive spread is because most humans want as much living space as they can possibly acquire and our laws and social norms reflect that.
Hear me out, I've spent years thinking about this :)
Yes, past underinvestment is bad. And yes, initially they are a band-aid, until yes they do become critical.
My excitement for self-driving tech isn't about the short term changes, but just how powerful a technology this is in the longer term. Ultimately this tech is not about cars, it's about the ability to automate the movement of mass. This is novel and meaningful.
An obvious medium-term implication of self-driving is that cities will ban human drivers, because that way cities can ditch a bunch of high-cost infrastructure required because of human fallibility. Up until that point, self-driving would be a band-aid. After that point, the dominoes start to fall.
1. Form factors change: cars become 1-4 person pods, stripped of the unnecessary bulk of excessive safety systems and unused capacity.
2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.
3. What is transported changes: now you have shipping drones dropping off standardized (reusable) packages into standardized intakes. Think The Box [1] but smaller.
4. Infrastructure changes: Roads narrow, parking becomes drop-off spots, larger cafes, actual parks. Cut and cover roads multiply, leaving more space above ground for people. Cities grow 20% without getting bigger, just by obviating the need for half their roads. The blight of various parking signs and warnings to drivers disappear. People can walk about freely or ride their bikes. It's quieter. The air quality improves.
5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?
If you extend the implications of the automated movement of mass, the logical conclusion is the physical infrastructure of the city will transform to take advantage of every gain that creates. Cities dedicate 25-40%+ of their land mass to roads. In dense urban cores, 20% of their land mass is just parking spots. We can't route people-driven cars underground unless we really really mean it and build a highway. We waste a huge amount of space on transportation. We also shape all of our buildings around the constraints imposed by car-shaped objects and all their various externalities, including noise and air pollution.
My belief is that self-driving is easily the most transformative tech to hit cities since the car, and may exceed the impact that cars have had on the built world.
> 2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.
Producing more small things isn't usually more efficient that fewer equivalent large things. You can't just will some "pods" into existence that are magically cheaper (per person!) than trams, trains and busses. Also, once you have a system running capex and opex aren't that different - replacing a set number of vehicles per year is pretty much the same thing as operating expenses.
> 5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?
My prediction is that no one will ever be fine with the amount of noise a "drone" (read helicopter) makes, especially as a replacement for the very noise-free and orders of magnitude more efficient elevators we have right now.
By npunt 2025-03-283:33 Agree to disagree about economies of scale, but FYI busses are ~$500k and seat ~40, meaning ~$12.5k/person. There are a dozen manufacturers of electric 2 seaters today that can build for a quarter of the cost per person, or half if you assume 1 person occupancy. Yes the area per person is larger (tho not by much), but you can make up for that with increased throughput by way of point-to-point operation without stops, faster speeds, and more.
Focusing on rollout, municipal light rail almost never gets deployed in US-style cities due to huge capex, not opex. Smaller vehicles allow incremental roll-out and can use preexisting road infrastructure. Ergo, that's the form of public transit you're most likely to see grow over the next decades.
Drone here doesn't imply flying, it's about scaling down wheeled vehicles and the coexistence of a wider variety of vehicle sizes on roads that is unlocked by the automated movement of mass. Delivery to higher up floors can be done through small in-building elevators. If you think that's unrealistic, consider that it was once extremely popular to use pneumatic tubes to send mail in buildings. Built infrastructure changes based on what is possible, and mass needs to move.
By throwaway2037 2025-03-279:43 It is interesting that you raised the high cost of free parking. And we are talking about Waymo and San Francisco!
SFMTA article: San Francisco Adopts Demand-Responsive Pricing Program to Make Parking Easier
Ref: https://www.sfmta.com/blog/san-francisco-adopts-demand-respo...
Some nice analyses of the most expensive places to park in SF with demand responsive pricing:
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/sf-most-expensive-parki...
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/01/parking-meter-san-francisc...
I can't imagine any of that since it relies on >99% of cars being self-driving whereas currently <1% are. Even under the most optimistic estimates, how many decades would it take to get to that? 5? 10?
> Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities.
Ok, that's just giving me a stroke. We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability. These have the upside of being extremely well understood and use technology that's available today. We could start seeing benefits within a few years, not decades.
Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.
By rangestransform 2025-03-282:46 I live carless in NYC and primarily use a mix of public transit and cycling. That being said, infrastructure costs so excruciatingly much in the US that it would cost tens or hundreds of Waymos (company, not individual car) to replicate an NYC subway-tier system in most American metropolitan areas.
Forcing people to take public transit that is any worse than NYC subway will definitely and rightfully lose an election for that party. Building such a system at modern American construction costs will also lose an election. What is left to do but embrace autonomous driving as the first step toward retrofitting American cities to be slightly more people friendly?
Besides, this is the decadent west, we can afford for people to use more resources for more comfort. Even the well off in china have embraced cars as mobile living rooms.
By npunt 2025-03-2722:27 > I can't imagine any of that since it relies on >99% of cars being self-driving whereas currently <1% are
Technology famously has a linear adoption curve, and convenience is famously not something that drives adoption /s
> We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability.
Do we have that though? In the US, mostly not. So what's the path? Hoping that sprawled out cities somehow magically get the political will to build $billions in light rail? What do you think is the path of least resistance to these goal states?
> Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.
Read other comments, don't get stuck on the notion of 'cars' as-is.
By woah 2025-03-273:27 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.
By kccqzy 2025-03-2621:37 I don't agree with this novel environment argument about routes. As a human, there are a limited number of roads that I have driven on. A taxi driver drives better than me because none of the routes are considered novel: the taxi driver has likely driven on every road in a city in his/her career. The self-driving machine has most definitely driven on every single road in the city, perhaps first as testing with human backup, then testing with no passengers, and finally passenger revenue miles.
By KoolKat23 2025-03-2621:45 I think you underestimate how many novelties the car will encounter on existing routes and how adept these cars are at navigating novel routes.
I imagine this route data is an extra extra safeguard which allows them to quantify/measure the risk to an extent and also speed up journey's/reduce level of interventions.
I wonder if you can decrease the impact of (2) with a policy of phased rollout for updates. I.E. you never update the whole fleet simultaneously; you update a small percentage first and confirm no significant anomalies are observed before distributing the update more widely.
By timschmidt 2025-03-2621:28 Ideally you'd selectively enable the updated policy on unoccupied trips on the way to pick someone up, or returning after a drop-off, such that errors (and resultant crashes) can be caught when the car is not occupied.
By nukem222 2025-03-2621:31 Presumably management would also be highly regional. Functionality in san francisco doesn't imply anything about functionality in oakland, etc.
By mjburgess 2025-03-2621:36 One measure of robustness could be something like: the ability to resist correlation of failure states under environmental/internal shift. Danger: that under relevant time horizons the integral of injury-to-things-we-care-about is low. And then "safety", a combination: that the system resists correlating failure states in order to preserve a low expected value of injury.
The problem with machines-following-rules is that they're trivially susceptible to violations of this kind of safety. No doubt there are mitigations and strategies for minimising risk, but its not avoidable.
The danger in our risk assessment of machine systems is that we test them under non-adversarial conditions, and observe safety --- because they can quickly cause more injury than they have ever helped.
This is why we worry, of course, about "fluoride in the water" (, vaccines, etc.) and other such population-wide systems... this is the same sitation. A mass public health programme has the same risk profile.
By timewizard 2025-03-278:081 reply You would save more lives by harshly punishing drunk or influenced driving; however, most of the lives you save would be that of the drinker or the abuser.
You would save more lives by outlawing motorcycles; however, it would just be the motorcyclists themselves.
Another thing people don't consider is that not all seats in a vehicle are equally safe. The drivers seat is the safest. Front passenger is less safe but still often twice as safe as sitting in the backseat. If you believe picking up your elderly parents and then escorting them in your backseat is safer than them driving alone you might be wrong. This is a fatality mode you easily recognize in the FARS data. Where do most people in a robotaxi sit?
Your biggest clear win would be building better pedestrian infrastructure and improving roadway lighting to reduce pedestrian deaths.
> Front passenger is less safe but still often twice as safe as sitting in the backseat
Is there a good source for this? I was always under the impression that it was the exact opposite….
By timewizard 2025-03-2719:401 reply 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.
By yolovoe 2025-03-281:48 This is a really good link. Will definitely refer to this when making a car purchase in the future. Thanks!
It seems like Volvo's reputation as one of the safest car is still well deserved after all. I don't own a Volvo--too expensive for me, but good to know.
> In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.
Can you provide some examples of what you mean?
Volcanic eruption filling the atmosphere with ash. Acts of war or terrorism. Could be physical or cyberattack.
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.
By im3w1l 2025-03-2716:55 The system could go haywire and crash in such unexpected circumstances. They might also not. It's hard to know how they will behave.
By shadowgovt 2025-03-270:121 reply I usually think about it in the other direction: every time an accident occurs, a human learns something novel (even if it be a newfound appreciation of their own mortality) that can't be directly transmitted to other humans. Our ability to take collective driving wisdom and dump it into the mind of every learner's-permit-holder is woefully inadequate.
In contrast, every time a flaw is discovered in a self-driving algorithm, the whole fleet of vehicles is one over-the-air update away from getting safer.
And it goes the other way too, one crappy update means complete chaos.
By shadowgovt 2025-03-2715:011 reply There is already industry best-practice, in and out of self-driving cars, to avoid doing that.
By codr7 2025-03-2717:38 Hey, I've written software for a living for 26 years.
No best practice in the world is going to stop people from making mistakes.
By ozim 2025-03-2621:48 I can imagine whole city areas well known closed to manual drivers.
Sure I would love to read a book while car is driving me to visit family in the countryside but practically I need city transportation to work and back, to supermarkets and back where I don’t have to align to a bus schedule and have 2-3 step overs but plan my trip 30 min in advance and have direct pick up and drop off.
If that would be possible then I see value in not owning a car.
Does waymo also choose the times of driving, and conditions? Or do they always drive, even at night and in heavy rain?
By a2128 2025-03-2621:38 I was waiting for a Waymo in Austin during the weekend storm and the Waymo suddenly cancelled on us right after a power outage that lasted a second or two. According to local news the vehicles had stopped and were blocking traffic.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/waymo-ve...
By maxerickson 2025-03-2621:33 Correctly estimating capability is pretty safety positive.
Meaning, humans choosing to drive in more difficult conditions probably means they sometimes drive in conditions that they shouldn't.
By qgin 2025-03-2622:26 This is good to know, but we should note that humans choose also.
By thaumasiotes 2025-03-2621:233 reply > The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.
Why is (1) an issue? Route data never gets worse.
Consider London: a series of randomly moving construction sites connected by patches of city.
Waymo, as far as I recall, relies on pretty active route mapping and data sharing -- ie., the cars arent "driving themselves" in the sense of discovering the environment as a self-driving system would.
By AlotOfReading 2025-03-2621:44 Waymo's map data is a prior, not an authoritative reference to the world. The cars report update when the map data is wrong, and a lot of what they use it for (e.g. traffic light identification, fine localization) degrades gracefully when there's new information in the environment.
Huh? All the Waymo cars in Austin have lots of LIDAR spinny bits and are driving around all the active construction zones downtown and near campus.
I'm pretty sure that counts as "discovering the environment".
By mjburgess 2025-03-2621:45 Sure, my understanding is that they collectively share data, and this is combined with central mapping.
On net, yes, they are sensitive to features of the environment and via central coordination maintain a safe map of it.
The mechanism there heavily relies on this background of sharing, mapping, and route planning (and the like) -- which impacts on the ability of these cars to operate across all driving environments.
> Route data never gets worse.
Construction? Parade? Giant tire-crunching pothole in the middle of the freeway?
By bluefirebrand 2025-03-2621:251 reply Route data gets worse all the time
Any time there is a detour, or a construction zone, or a traffic accident, or a road flooded, or whatever else your route data is not just "worse" it is completely wrong
By zmmmmm 2025-03-2622:49 it's true, but if the scenarios are rare you can treat them as outliers and have the vehicle switch to a "safety mode" or similar. Even human drivers effectively do that (or should!).
By tonyhart7 2025-03-2621:31 Yeah but that's the point no???
machine don't make mistake when they are get perfected in certain route, sure human drive would be better in dynamic areas but you dnt need machine to be perfect either just want (80% scenario)
