←back to thread

Waymos crash less than human drivers

(www.understandingai.org)
345 points rbanffy | 4 comments | 26 Mar 25 20:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.707s | source
Show context
mjburgess ◴[26 Mar 25 21:19 UTC] No.43487426[source]▶
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.

replies(13): >>43487464 #>>43487477 #>>43487508 #>>43487579 #>>43487600 #>>43487603 #>>43487655 #>>43487741 #>>43487758 #>>43487777 #>>43489023 #>>43491131 #>>43491352 #
thaumasiotes ◴[26 Mar 25 21:23 UTC] No.43487464[source]▶
> 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.

replies(3): >>43487498 #>>43487502 #>>43487510 #
1. mjburgess ◴[26 Mar 25 21:26 UTC] No.43487510[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>43487625 #>>43487734 #
2. bsder ◴[26 Mar 25 21:35 UTC] No.43487625[source]▶
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".

replies(1): >>43487746 #
3. AlotOfReading ◴[26 Mar 25 21:44 UTC] No.43487734[source]▶
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.
4. mjburgess ◴[26 Mar 25 21:45 UTC] No.43487746[source]▶
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.