Because with waymos anything learned by one is immediately available to all of them. Therefore you have lots of miles but effectively one driver. Now if you take human drivers and pick only the best, how do you numbers look then? Many people have driven lifetimes and not been in an accident or not in an accident that was their fault or reasonable predictable and avoidable by them.
Driving needs to be considered a lot more serious of a task than it currently is. There are many driving errors that are the primary cause of accidents but those people are never forced to get extended drivers education. Self driving cars are nice but if the goal is to prevent accidents it's a bit like requiring everyone to order prepared food to prevent injury while cooking.
At some point we need to get back to shaming those who are bad at something and requiring that they improve their skills rather that restricting everyone else's freedoms.
Well. If you let people get away with murder by saying "Oh, I'm a confused little old lady, I thought the gas pedal was the brake." That's what I mean by robust enforcement. It is 100% not at all about data.
Consider this: A Waymo could be provably confused about a situation, we can directly peer into the state of its mind and prove that it is confused, despite driving safer than the average. Do you know what would happen to the Waymo program if one of its vehicles careened into a family of pedestrians and killed them all?
> something something about skills
Agency is kind of a myth. For human drivers, experts agree that road design has the biggest impact. Experts also think we should have better public transport.
The problems are bigger than Department of Unenactable Urban Fantasy or American Victim Blaming Institute. Self driving cars are exciting because they are like a cheat code around all these intractable social issues.
All of the driver aids that we have in modern cars lane sensors lane keeping, traction control, any lock brakes, and we can continue on with the plethora of driver aids. These are all great and useful tools but they are are being used as a substitute for improving driver skill. When what they should be doing is acting as an aid for driver skill and not a substitution.
Being able to drive a forklift and other heavy machinery on a closed environment work site requires a more training and more recertification than it does to get a driver's license in the United States. That to me is absolutely shocking. Because you have a closed course environment that has closed course regulations in place so there is less opportunity for randomness to occur. On the road nothing is closed about it you have complete randomness that you cannot factor in. So why do we not regularly require people to get retested and understand the rules of the road? I'm not saying tests are the best measure but when you see people who have been driving for two decades and they can no longer pass the written test for getting a driver's license, which is an exceedingly easy test, they should have their license revoked and be required to take driver education. When I say driver education I don't mean the fluff nonsense that we give today. It is fine as an introductory course to teach people the basics of driving. What we really need is an ongoing continual education for drivers to maintain their driver's license. Maybe that means we need a more robust public transportation system as well because there are definitely a lot of people who should not be having a driver's license. They simply do not have the cognitive wherewithal to be able to properly drive.
I suspect if you begin to look at the statistics accidents are caused by the same group of people repeatedly and those skew the numbers for everyone else.
This is just a joke about stereotypes btw. As for my actual opinion, I believe that pretty much every adult American needs to drive (unless they live in a big city), so trying to DQ anyone is effectively denying them the right to live independently. Rather, driving must be made easier with better technology and hopefully AVs.
The numbers may look different, but does it matter, though? This is a benchmark, not a competition. Since we can't possibly get every human driver to the level of the best drivers, it's still a win for Waymos.