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Waymos crash less than human drivers

(www.understandingai.org)
345 points rbanffy | 3 comments | 26 Mar 25 20:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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paxys ◴[26 Mar 25 21:54 UTC] No.43487851[source]▶
Worth repeating the same comment I've left on every variant of this article for the last 10 years.

Being better than "average" is a laughably low bar for self-driving cars. Average drivers include people who drive while drunk and on drugs. It includes teenagers and those who otherwise have very little experience on the road. It includes people who are too old to be driving safely. It includes people who are habitually speed and are reckless. It includes cars that are mechanically faulty or otherwise cannot be driven safely. If you compile accident statistics the vast majority will fall into one of these categories.

For self driving to be widely adopted the bare minimum bar needs to be – is it better than the average sensible and experienced driver?

Otherwise if you replace all 80% of the good drivers with waymos and the remaining 20% stay behind the wheel, accident rates are going to go up not down.

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1. D-Coder ◴[26 Mar 25 22:55 UTC] No.43488412[source]▶
> Being better than "average" is a laughably low bar for self-driving cars. Average drivers include people who drive while drunk and on drugs. It includes teenagers and those who otherwise have very little experience on the road. It includes people who are too old to be driving safely. It includes people who are habitually speed and are reckless... (etc)

But... that's the reality. If we replace human drivers with self-driving cars at random, or specifically the bad drivers above, then we've improved things.

We are not going to easily improve the average human driver.

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2. Barrin92 ◴[27 Mar 25 04:18 UTC] No.43490363[source]▶
>If we replace human drivers with self-driving cars at random

But that's the OPs point, we aren't. Waymo crashing less than human drivers is a tautological result because Waymo is only letting the cars drive on roads where they're confident they can drive as well as humans to begin with.

If you actually ran the (very unethical) experiment of replacing a million people at random on random streets tomorrow with waymo cars you're going to cause some carnage, they only operate in parts of four American cities.

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3. danielbln ◴[27 Mar 25 07:36 UTC] No.43491227[source]▶
I think if you swap a million humans into other humans at random you're going to get some road carnage as well, to be fair. If someone suddenly puts me on some icy road in Minnesota I'm gonna have a bad time.