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Waymos crash less than human drivers

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345 points rbanffy | 7 comments | 26 Mar 25 20:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.02s | source | bottom
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wnissen ◴[26 Mar 25 21:37 UTC] No.43487648[source]▶
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.

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londons_explore ◴[27 Mar 25 06:18 UTC] No.43490833[source]▶
> 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.

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jillesvangurp ◴[27 Mar 25 07:41 UTC] No.43491240[source]▶
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.

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1. trollbridge ◴[27 Mar 25 13:14 UTC] No.43493276[source]▶
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.

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2. pc86 ◴[27 Mar 25 14:25 UTC] No.43494005[source]▶
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.

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3. mannykannot ◴[27 Mar 25 14:38 UTC] No.43494126[source]▶
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.
4. Y_Y ◴[27 Mar 25 17:39 UTC] No.43495935[source]▶
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.
5. trollbridge ◴[27 Mar 25 18:13 UTC] No.43496317[source]▶
No one said it isn’t a privilege.

I don’t agree with making driving something only the wealthy do, though.

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6. pc86 ◴[28 Mar 25 13:00 UTC] No.43504858{3}[source]▶
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.

7. Breza ◴[28 Mar 25 17:12 UTC] No.43507824[source]▶
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.