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Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix

(techcrunch.com)
281 points nharada | 3 comments | 12 Nov 25 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.437s | source
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NullHypothesist ◴[12 Nov 25 16:24 UTC] No.45902077[source]▶
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
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terminalshort ◴[12 Nov 25 16:37 UTC] No.45902240[source]▶
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
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1. QuadmasterXLII ◴[12 Nov 25 17:20 UTC] No.45902832[source]▶
It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.

Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”

And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit

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2. bluGill ◴[12 Nov 25 20:07 UTC] No.45905693[source]▶
The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
3. terminalshort ◴[12 Nov 25 22:29 UTC] No.45907769[source]▶
It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.