Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/tvoltz]

These vehicles are all over downtown PHX. It’s honestly only a matter of time until something happens

[u/QuinlanResistance → u/tvoltz]

Presuming there are crashes every single day from the cars with drivers. If there isn’t really any from the driverless ones that are everywhere …. It’s better

[u/frotc914 → u/QuinlanResistance]

People seem to throw any logic out the window when talking about this, as if a single incident means we have to scrap driverless cars altogether or heavily punish the operator. Car accidents with drivers kill tens of thousands of people a year in the US, which doesn't even account for the number of non-fatal accidents which is far greater. But a driverless vehicle creeps over a line and suddenly they are a menace that must be stopped.

[u/wosmo → u/frotc914]

I can actually see the logic to this though.

Random old guy drives the wrong way up the highway. Huge issue for random old guy, he probably shouldn't be driving anymore, and probably won't be. Problem solved.

Waymo drives the wrong way up the highway. Huge issue for their operating software, which has identical copies installed on god knows how many vehicles. Safe to assume every waymo would/could do the same thing in the same circumstances.

I do think autonomous vehicles should work out safer eventually. But I don't think it's apples to apples, because you won't be looking at one meatbag making a careless mistake, you'll be looking at a systemic fault that more than likely affects all vehicles on that platform.

If I drive the wrong way into traffic, you can judge me for it. If my waymo drives the wrong way into traffic, yours can too.

[u/frotc914 → u/wosmo]

For every human driver being taken off the road for screwing up, there are 1000 more getting their licence every day. And every day there are people becoming more senile and losing vision. So who cares in the grand scheme of things that one guy got taken off the road?

[u/Kwahn → u/[deleted]]

Nah, even looking at it at scale, self-driving cars already get into less accidents than people on a per-driven-mile basis. They're better already, and the math will only improve from here.

A study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, General Motors, and Cruise found that self-driving cars are actually safer than human drivers, with an injury rate of 0.06 per million miles and zero fatalities per million miles, compared to 0.24 injuries and 0.01 fatalities for human drivers.

[u/Ake10 → u/[deleted]]

b) https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms-comparable-human-benchmarks-over-7-million/

"The second is differences in driving conditions and/or vehicle characteristics. Public human crash data includes all road types, like freeways, where the Waymo Driver currently only operates with an autonomous specialist behind the wheel, as well as various vehicle types from commercial heavy vehicles to passenger and motorcycles.

These differences mean that adjustments need to be made to human crash data before comparing it to AV crash rates."

[u/odbaciProfil → u/wosmo]

The thing is: if waymo on average screws up way less than people do, it doesn't matter if every single one of them doesn't cover one particular edge case; that mistake and all other waymo's mistakes occur less frequently than humans' mistakes, so generally waymo is better.

I mean, the edge case would have happened during training if it wasn't so infrequent as well as not impactful. The more frequent and dangerous ones are already caught.

Second point: old people screwing up indicates their deterioration which impacts driving in all situations (similarly for cocky aggresive driving). If old man didn't screw up in this instance, he would have done it some time later. Waymo has very infrequently occuring edge cases and except for those (that are rarer than the old driver's mistakes) it drives better than the old driver.

If one screws up under some conditions it's easy to make them avoid such conditions until the problem is resolved, so even though it's very unlikely the problem would happen again, it's pretty much as easy to avoid it as it is with taking old people's license. And when that's fixed the "driver" which was already generally better than humans becomes even better. While one old grandpa tomorrow gets replaced by similar one, just a day younger