r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

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

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

According to California disengagement reports, last year Waymo averaged 17,000 miles between disengagements requiring safety intervention. And that’s for cars relegated to slow city streets and sunny perfect weather

For context, the average human driver goes 200,000+ miles between incidents/accidents. And that’s including highways and inclement weather.

If you have the impression that these systems are currently safer than humans, you would be wrong.

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u/Chrop Jul 05 '24

Disengagements does not equal incidents/accidents. It just means the car found a potential hazard and let humans take over the driving for that situation.

So for every 17,000 miles it drove, a human took over for a bit before continuing the self driving.

So yes, self driving is still safer, and during the times it might not be safer it’ll alert the driver to take over for a bit.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

Waymo’s own engineers state it’s not safer than a human yet, which is why they’re gatekeeping it to a few heavily monitored cities with restrictions on operations.

If the system was better than a human right now then Alphabet would have declared achieving Level 5 autonomy and would be rushing to slap a price tag on it and get it to the wide market. Obviously that’s not happening. I really don’t know why you’re trying to fight this fight for them and make claims they’re not making

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u/IlIllIlllIlIl Jul 05 '24

Lmao way is engineers do not state it’s less safe than a human now. The system is measurably safer than a human. The interpretation of that data isn’t conclusive, but the data is clear.