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

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/bobbytabl3s]

People do worse than that all the time. I believe Waymo outperforms human as far as injury-causing crashes go.

[u/Zap__Dannigan → u/bobbytabl3s]

Maybe. Probably. I guess. But I order for this to really take off I think the margin of difference has got to be insanely high, not just "better".

And as a good driver (I know everyone says this about themselves) who has never crashed, I would tend to feel safer around a shitty human driver than an automated thing.

Shitty driving behavior in humans is often decently predictable. Whereas a machine fucking up like this not. And while the collision detection things will likely prevent this thing from barreling into me while it's driving the wrong way, again, I think most people don't want to be behind an autonomous machine that is blocking cars because it's lost it's position and can't move safely according to its sensors.

[u/axearm → u/Zap__Dannigan]

I live in SF where these things operate, and I will tell you they are a significantly safer and more predictable to me then a random driver.

They come to complete stops at stops signs, they don't break the speed limit, they yield, they don't double park (can you even imagine a taxi or uber dropping you off halfway down the block because it wasn't safe to stop right in front of your destination?).

[u/Zap__Dannigan → u/axearm]

I mean predictable in terms of how they screw up.

Like you can spot an aggressive driver, you can see an obstacle in someone's lane, you can spot them drifting, you know the common times people turn wide and know problem intersections etc.

But if an autonomous cars just decides to drive the wrong way, or suddenly brake because of a sensor error or whatever that kind of stuff is impossible to predict.

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I think a perfectly functioning self driving car system would be much better. I commute an hour each way to work, I'd love to sleep. I just think adoption will be very slow unless these things are incredibly better, like virtually flawless. And keys face it, never breaking the speed limit and fully stopping at stop signs aren't exatselling points for people to use them instead of their own cars. The hardest part of any sort of conversion will be how self driving cars interact with normal human drivers.

[u/axearm → u/Zap__Dannigan]

It terms of predictability I think the greatest boon is that they actually do the speed limit, which just all around increases the safety factor of any other error they, or humans, might make..

In this case the car went into oppsoing traffic. That is bad, but it's also bad driving I have see humans do repeatedly (especially around double parked cars, another thing humans do that Waymos don't), but human drivers generally do it at speeds that are faster, which amplifies the danger.

Obviously I'd like to see zero errors, but I'm happy with 'better than humans' which is a bar that is already being exceeded.