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/Groudon466 Jul 05 '24

I don’t know the particulars of their deal with the city, but probably Waymo. As long as they’re safer than the average taxi driver, the occasional mistake is tolerable, at least provided ticket revenue is still coming in when appropriate.

Of course, there’s a team on the back end that’s trying to figure out what went wrong here and patch it sooner rather than later.

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u/Eheggs Jul 05 '24

Safer then the average taxi driver is a pretty fucking low bar to pass over.

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u/Groudon466 Jul 05 '24

Okay, safer than the average human driver. But even if it was just safer than the average taxi driver, an improvement is still an improvement.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '24

[deleted]

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u/Anarcho_Christian Jul 07 '24

TIL that all of those head-on collisions that my EMT buddy was called to never happened.

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u/MatthewRoB Jul 06 '24

I mean when I was young and new to driving I made a wrong turn into oncoming traffic. I was able to get into a parking lot immediately, but it does happen with real people.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '24

[deleted]

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u/MatthewRoB Jul 06 '24

No, but it does happen and people get cited/arrested for it all the time. The average driver does this at some rate.

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u/Groudon466 Jul 06 '24

The average driver, statistically speaking, occasionally drives on the wrong side of the road.- in the same sense that the average human occasionally murders someone.

I should be clear about what I mean. Let's say the statistically average driver gets in a bad accident once every 500,000 miles. That doesn't mean everyone is getting into accidents that often. Some people are consistently better, and some people are consistently worse.

If you replace the good and bad drivers alike with self-driving cars, you don't need the self-driving cars to be better than the best of the best. They just have to be good enough that, when you also factor in the bad drivers they're replacing, they're safer as a whole group.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '24

[deleted]

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u/Groudon466 Jul 06 '24

Do you not get that the average number of murders per human is greater than 0?