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Comment by trenning | Hacker News Reader

Does Phoenix have laws that make them more attractive for testing or just location preference?

Arizona basically threw their citizens to the wolves with a 2015 self-driving car law that allowed anything and everything to go (you wouldn't even have to register your cars as self-driving for a period). This attracted tons of firms to test their cars in a lax regulatory environment but since the famous Uber death and a number of self-driving accidents, they have tightened the rules somewhat. I suspect they're still looser than average and there's some inertia from everyone setting up shop there originally.

From the original press release:

> "Part of what makes Arizona an ideal place for Uber and other companies to test autonomous vehicle technology is that there are no special permits or licensing required," the ADOT release said. "In Arizona, autonomous vehicles have the same registration requirements as any other vehicle, and nothing in state law prevents testing autonomous vehicles."

Article with latest updates: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/maricopa-county-sheriff...

Thrown their citizens to the wolves and caused all of one death, and no other problems to speak of? Seems like they made a great call to me.

Yeah cause screw that person who died.

Arizona allows drivers over 80, and I'd trust Waymo over the average octogenarian driving.

That would be an interesting metric: normalized accident rates for self-driving cars vs octogenarian-driven cars.

I'm certain the self-driving cars win. Per Waymo's numbers they already have a much lower accident rate than the average driver.

See, the thing is, Waymo controls the data, and certainly knows how good their driving is. If it was clearly better than the average octogenarian driving, wouldn't they be letting us all know that? Wouldn't they be announcing that and writing up white papers and giving presentations at conferences about this? They need to start building the safety case, and it is entirely to their benefit to release this data, if it truly is more reliable than even just the average octogenarian. The fact that they don't, and so far as I can tell only release the minimum data that they are legally obligated to (and marketing-speak like https://waymo.com/safety/ is not the same thing at all), leaves me with an inference that the data is not nearly that rosy.

There's a difference between something being safe and being capable. I can make a trivially safe self driving car that just sits there and does nothing, completely safe but not capable :) My point being that Waymo could have zero colissions (which I believe is not true) but still not be as capable a driver as someone for which it is unsafe to be driving, but is reasonably capable of getting around.

Arizona also allows people under 30 to drive, and every age group under 30 has a much higher accident rate than 80+. People under the age of 18 have quadruple the accident rate of people aged 80. The reason people incorrectly believe that octogenarians are bad drivers is they have a tendency to die in even minor accidents.

I think folks think 80+ drivers are bad, is they drive conservatively and carefully. Its annoying to 20-something drivers who want to race around and take chances.

{not an 80+ driver}

No regulation was going to prevent a death where developers intentionally disabled all safety checks.

What about a regulation requiring reasonable safety checks?

Laws don't change outcomes, but they can influence behaviours. Such as a developer not doing the above due to concern of a law.

Regulation can prevent some instances of such disabling.

Do you know how many people dies in US roads every day? Maybe we should ban all motor vehicles.

Both lack of regulation as well as weather, road condition, and road layout. Most of the Phoenix metro area is a grid, fairly modern as streets are constantly redone as we've grown so new-ish signs that are largely unobstructed by trees, etcetc.

As a motorcyclist with a 45 minute commute, I'm on the cautious side when it comes to self-driving tech on the roads, but I have to say that anecdotally it's been fine so far. I'd be willing to bet I see ~10 Waymo vehicles a day. I've had plenty of issues with normal cars/drivers, have never had nor seen an issue with Waymo.

Not much precipitation in Phoenix, and the roads tend to be dry.

Uber was testing there because the local city government was easy to work with initially. After their fatal incident, the city became more restrictive, but Google/Waymo had already also moved in and started testing there, and because they didn't have any issues, I presume the city continued to work with them.

The opposite -- Phoenix has less laws that make them more attractive for virtually everything.

Combination of favorable laws, good weather for testing, wide roads, etc.

Well maintained roads. Easy access by engineering teams from California. Cheap local wages for test drivers.

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