Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>Prioritizing safety over everything has kept regulators far away and there haven't been any mishaps that I'm aware of.

Maybe I have missed it, but has there been any substantial use of Waymo outside of the Phoenix area? There is a reason why both Uber and Google were targeting that area for testing. It is an area with lots of sun, little precipitation, lots of relatively new, big, and straight roads, no real wildlife that might jump out into the road, and that is notoriously hostile to pedestrians. Is demonstrating a self driving vehicle is safe there truly indicative that it will be safe in the back alleys of Boston's North End when there is a foot of snow on the ground?

View on HN

A family member drives for one of the largest Trucking companies in NA. They have specialized drivers that take the loads into NYC, Boston, etc. He drops the trailer at a yard outside the city and a city truck and driver take it in.

It just works out better for the company since these drivers know their city and that is all they do. It keeps the company from having accident insurance claims.

I doubt there will ever be self driving Tractor Trailer type vehicles in any city. It requires some serious skill and intuition about your rig and roads, like where to take the truck wide to complete a right turn without taking down the street light or pedestrian waiting to cross would be a good example.

This mirrors how ships worked historically, as well. You have ocean navigators, who are great at getting reliably from one continent to another (even without knowing their longitude reliably), and then pilots who know every rock in a particular harbor for the last mile.

> serious skill and intuition about your rig and roads, like where to take the truck wide to complete a right turn without taking down the street light or pedestrian waiting to cross

I'm actually convinced that maneuvering a large, articulated vehicle is the comparatively easy part.

These two videos convinced me AIs can be pretty good at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4MEh5-paA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYPA4ajTQgk

AIs might even have an advantage over humans because they can more easily use cameras on all sides of the truck to maintain awareness of everything going on around them. The AI should be able to predict with good accuracy where each part of the truck will be as the motion progresses because it can do the math, whereas a human has to rely on experience.

To me, the real difficulty for AIs is in the higher reasoning, like how you deal with situations (lane closed, vehicle traveling the wrong way, etc.).

Would you recommend starting AV development in Manhattan for safety, then?

Obviously not. It makes sense to start with the easiest problems first, I'm just advocating for keeping that perspective that Waymo's success in Phoenix is an easy problem in comparison to a lot of driving environments that would be expected of a truly self driving vehicle.

I imagine that these conditions are good for trucks in particular. I highly doubt that these trucks will ever be intended to be driven outside of freerange highway roads.

Waymo also do substantial amounts of testing around Alphabet's HQ in Mountain View and the surrounding area

According to the state of California, Waymo had less than 1.5 million miles driven in 2019[1]. That is basically nothing when it comes to proving a track record of safety. The fatality rate in California is around 1 per 100 million miles. Waymo's cars can be twice as deadly as humans and there would only be a 3% chance of killing someone in a 1.5 million miles.

[1] - https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

That's only in California. They have over 20 million miles driven total and its increasing rapidly (10 million of those were just in the past year.)

https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/06/waymos-autonomous-cars-ha...

There is no breakdown there of where these miles occurred. It appears that most of those miles came out of the Phoenix area which leads back to my original point.

Either way, 20 million miles is once again a drop in the bucket compared to the number which would indicate these cars are as safe or safer than human drivers. For comparison, Tesla is likely around 4 billion miles with Autopilot. I still wouldn't be comfortable saying definitively that Autopilot is as safe or safer than humans.

You gotta start somewhere.

If you have a very limited fleet of self driving cars then maybe it's actually ok if they are not as safe as human drivers as long as the trajectory is towards better safety. I'm sure the very first test car driving anywhere was less safe than a human driver. Each step will lay the foundation baseline for the next step. The Tesla 4 billion miles can't be compared with anything since those aren't really autonomous driving. It's like saying there's a trillion miles on cruise control.

I don't disagree with you. I'm not coming from a position that Waymo is unsafe. I am coming from the position that we don't have any substantial evidence on the safety of Waymo and we should be cautious drawing conclusions from the extremely limited track record.

The quality of the information is different.

Waymo has 20 million miles using multi-modal sensory data: cameras, LIDARs, etc. Because the sensory data is gathered in multiple modes, it can be cross-referenced and calibrated against each other even if the placement of individual components change (so long as not all components change at the same time), meaning that the data can be used across multiple models.

Tesla has 4 billion miles using a single mode of sensory data, but because it uses a single mode of input (visual), old data becomes mostly useless when they make any changes to the system, such as to the visual resolution of the cameras, or their positioning on the vehicles. This is one of the big reasons that they get so many regressions with Autopilot.

Also, despite having 4 billion miles of sensory data, that hasn't stopped Tesla from being the industry leader in self-driving fatalities. The rest of the industry combined has only a single fatality.

>Also, despite having 4 billion miles of sensory data, that hasn't stopped Tesla from being the industry leader in self-driving fatalities. The rest of the industry combined has only a single fatality.

You are missing the point. Tesla is the industry leader in fatalities primarily because they have such a huge lead in the number of miles. Miles are not directly comparable to each other because each company has a different approach, but Tesla's fatality rate is 1 every 800 million miles. Waymo appears to be the leader among the rest of the industry with 20 million miles. How can you predict Waymo is safer than Tesla at this point? They may end up being safer, but it is way too early to say that right now.

No, the point is that Tesla isn't learning from the data it collects. It keeps having the same problems over and over again.

And that problem gets worse with increasing data, not better, because the useless data will drown out the important data.

I don't know how you are drawing that conclusion and it is irrelevant to the original discussion about having a track record of safety. Neither company has proven their system is as safe or safer than humans. Tesla at least has a much longer track record of their system not being substantially more dangerous than humans. Waymo doesn't have enough data to say even that.

You're correct: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

No, you're both incorrect.

Tesla's own legal filings shows that Autopilot is 2-3x more likely to get into accidents that Teslas without Autopilot engaged. (The 2x for Autopilot disabled but other advanced driving features engaged; 3x for all advanced driving functions disabled.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...

Their marketing claims are just that: marketing.

> Tesla's own legal filings

Where is the source for this? It wasn't anywhere on the article that you linked.

What you need is a zillion representative miles. If Waymo mostly drives in easy conditions, or autopilot is mostly only on in easy conditions, then even 100 billion miles won’t let you extrapolate on how safe it is in a full regular person end to end commute scenario.

It’s clearer by hours instead of by miles. If a normal car gets into an accident every 1 zillion hours, and I’ve driven my research car for 20 minutes and then had it parked for 100 zillion hours and it only had one accident accident, I don’t get to claim it’s 100x safer. (100x fewer accidents per hour!) It has to be apples to apples.

Phoenix is still a very populated place. One question is if they replaced the entire rideshare market in Phoenix, will they make their money back in a reasonable time?

Second, you may be moving the goalposts. If the car can drive in Boston, but not in, say, French Guyana, would you still say it's not true self-driving?

> an area with lots of sun, little precipitation, lots of relatively new, big, and straight roads, no real wildlife that might jump out into the road, and that is notoriously hostile to pedestrians.

You just described a quarter of the US.

And probably only 10% of the population. But either way, I'm not sure your point. It appears no one has anything close to true self driving. Different companies are attacking the complexities of the problem in difference ways. For example, Tesla is limiting its system by situation while Waymo is limiting it by environment. Neither has been proven safe for the full spectrum of driving and we all know that the biggest problems for self driving are going to be solving those outlier scenarios.

I agree with you mostly, except your definition of self driving. Full self driving limited to the Phoenix metro area counts to me as full self driving. That doesn’t meant squat towards full self driving in different conditions, but if you’re a Phoenix resident, who cares?

If it works for the full spectrum of usage for normal people, I’ll count it, even if it’s not all normal people everywhere. If we get something that works everywhere in the US, but not the crowded streets in India, you’d count it, right?

Sure, you are fine to take this conversation purely from the reference point of a resident of Phoenix. I can't argue against your definition with that very limited context. I simply think that is a narrow enough viewpoint to not be particularly useful in a larger conversation about self driving vehicles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com