> But the company highlighted eight incidents that it considered “most severe or potentially severe.” Three of these crashes occurred in real life and five only in simulation. Airbags were deployed in all eight incidents.
When the engineers reviewed all of these 8 crashes they played them back watching what the humans did, then they put all of the constraints into their simulation and let the AI take over. When they say "Three of these crashes occurred in real life and five only in simulation" that means that 3 severe crashes happened in real life and the AI would have cause 5 more "severe" crashes had the humans not taken control.
'In order to provide more information about event severity within the S1 designation, S1 severity events have been separated into two columns in Table 1 based on whether each event is of sufficient severity to result in actual or simulated airbag deployment for any involved vehicle. Of the eight airbag-deployment-level S1 events, five are simulated events with expected airbag deployment, two were actual events involving deployment of only another vehicle’s frontal airbags, and one actual event involved deployment of another vehicle’s frontal airbags and the Waymo vehicle’s side airbags. There were no actual or predicted S2 or S3 events'
[0] https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...