Safety performance of the Waymo rider-only automated driving system [pdf]
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That agrees with the California DMV reports. The usual problem is being rear-ended at slow speed when the autonomous vehicle detects a threat at an intersection and stops. That shows up over and over in California reports. The Arizona data has five occurrences of human drivers backing into a stationary Waymo vehicle, mostly in parking lots. That doesn't seem to be happening in California, probably because picking up people in parking lots isn't that common in San Francisco.
As more human-driven vehicles get auto-braking, the rear-ending problem will probably decrease. Really bright brake lights that flash when the autonomous vehicle detects a rear-end threat might help.
You could probably shorten that to "probably because parking lots aren't that common in San Francisco."
Sure. In general, people will try not to hit the brakes any harder than they have to especially if they have the situational awareness to know someone is close (maybe too close) behind them.
Brake checking at yield signs and stop signs isn't really a thing.
It's refreshing to see Waymo continue to be transparent about their safety data. I guess it's easier to do when you have a stellar safety record.
... for the conditions that the Waymo vehicles operated in.
Deployment of Waymo FSD across the board would seem to be a sure win in SF and Phoenix, so I hope that it gets widely adopted in those areas at minimum since I think it will save a lot of lives. There's a lot of work to be done by Waymo yet to get it to work in other areas of the country and conditions, though.
It’s illegal to hit people! If they step into the road, they have the right of way!
Three consisted of the Waymo hitting random objects - not catastrophic but clearly shows weaknesses in the self-driving: 3 (Waymo ran over a traffic cone), 17 (Waymo hit a "free swinging parking lot barrier arm"), 18 (Waymo hit a shopping cart).
Ten of the accidents seem unavoidable for the Waymo and clearly someone else's fault:
1 - distracted driver rear-ends Waymo coming to a stop, with a delta-v of 20 mph. A 0.2 g deceleration could be a bit faster than normal but definitely isn't slamming the brakes, and the report mentions at one point that the other driver was using a phone.
2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 19 - someone hits a stationary Waymo in a parking lot or while getting out of a parking spot. [Edit: Someone pointed out that these could be preventable for the Waymo, if it knew how to use the horn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34974313]
16 - Garbage truck tried to squeeze by a stopped Waymo, didn't fit (although for this one, it is possible that a human driver would have pulled over further).
Two were emergency braking situations - would be interesting to see what the reaction time was and how it compared with a human driver:
7 - someone cut off a Waymo and got rear ended
20 - Waymo hit a minibike that had crashed and tumbled into its lane, despite braking.
And of course there has to be a weird one, 15 - Wind blew debris into Waymo.
Overall, it seems like the report mostly avoids assigning fault, which is a good thing - in the end, how many crashes happen matters more than who was at fault. [Edit: and as the "use the horn" example shows, even when the other side is clearly at fault, improvements may be possible]
I've been backed into before. I didn't hit my horn. I just kept thinking, "There's no way they're going to back into me."
See https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...
Followed by a table with # miles driven in various weather conditions.
Opposite to the claims seen elsewhere in this thread, which are omnipresent whenever the topic arises, it is in fact humans who are driving around on easy mode and self-driving car developers operate in the most difficult conditions they can find.
Ehhhhhhh. While I agree that these aren't the easiest driving environments in the world, they are certainly mild climates. If I were in the business of proving that waymo vehicles weren't ready for prime time I'd be taking them up the alcan in winter or Florida during hurricane season, not Phoenix.
You might be confusing them with Cruise. Waymo is driving around SF driverless 24/7 so the million miles also come from during the day, while Cruise is limited to nighttime.
- a shopping cart
- a parking barrier
- a construction pylon
- a minibike (slid into the waymo's lane)
- a plastic sign (blew over onto the waymo)
Humans have a horn to warn other humans of unsafe behavior or conditions. We really only need to worry about warning in front of us. And we provide some warning to cars behind us in specific cases with hazard lights and brake lights.
The autonomous vehicles have a better understanding of the whole state. We've already talked about warning other autonomous cars with V2V, but maybe there's something easy/sane they can do to warn human cars behind them and further increase safety.
https://waymo.com/research/identifying-driver-interactions-v...
It's doing that by looking at the vehicle as the agent though; it has nothing to do with "the body language of this pilot suggests this vehicle will do X", it's just a predictive module because it's useless to be able to see another car if you can't predict it's going to go X units forward in the next time tick(s).
Adding a layer that models human drivers to augment the prediction of this module you link would be a waste of time.
In the end, if I'm in a self-driving car, I care whether the crash happened, not who caused it. The injuries and hassle are mine either way, the financial damage isn't mine either way.
If you do that kind of thing, don’t expect it to work out well if the other driver has a dashcam. If they don’t, of course you can lie and deny having caused the accident.