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Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want to read the full 30 page paper, Waymo has a blog post summarizing it: https://blog.waymo.com/2023/02/first-million-rider-only-mile...

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.

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> 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.

SF is not an easy locale to test in. Sure, there is no snow, but the city is narrow, dense, with a lot of challenging situations including fog, rain, and crackheads. This success seems promising.

SF is a terrible city to drive in. Narrow streets, terrible hills, a huge diversity of traffic: pedestrians, cyclists, electric scooters, buses, light rail, trains. Highly congested. Plenty of tourists driving (it’s not like NY or London where people who are visiting know not to drive).

SF doesn't seem that bad? At least not compared to Boston in the winter.

The grid in Boston is a joke.

Don't forget the "pedestrian right-of-way" law.

It’s weird how every city in the country thinks this is some idiosyncratic thing that makes their city especially hard to drive in.

It’s illegal to hit people! If they step into the road, they have the right of way!

I've probably driven half a million miles and I don't remember having 10 incidents (I probably have, just don't remember). So I'd conclude I'm at least as safe a driver as Waymo. Even if not true, most people are going to feel that way when they see the data. Human nature.

Probably more highway miles though to reach that number. City accidents I expect would be lower severity but higher frequency.

In addition, 40% of the waymo incidents were while the waymo vehicle was parked. I expect that (1) most drivers are unaware of incidents that happen while their car is parked and (2) waymo vehicles spend more time parked in less protected places (i.e. in parking lots waiting for riders to appear/enter/exit and not in a parking spot).

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