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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population. The majority of people are driving most of their miles during rush hour when chances of a crash are the highest, while Waymo cars operate all day/night. Plus I'm sure that first-time drivers, drunk drivers, people out on illegal joyrides and other such extremes drag the numbers down enough that saying "I'm in the top 40%" really isn't all that meaningful anymore.

What I'm interested in knowing is how these cars drive compared to the average competent driver in the exact same environment.

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>I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population

This depends on what type of drivers waymo is displacing. If it's displacing mostly professional drivers, then that substitution would be reasonable, because the choices we have are either professional drivers or waymo. However, if it's displacing "normal" drivers, including "first-time drivers, drunk drivers", then the substitution wouldn't be reasonable because banning waymo would mean those rides would be replaced with "normal" drivers, not super-safe professional drivers.

Well at the moment Waymo operates a taxi service, and the only way to use it is as a substitute for Uber/Lyft, so that question answers itself.

Even otherwise though, if at some point in the future I have the option of trading my car in for a fully autonomous one, the only thing I'm really interested in knowing is how my personal accident risk in getting from point A to point B changes compared to if I was driving myself. These benchmarks are meaningless in that regard. I'm not driving drunk, I'm not driving in bad weather conditions, I'm not being needlessly arrogant or reckless on the road. Can this car drive better than me?

> Well at the moment Waymo operates a taxi service, and the only way to use it is as a substitute for Uber/Lyft, so that question answers itself.

but thanks to the gig economy, "professional taxi drivers" basically means anyone with a drivers license.

I don't know that taxi or uber drivers are particularly safer. I mean drunk and joyriders sure - but that must be a tiny fraction of drivers. As opposed to the ultra-common "scared" and "distracted". The last shared drivers (including taxis) I have used did not seem particularly expert. They certainly did not seem hyper-alert (which would make sense if driving all day) or experienced (in the case of uber drivers).

But there seems to be some stats. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/that-wild-taxi-r... got "crash rates one-third lower". Still great result from Waymo.

>I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population.

When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are looking to replace.

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