Hacker News Reader

Comment by floxy | Hacker News Reader

That's great news. I wonder how much insurance rates will go down when autonomous vehicles get popular. Seems like the liability portion could go way down.

View on HN

It's a 3x effect for insurance agencies: 1) Google/Waymo doesn't buy insurance for their vehicles 2) Waymo vehicles are much less likely to cause accidents 3) Waymo vehicles actively avoid being hit and calm traffic overall

I'm not super familiar with this space, or laws where Waymo is active, what do you mean Google/Waymo don't buy insurance for their vehicles?

Is having insurance not legally required? Do they just pay out when there's an accident where they injure someone?

Large companies with fleets of vehicles often self-insure.

Interesting!

When I was much younger, I worked for a couple companies that had (what I would consider) large fleets of vehicles, and they all were insured through an insurance company. I guess I just assumed that's how it was. I wasn't aware self-insuring was a possibility. Thanks.

Self-driving is probably still new enough that insurance companies wouldn't have good actuarial data to properly price the risks, so they'd just have to charge exorbitant rates.

Companies can self insure. That doesn't mean they have to. Your accountant can run the numbers to figure out if it is worth it.

Often self insure means they still pay an insurance company to handle the paperwork, but when there is a claim the company pays it.

While I'm not sure of the specifics for car insurance.

For health care, a lot of large companies technically have say Anthem or whatever but the company pays out all of the claims and it's just administered by Anthem. So you may have seen a similar thing where all claims were handled by say Geico but it's not Geico's pot of money paying out claims.

In many states, including CA, individuals can post a bond instead of carrying insurance. Companies with fleets of vehicles can also self-insure. In both cases the car owner is liable to pay any damages that insurance would normally pay.

It has been classic lore that Bill Gates couldn't get anyone to insure him after his younger years (see classic mugshot photo used as the silhouette) so he had to self insure. Not sure if completely true but I remember the stories.

The problem is that Waymos can't replace cars (or even Ubers!) since they depend on human oversight and problem-solving. Even at a 20:1 ratio it is not feasible for autonomous vehicles to employ 10m people to account for every American on the road.

This does not sound scalable.

Why can't it replace Ubers?

Those people dont have to be americans though

Americans only spend 3% of their time driving, so it's maybe closer to 300k than 10m. Still not scalable at that though so the key will be driving that 20:1 up, which seems very possible given enough time.

If they keep pushing the hours between requests down like I saw on https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-number-of-full..., that might be feasible.

What determines whether 300k is scalable ?

The human oversight is mostly to tell off people breaking rules in the cars, not to fix the driving, and is quite easy to automate as they scale.

That might be what human overseers are mostly doing minute-to-minute but it's not why it's necessary. The problem is AI simply does not have the real-world problem solving ability to handle all the minor inconveniences and surprises on the road.

This is a very confusing position. Every Uber has full-time 1:1 "oversight". Waymo has a support team that only directs actions (not remote driving) when the vehicle requests. I would be very surprised if the number of Waymo rides that need any intervention at all is greater than 1 in 20.

My point is you're not going to get much more than half[1] of those Uber drivers into a Waymo control center, even if they're facing unemployment. The workers have to come from somewhere. And it has to be somewhat regular hours, surge oversight doesn't make sense.

[1] Edit - I meant 5% not half, I was on the train and very frustrated with these comments. (not yours, though it seems bad faith to say "not remote driving" when I said "problem solving." The problem has always been the 1-5% of driving which truly requires sophisticated intelligence, that's why the oversight is there.)

Every Lyft driver I've spoken to drives because a) they like driving b) they like choosing their own hours and c) they don't want a boss. Telling them to go into an office for an 8 hour shift with a manager is not gonna work, they will find something more appealing. It's a different kind of employee. (I would enjoy that line of work but I would hate to drive for Uber, way too stressful.)

I don't think Waymo needs a significant amount of vehicle support staff now, and will need even less (per vehicle) in the future. The ratio will probably be something like the number of elevator repair people to number of unattended elevators operating smoothly.

I emphasized that Waymo staff does not drive vehicles remotely, because this persists as a common misconception.

How does oversight handle issue. They are not remote driving, but what are they doing. The more important question is can the car have me (who is already inside it) tell it what to do?

Waymo doesn't say very much, but other self-driving services have been more open. It is things like "the fire truck is at a weird angle and the car didn't know what to do, draw a path where it pulls slightly into an oncoming lane so it can get around." A lot of common sense stuff which is far beyond the reach of AI in 2025.

Where does the 20:1 stat come from? Does anyone know how may human interventions Waymo has per trip or per mile? How much human time is needed per intervention? And are the intervention rate and human time increasing or decreasing over time?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com