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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

On net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile.

Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance.

Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, analyzed with thousands of metrics and exact replays, patched, and the improved model running the Waymo is distributed to all cars on the road.

There is no equivalent in humans. There are millions of human drivers currently driving who drive distracted, drunk, recklessly, or aggressively. Every one of them who is replaced with a Waymo is potentially many lives saved.

Approximately 1/100 deaths in the US are due to car fatalities. Every year autonomous drivers aren't rapidly deployed is just unnecessary deaths.

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>> Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile.

That's not exactly right. You need to take into account how likely it is for accidents to happen, not just the number of miles travelled. If the low probability of accidents is taken into account it turns out it takes many more millions or even billions of miles than already travelled for self-driving cars to be considered safe. See:

Driving to Safety

How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?

Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared with vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate performance prior to releasing them for consumer use. Our findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

>Study from 2016

Waymo hit 100 million driven miles in July so far without a death (in the US the death rate per 100 million miles in cars is 1.26). Likewise the crash rate is lower across the board

https://www.theavindustry.org/blog/waymo-reduces-crash-rates...

I assume that study based its assumptions on the limited testing performed so far on the extant self-driving cars of the day, which of course if you have only 10 test cars would take many decades, but at scale that isn't relevant anymore given Waymo's success.

Actually, your assumptions that human drivers cannot be improved are wrong. Modern cars have a lot of safety features to help avoid accidents:

* lane keeping with optional steering

* pedestrian and obstacle detection at the front

* pedestrian and obstacle detection when reversing with automatic braking

* assisted driving with lane keeping and full stop / driving on in case of traffic jam

Waymos are just fancy taxis. And taxis haven’t replaced all human drivers or solved traffic accidents.

Those features are all still essentially making normal cars more like self-driving cars by removing the human factors that lead to accidents.

> And taxis haven’t replaced all human drivers or solved traffic accidents.

That comparison is irrelevant. The point is that Waymos are superior to human drivers with respect to safety, thus they would also be superior to taxis in that dimension and would be a justifiable replacement. Also self-driving tech, if deployed in all cars, would offer benefits beyond taxis since the car belongs to the user of the tech itself.

Yes, thereby making them even better than self-driving cars. Human + driving automation still beats the bots. ;)

The bots aren’t superior either, they’re just not able to function in many countries and situations so in their little box they have good stats because they’re super-careful. This is fine for a taxi, hence that is the comparison that makes most sense.

It just looks really bad when that one in a million death is caused by something stupid a human would never do. So far these Waymos are only replacing taxi and Uber drivers, which have a lower rate of accidents than the general population.

"Uber reported 0.87 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 2021–2022"

https://insurify.com/car-insurance/insights/rideshare-driver...

Waymos are still safer than that (so far 0 deaths with well over 100 million vehicle miles traveled)

Taxi drivers or bus drivers are also much safer than regular people if you interpret it like that

Which is also true

So what will these humans alternatively perish from? Old age? How is that fiscally possible?

Probably heart disease

> Approximately 1/100 deaths in the US are due to car fatalities. Every year autonomous drivers aren't rapidly deployed is just unnecessary deaths.

You could improve driver training. American drivers are absolutely terrifying.

“Could” is doing a lot of work there I think.

I suspect most problematic American drivers already know they aren’t supposed to text, drink, or watch or record TikToks while they drive, but simply do it anyway because they are aware these laws are under-enforced.

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