Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.

It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.

Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.

Well, 80% of us believes ourselves to be above average, so there's that.

How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh.

It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.

That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.

But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.

I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.

They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.

Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem.

The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult.

For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.

I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros.

If we're talking about a small country then sure.

a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and

b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason.

We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.

As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile.

And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.

They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long.

As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.

lol

> - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents

> - so either insurance will be cheaper for them

> - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up

If they were going to do that, they would have done it by now for those drivers opting into the insurance monitor device: they can literally tell that you're a driver that never took a risk, never got into a situation to brake hard, never drove recklessly, etc, and yet, the insurance cost with the device is only slightly less than the insurance cost without the device.

In any case, if this was strictly a financial decision, why would the human cost go up? The larger the percentage of SDVs there are on the road, the less likely a human driver gets into an accident, their risk goes down too, so their insurance should also go down.

Driving yourself will become like horse riding, something you do on private property for sport rather than transport.

I can easily construct arguments along the lines of “cars are necessary to drive and insurance costs are regressive since they don’t scale with income so we need to have price controls on insurance for low-income drivers”. These will be quite popular.

Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.

An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.

> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]

I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.

1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...

The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.

The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.

Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.

The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.

I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.

It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.

People understandably prefer to keep control of their own safety, even if on average they are worse at it. Because individuals that do care about safety can actually do many things to lower the risks well below the statistics, and likely remain much better than self-driving.

There’s also the question of responsibility and liability. In society we have such pressures so that there’s an incentive to continually reduce risks. It is dangerous to shift the responsibility to fast-growth tech companies that will care much less about individual accidents than the drivers involved, and are more capable of absorbing liability without substantive remediation.

Safety is outsourced in many contexts (aviation, police, military…), but it has to be substantially better than what the individual can achieve on their own. For instance, due to the expertise required, or because you can achieve more through coordinated collective action. And there has to be very high trust in the companies involved, the regulatory systems around them, and the technologies employed.

Wherever you draw it, there is a group of 10-100 million drivers who will be less safe (to themselves and others) in an automated vehicle.

There’s reason to believe that automated vehicles exceed bad drivers, and may improve , but it’s no guarantee that they will exceed very good or excellent drivers.

They put safety above all else and actually goal to it.

Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.

If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.

Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.

I used to bike to work in Chicago and it was surreal being able to look right into someone's car and see hardly anyone is paying attention.

I'll also never forget the first time getting hit by a car (car did left turn when I was biking straight through a green light) and right before impact seeing the driver's face illuminated by their phone while looking straight down driving into me.

It's also extremely important to normalize this data per geo and driving type (urban vs freeway miles), which Waymo does do and you seem to ignore.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

"At-fault" Waymo crashes on 35mph city roads driven only in good weather vs. all crashes regardless of fault for on all roads including highways driven in all weather conditions

You can't subsidise "better driver education" (to a meaningful sense, to my knowledge) or "banning alcohol." You literally can't do the latter. We tried, and I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.

You can use direct poicy action to save lives through AVs.

So at the end of the day, we're deflecting from harm reduction to preserve a parochial mode of transport or not.

You already have it, people want this.

> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.

And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?

Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers.

Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconfident. I would be very surprised to find out they are above average drivers.

Citation definitely needed.

The last couple of human rideshare drivers I have had were AWFUL. One was so awful that I gave them a one star with "Actively dangerous remove from road, please." I never give one star reviews.

I would visit my mom (2hrs by car) more often if that 2hrs (each way) wasn't so stressful and exhausting and I could just be chauffeured by a self driving car while I browse the net, play a game, watch a movie, or talk to friends.

fault absolutely matters. and with two fatal accidents, it should be trivial to find out if waymo is at fault.

it is bad faith, otherwise.

So it's more useful to look at serious injury statistics as a proxy. For those, Waymo says that there is a significant reduction.

LOL, we have a machine that can now drive much more safely than average humans, and comparable to professional drivers. Yeah, this is not impressive at all. C'mon people, wake me up when we actually make some real technological progress, will ya?

The lower auto liability and umbrella insurance premiums alone would drive buy-in.

It’s literally the riskiest thing people do with the costliest consequences.

I don't know why you come across as so antagonistic to self driving cars. But even if they're only as good as humans today, then you have completely and flat out lost the argument already.

"Interesting" is doing so much heavy lifting here.

Fully agreeing with your other points as well.

I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them.

In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the car behind it was rear-ended by an SUV traveling at high speed. Both that car and the SUV then struck the Waymo. The SUV hit a total of 6 cars and someone in one of the other cars died. According to the police, the SUV may also have been involved in "multiple hit-and-run accidents reported just minutes before" [2].

In the second [3], the Waymo was yielding to a pedestrian when a motorcyclist made contact with the left rear corner of the Waymo. The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.

If you drive on urban streets, no matter how good of a driver you are, there's a chance you're going to be involved in some sort of incident that's completely out of your control -- that seems to be what both of these are.

[1] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-9724

[2] https://archive.ph/5M05h

[3] https://www.autopilotwatch.com/incidents/30270-11713

Removing liability might incentivize more people to, e.g., drive their car to a bar. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Maybe great for bars and restaurants, or possibly quality of life, but removing liability probably has other unintended consequences.

It's maybe too early tell whether criminal liability should be changed, or at least how it should be changed. If criminal liability had been removed when Tesla started making their extravagant self-driving claims, surely you'd agree it would have been too soon, and potentially resulted in more accidents. Few if any consumer autonomous driving modes are as reliable as Waymo

Absent statutory changes, common law tort will probably evolve in some states to take into consideration new incentives and norms, and that might help point the way for changes in criminal law. Those policy changes are typically driven by courts wrestling with real world cases, whereas de novo legislative changes are often driven by imaginations and lobbying.

Superman: I want to get rid of guns.

Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale. Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.

Superman: But most. You know we could.

Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.

Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check.

Mr. Terrific: Some would fight.

Superman: Let them come then, with sticks. Think of the lives we’d save. Check.

Mr. Terrific: Smoking.

Superman: What?

Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more. People keep smoking even though they know it’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die.

Superman: And?

Mr. Terrific: You want to save lives? Jail every smoker. Check. And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check. Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check. Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.

Superman: You’re not going to help me, are you?

Mr. Terrific: No, sir, I am not.

The biggest thing would be safer road/street design, but Americans are kind of allergic to that. Talk about traffic calming or road diets and a lot of folks get absolutely furious.

We should return to the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right.

As in a full on country wide prohibition? Whatever amount of road deaths that would prevent would be offset by idiots dying via drinking industrial spirits.

Liability is the biggest issue holding back widespread adoption, IMO. The tech is pretty good already. Yet accidents are still going to happen. The question is m who pays when they do? The “driver”? The taxi operator? The car manufacturer? It’s all unclear at best right now.

Across Europe they have 2030 targets to get half the journeys in urban areas made with 'active travel', which means walking or cycling. Even the UK has such absurd targets that are no longer so absurd.

Europe is out of hydrocarbons and Hormuz is closed. The global south will experience the pain of this initially, however, there may come a time when people in Europe can no longer afford to run a car. It won't matter if that car is an EV that can drive itself and warm the seats for you, that future will be gone, for all but the higher status members of society. This will be a big club, but you know you won't be in it.

The levels of active travel sought by the European authorities (including the UK), takes us back to 1930s levels of cycling, when very few owned a car in Europe. Of course, the USA was different, with an abundance of cars, which Europe only saw in the post-war years.

Recently I saw a woman, somewhat large for her size, stuffing her face full of junk food, whilst she waited in her SUV in a supermarket car park to pick up her children from the nearby school. Her posture was not great and I did not think she had a 'good look'.

This particular woman could adapt to a 'Buy and Large' self-driving vehicle, however, Hormuz is closed, with an expected financial challenge expected next year. She might not be able to adapt to 'active travel', to walk or cycle to the school, to escort them back the 'active way', with no heated steering wheel, no A/C, no vanity mirror, no cup holders, no Apple Car Play and pedals that have to be well and truly pushed.

If she is able to make this transition, then she will become part of the community, able to say hello to neighbours because she won't be stuck in a tin box. Nature might return to her street without her there to run over anything that moves.

For longer journeys she might have to get the train rather than sit in those foul sweaty seats in her SUV, that have never been cleaned.

Once free from car dependency, much of the car-dependent world no longer makes sense. Drive-thru fast food is not for 'active travel', neither is the out-of-town retail park. A decent sit-down cafe in town centre or even a pub makes much more sense, as do the smaller shops in town centre, even if they cost more.

Car dependency is up there with drug and alcohol dependency, or even breathing, the car dependent are not going to give up their cars, whatever tribe they are in. However, for one reason or another, much of the world's supply of hydrocarbons is being taken offline at the moment and only the asset owning class are going to be afford any type of car, FSD EV or not. The working man is going to have to get in shape for 'active travel'.

America will be safe from this for a while, however, we will be going back to 1930s, with just the USA as a viable market for cars, FSD or otherwise.

In time Hormuz will reopen and everyone will go back to their gas-guzzling ways, as per previous oil shocks, however, we need to open our eyes to the opportunity to escape car dependency, to create a new era of peace, prosperity and active travel.

The thing is, the automated cars can't afford to have obvious and readily understandable faults like being blinded by the sun.

Driving older cars is one of the simple things that bring me joy.

Now I think "guard rails" is the thing I'm hoping for. Your car actively tries to prevent accidents.

Then, I think once that's seen as working really well, I think what's next is that it will become prohibitively expensive to insure your car without keeping the guard rails on all the time.

Insurance rates are based on data.

Meanwhile, profit-driven private industry is actually out there making things better.

- Autonomous cars will improve traffic because stopped cars can start going at the same time at an intersection -> Then you have no safety distance. And while theoretical improved reaction times mean you might need a bit less distance, the quadratic term comes from the needed breaking deceleration, not the reaction time.

- Autonomous cars will reduce congestion: they can't if they are supposed to drive around empty either to park somewhere else or to get to the next person to transport. On the contrary, they will increase congestion.

Note also that I don't buy the "work" inside "very small cars". It's not just that having to drive prevents you from working. Also the overall comfort while traveling isn't good enough outside of trains or planes for anything but some tiny amount of work.

I am on board with the benefits for old, disabled, tired and drunk people though. Also, I do accept that they will prevent a lot of accidents and deaths.

Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers.

This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer.

As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.

just to illustrate the idea, not saying these are the exact numbers:

1. $1000 a month to drive yourself and still risk liability

2. $50 a month to have the car drive you, and GOOGL takes excess liability

The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."

My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.

I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?

I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.

I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.

There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.

But the bigger fear is the loss of autonomy in movement that having everyone become beholden to a botnet for transportation will bring.

"Drive me to the anti government protest. I want to make my voice heard."

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

In theory they should be cheaper one day because you don't need to pay someone to drive. This means you can use them in situations where for cost reasons you would have driven yourself - e.g. for long journeys, in the countryside, for commuting etc.

Getting people out of their own cars and into autonomous cars is better for several reasons:

1. We need to own fewer cars collectively, which is better for the environment.

2. Don't need to waste a ton of space on car parks.

3. It's safer (at least for Waymo). Not just for occupants but also for pedestrians and cyclists.

Having a cheap option for last mile travel also makes trains more attractive.

All of this of course rests on them actually ending up cheap, which hasn't been the case so far but we'll see.

So what do people do? They have to deny it. They have to make up stories, they have to lie to themselves. Normally HN is all about being data driven and logical. But you can see here that with AI this isn’t the case.

When your identity is about to be eviscerated all logic goes out the window. I deal with it by having no identity. I never placed pride in anything.