The data coming out from an independent study of Waymo autonomous vehicles is, frankly, amazing. Swiss Re, one of the largest global insurance firms based out of Zürich, reports that 25.3 million fully autonomous miles drive by Waymo vehicles resulted in a 92% reduction in car crash injuries.
In plain English, Waymo self-driving tech is 12.5x safer than human drivers.
Let’s dig into what that means!
I work in vehicle testing, specifically on ADAS and autonomous driving features. One thing that gets overlooked with Waymo is the fact that that fucker has a 6-figure price tag on the sensing equipment on it. You’ll never see that on a production level vehicle
“Never” is a long time. Technology is always getting cheaper, I see no reason why that sensing equipment won’t end up on a production vehicle at some point.
In the auto industry pennies matter. Inevitably some higher-up will convince himself that they can accomplish the same thing with just a camera and some software. Margins tend to be more important than quality. I’m not saying that’s right, its just what tends to happen
The real point of self driving cars is not to have to buy one. They should be ubiquitous fleets of taxis that never sleep, not personal possessions that sit in the driveway 90% of the time.
From where I’m sitting that’s very far from reality for a whole lot of reasons. I’d be happy to be wrong (because cars are unacceptably unsafe as-is) but there’s a long way to go
Okay, feel free to tell me all the reasons.
I’m not going to write you an essay
There are good video essays on the subject by Benn Jordan, Not Just Bikes, and Adam Something that (mostly) are a good overview of the problem and their videos explain things better than I’m ever going to write
Also the eternal taxi idea just seems like a shit excuse for not building other transit options. Like why not build trains and bike lanes instead of that
Well I wasn’t asking for an essay. Benjamin Faraday’s well known video about the effectiveness of automated taxi trials in St. Germaine and the Transportation Policy Institute numerous published case studies, which you can go Google, show how self driving taxis take net cars OFF the roads AND free up parking spaces for OH I DONT KNOW bike lanes and bus stops so perhaps these ideas aren’t so mutually exclusive as you suggest.
That sensor array is fuckin sweet. If I’m going to trust a car to drive me, I want it to have laser beam eyes that see through pitch blackness and blizzard conditions.
You’re the engineer, I’m just a pickup truck driving comedian, so I’m assuming that I’ve just accurately described a commercial-grade LiDAR array.
The LiDAR arrays are dropping very quickly in price - they’re now low six figures. I anticipate they’ll eventually make production, probably with fewer sensors, but sensors of equal quality. Probably sooner than most folks realize.
In the end, insurers will be the harbingers of autonomous vehicles.
In 2050, the insurance will be twice as high if you insist on having a steering wheel, and it will have a major impact on buying decisions.
Never trust an automated vehicle you have to buy insurance for. If it’s truly autonomous, then the actual person in the driver seat is irrelevant. There is no need to price risk individually. Any true self driving car should have a lifetime insurance policy included in the purchase price. The manufacturer is the one determining if crashes will occur. The liability should be entirely on them. Any company selling you a “self driving” card that still requires you to buy insurance is selling snake oil.
This comment section is surprising me with both thoughtful and dark observations about the article. Well, that’s rad! I was expecting a more “good news” crowd on the Uplifting News board, but if y’all want Dark Futurism, I can hang.
You’re 100% correct. Non ADAS vehicles will be a luxury good. There will probably be social pressures, similar to seatbelt adoption, pressuring folks to not drive themselves. 2050 feels like a reasonable time horizon for that to start.
While I don’t disagree that autonomous cars are safer, I think they are comparing the Waymo city miles against mixed mileage and when you are driving at reduced speed the chance to have an accident lowers significantly.
But yes, people get distracted all the time, can be angry, tired, etc. that will negatively affect their driving.
Yep - of course they’re safer when they take at least 2-3x longer to get anywhere.
The article covers an academic-style research paper. You might find that section of the full research paper interesting! You spotted something important, but I think you think that city driving is safer, when the opposite is true:
Here’s the part you might find interesting, the “12x safer than human” claim likely greatly understates the safety advantage, just due to the methodology of the study:
“The garaging zip code of the insured vehicle was used as a proxy for the city (Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin) in which the vehicle drives. Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk. For example, commuters from the city would likely experience a reduced crash risk as they travel to less densely populated areas (Chen et al., 2024). Previous studies have shown that most injury collisions occur within a small radius from residency, and that American drivers rarely travel far from their place of residence, with approximately 80% of one-way household trips being less than 10 miles (DOE, 2022). Third, the benchmark drivers garaged in the Waymo deployment area are not operating with the same distribution of mileage within the geographical limits as the Waymo ADS. Chen et al. (2024) explored the effect of Waymo’s driving distribution on benchmark crash risk and found that - should the benchmark driving distribution match Waymo’s in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles - the benchmark police-reported crash rates would have been between 14% and 38% higher. Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative. Surely, there is an opportunity in future work to leverage new data, such as insurance telematics, to more precisely define and leverage the benchmark driving exposure data to better account for this potential confounder.”
Of course the user named leadfoot is thrilled with auto-driving.
I’m personally skeptical, probably won’t enjoy for myself (at least not til I’m REAL old), but hey, I love this for folks who can’t or don’t like to drive!
Fewer car accidents is good for everybody.
