
Waymo’s robotaxi pilot surpassed 6,200 riders in its first month in California - sdan
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/waymos-robotaxi-pilot-surpassed-6200-riders-in-its-first-month-in-california/
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jmpman
Self driving companies should be required to release the video from any time
the safety driver has to intervene. It will quickly become clear to the public
that these vehicles are decades away from being safe.

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mobilefriendly
One major problem of automotive transport is society's denial of the risks
involved. Mandating showing autonomous interventions while hundreds die every
day un-viewed in traditional cars will make everyone less safe.

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jmpman
For all I know, my politicians have been incentivized to allow these
autonomous cars on my streets. (For politicians, all it takes is the ability
to tout - It’ll create jobs, you’ll be able to get on TV, looking like an
innovator) Why should I believe the government that they’re safe? (The most
recent Uber self driving death felt like a coverup being encouraged by the
politicians as the original unredacted video wasn’t shared for a long time)
How can the public become confident that the autonomous cars are safer than
human drivers? Certainly there’s an incentive for the autonomous vehicle
manufacturers to lie or distort the trust? What if these autonomous vehicles
are just safer than a drunk driver blowing 0.2 BAC, but not as safe as a drunk
driver blowing 0.08? If presented with those metrics, would you be so
dismissive of their risks? Without human drivers intervening, I expect self
driving cars outside of boring highway miles to be currently equivalent to
around a 0.3 BAC.

Yes, I understand the point that self driving are an incredible potential life
saving tool, and when perfected, thousands of lives will be saved. But if
they’re released too early (know of any company with a financial incentive to
release a product too early?) they are going to have many victims - possibly
someone I know. And yes, the safety of autonomous cars driving on bumper to
bumper LA traffic is going to be used to justify their safety on single lane
highways during a Michigan snowstorm. Remember that when self driving
companies are citing their “better than human drivers” claim, the humans
they’re comparing against is “all humans”. Who causes the human accidents? The
drunk, distracted, inexperienced or very old. Eliminating those drivers from
the statistics, incorporate non-boring highway miles from the statistics, and
you’ll quickly find that human drivers are likely tens of thousands of times
safer than autonomous cars. Isn’t that a story the public should understand?

But, if you add on automatic red light/stop sign detection and auto braking to
augment a human driver, even the drunk, distracted, inexperienced and very old
will become 1000x better than today, and that’s going to save lives.

Don’t become blinded by the starry future. It’s coming, but before we get
there, it’s more likely to be an the fire of an autonomous car that mistook a
fire engine as a drivable highway.

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skywhopper
The biggest problem with this article is that it takes as a given that
commercial autonomous taxi services are inevitable. The data being collected
here includes only trips in a pristinely mapped area. There’s no data about
how often service is suspended because of weather, or how much labor beyond
the safety driver is required to keep the vehicles in operational order, or
how sensitive the sensors are to common visibility issues that happen in the
real world, or which rides are turned down because of construction or other
temporal factors, or what the failure states would be without a human safety
driver...

But even if Waymo beats all the odds and common sense and makes an autonomous
vehicle that can function as a taxi in a way people actually want to use
outside of highly regularized low-density suburban environment, I continue to
be surprised that anyone thinks these services would be able to operate in a
profitable way, or that they will change anything about how cities work except
for doubling automobile traffic and irritating any human drivers, cyclists,
and pedestrians that are forced to interact with them.

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Moru
TLDR; Waymo is not allowed to take money from the passengers and the program
is only open for a select few working there. Most of the miles traveled comes
from testdriving between rides, not from actually passenger travel.

Free travel for employees in a limited area.

