"Waymo estimates that human drivers fail to report 32 percent of injury crashes;"
That seems insanely high to me. Maybe this is just a SF thing?
These articles seem to be pushing the safety aspect and saying they can do just as good as a human driver. This is progress and could be better than relying on a taxi or Uber human. But if you want to convince me to use it, it needs to be better than me, not the average. The average is human driver terrible. I would love to hear (and see!) more about how good these systems are at defensive driving. Ok, so you got rear-ended or another car ran the light - not your fault, but what steps did the car take to try to avoid it?
The article doesn't seem to address fully how much of the "Humans are to blame" part is Waymo cars driving in a manner that isn't normal.
The cases they highlight, such as a multi-collision hit and run, are obvious bad human situations. But, this article feels like it's being a bit generous in its interpretation.
After all, I've seen Waymo cars cause wild traffic jams, and that sort of unexpected behavior could absolutely cause collisions.
Being rear ended (16 out of 23 serious accidents according to the article) is a pretty clear case of the car not doing anything wrong at all. It's the one case where collision avoidance is going to be useless because the car is waiting for e.g. a red light and is supposed to be stopped and has to blindly trust cars behind us will do the same thing.
Your assumption is that it was stopped at a red light. What if if slams the brakes on in the middle of the road due to a mylar balloon, etc? Does it sense a vehicle approaching quickly and sound the horn to hopefully alert the driver to stop, and pull forward from the stop line into the crosswalk if it's clear to provide extra braking distance?
Hypothetically possible but the article suggests these were situations where Waymo was not at fault. And I actually know people that have been rear ended at traffic lights or junctions. Twice. In the same month. Both times after they came to a full stop in a spot where they were definitely required to stop.
There's nothing you can do when that happens. Some idiot coming in way too fast not paying attention for whatever reason. Stuff like this is quite common. I don't see how you could mitigate that easily.
I've mitigated it in the past. You sound your horn, which can cause them to look up from their phone, etc. You can also pull forward through the crosswalk if it's clear. If anything, Waymo sensors should be better able to identify vehicle speed delta to sound the horn when a vehicle is approaching it too quickly.
The first mistake here it equating robo taxi drivers to "average drivers." Is that even per mile? Shouldn't the coparison be other cab drivers? There is some statistical skulduggery afoot.
Waymo has an advantage here carefully planning tests in optimal conditions and locations to bias the results from the outset.
That's quite an impressive track record. I would still like to see how they perform in a city with bicycles and/or more variations in vehicles but it at least looks like they are making meaningful progress.
Neither of those are in the US, where Waymo has its headquarters. San Francisco may not be the booking paradise that Amsterdam is, but in terms of bicycle infrastructure, it's up there, for the US.
I think the "safer" argument is moot because as a society a clear choice has been made where we preference convenience of the individual over the safety of the community.
If safety was the key concern for travelling by car, highways would have a 30mph limit, cars would require yearly inspection (common in Europe), and city centres would be car-free.
Making the "look how safe we are" argument in order to garner support seems like a fools errand.
Many states have yearly inspections too. The research seems mixed and does not show strong support that inspections reduce mechanical failure related crashes.
My intuition tells me that there are quite a lot of dangerous cars on the roads in states where it's a free-for-all, so I'd be interested in the research you're referring to.
If it's just an annual emissions test (as I assume many are, but I'm not well informed), then there's unlikely to be any significant prevention of mechanical failure on the road.
You are right that some of the issue could be inspection quality, although I am talking about safety inspections and not emissions. The research that I saw before seemed to indicate that mechanical failures are rare these days and contribute to a very small number of crashes. Here is an overview with some links.
Be that as it may, I think the point still stands that safety is actually not the primary concern when it comes to how we decide what is acceptable on the roads.
As a society, we tacitly accept significant death and injury every year because making the changes to avoid said death and injury would render the roads unfit for actually transporting people at the speed and volume that society and the economy require.
There are other options, for example mass public transport that (as far as I'm aware) is much safer than road travel, but the US seems unable to to invest in it seriously for whatever reason.
"Be that as it may, I think the point still stands that safety is actually not the primary concern when it comes to how we decide what is acceptable on the roads."
It is the primary concern being the most important factor in determining regulations. It simply isn't the only factor. It's a balance between safety and utility with the goal of reasonable safety.
> Inside companies like Zoox, this kind of human assistance is taken for granted. Outside such companies, few realize that autonomous vehicles are not completely autonomous.
> For years, companies avoided mentioning the remote assistance provided to their self-driving cars. The illusion of complete autonomy helped to draw attention to their technology and encourage venture capitalists to invest the billions of dollars needed to build increasingly effective autonomous vehicles.
> “There is a ‘Wizard of Oz’ flavor to this,” said Gary Marcus, an entrepreneur and a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University who specializes in A.I. and autonomous machines.
> ...
> When regulators last year ordered Cruise to shut down its fleet of 400 robot taxis in San Francisco after a woman was dragged under one of its driverless vehicles, the cars were supported by about 1.5 workers per vehicle, including remote assistance staff, according to two people familiar with the company’s operations. Those workers intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles, the people said.
The submitted article is about safety of the Waymo cars. The article you're linking to is about non-safety [0] remote assistance of a non-Waymo remote taxi company. I'm quite baffled why you think there's any connection here.
[0] Remote operators don't control the car in real time, so they certainly would not have any kind of impact on the safety record either way.
> The submitted article is about safety of the Waymo cars. The article you're linking to is about non-safety [0] remote assistance of a non-Waymo remote taxi company. I'm quite baffled why you think there's any connection here.
The article I linked is about Waymo cars too:
> As companies like Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet...have begun to remove drivers from their cars, scrutiny of their operations has increased. After a series of high-profile accidents, they have started to acknowledge that the cars require human assistance.
Zoox let the NYT peek to see the man behind the curtain. That "Waymo and Cruise declined to comment for this story" doesn't mean there's no man behind their curtain, and probably just means they're still following the playbook of exaggerating the technology to drive interest in it.
I disagree, the article is not about Waymo cars. 99% of the article is about some Amazon-owned robotaxi company. Waymo is mentioned in two sentences. One saying they didn't comment on the story, and the other the one you quoted.
Waymo has used this kind of limited remote operation for years and talked about it publicly [0]. The article provides literally no evidence for its assertion that something changed (let alone making a falsifiable claim about what changed). So it's pretty clear that this paragraph claiming that something changed isn't actually about Waymo either. It's pretty sad that the journalist feels the need to just blatantly lie like that, but I guess it made the article look a little bit more relevant.
I can't help notice that you didn't explain why you think this is in any way related to the crash data from the submitted article. The remote operation is not used in realtime, and would neither help avoid crashes nor cause them. I guess it's my fault for phrasing that as a statement rather than a question. Any chance you could answer that?
> I disagree, the article is not about Waymo cars. 99% of the article is about some Amazon-owned robotaxi company.
I disagree. The article is about how robot taxis in general aren't as robotic as they seem, which includes Waymo. It focused on that Amazon-owned robotaxi company as an example, because they allowed the NYT to peek behind the scenes, which greatly helps in explaining what's going on.
> Waymo has used this kind of limited remote operation for years and talked about it publicly [0].
I don't get your objection that the NYT article applies to Waymo, since you acknowledge Waymo has similar human operators behind the scenes doing similar things.
Your initial claim was that the submitted article was "propaganda" in reaction to the NYT article.
I think that claim doesn't make any sense for a number of reasons:
a) The article wasn't about Waymo, and they would not have seen any need to respond to it.
b) You're implying that this article is somehow scandalous, and that something new is being revealed, and that's why they're doing this "propaganda". That's not the case. This is not new. Waymo has described their remote operator setup for years, and nothing new is being being revealed here about how the companies operate in general, and about Waymo in specific (see point a; the article has no information about Waymo except an unsourced lie and a "no comment statement").
c) The article has nothing to do with the submitted post. For this "propaganda" to be effective at refuting the article, the two would need to be in some way about the same thing. The submission is about accidents, in particular accidents leading to injuries. Remote operators have nothing to do with such accidents. Your NYT article does not suggest any such mechanism. You have not suggested any mechanism by which that happens. You have not even said what you think the problem is. Do you think the remote operators are covering up for accidents? Causing accidents? Avoiding accidents?
As far as I can tell the article is a total nothingburger, and your pushing of it in this context is just a non sequitur.
Again: Why do you think your NYT article has anything to do with the subject of this blog post? What's the part you think is scandalous and demands a response?
That seems insanely high to me. Maybe this is just a SF thing?
These articles seem to be pushing the safety aspect and saying they can do just as good as a human driver. This is progress and could be better than relying on a taxi or Uber human. But if you want to convince me to use it, it needs to be better than me, not the average. The average is human driver terrible. I would love to hear (and see!) more about how good these systems are at defensive driving. Ok, so you got rear-ended or another car ran the light - not your fault, but what steps did the car take to try to avoid it?