> In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup.
> In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV.
> In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind.
It’s worth noting that all 3 of these incidents involve a Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver’s fault even if the Waymo acted “unexpectedly”. This is very very good news for them.
>Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver’s fault even if the Waymo acted “unexpectedly”.
Yes, but...there is something else to be said here. One of the things we have evolved to do, without necessarily appreciating it, is to intuit the behavior of other humans through the theory-of-mind. If AVs consistent act "unexpectedly", this injects a lot more uncertainty into the system, especially when interacting with other humans.
"Acting unexpectedly" is one of the aspects that makes dealing with mentally ill people anxiety-producing. I don't think most of us would automatically want to share the roads with a bunch of mentally ill drivers, even if, statistically, they were better than neurotypical drivers. There's something to be said about these scenarios regarding trust being derived from understanding what someone else is likely thinking.
Edit: the other aspect that needs to be said is that tech in society is governed by policy. People don't generally just accept policy based on statistical arguments. If you think that you can expect people to accept policies that allow AVs without addressing the trust issue, it might be a painful ride.
Ordinary neurotypical drivers act "unexpectedly" on the road all the time. I know that I would brake if I saw a downed branch. And people do much much much more. Suddenly change lanes on the highway with no signaling? Check. Brake suddenly because you almost missed your turn without looking to see if anybody was following close behind? Check. Drive over non-lane portions of the road because you were late seeing your highway exit? Check. Swerve suddenly because you dropped your phone between the seats while texting? Check.
> I don't think most of us would automatically want to share the roads with a bunch of mentally ill drivers, even if, statistically, they were better than neurotypical drivers.
I'm not scared of mentally ill drivers. I'm scared of rich 16 year olds. I'm scared of drunk drivers. I'm scared of drivers sitting so low they can't see most of what is happening around them. I'm scared of drivers having seizures while driving (my mom was hit a while ago by a man who lost his license due to seizures, and still refused to stop driving). I'm scared of drivers who drive without a license because "fuck them, I drive when I want to". I'm scared of people mixing up gas and break pedals (just got hit by one), in cars which can go 0-60 in 2.6 seconds weighing 6000lbs.
> I don't think most of us would automatically want to share the roads with a bunch of mentally ill drivers, even if, statistically, they were better than neurotypical drivers.
Others may not necessarily agree, but at least anecdotally, a sizeable portion of drivers I see make all kinds of mistakes (law of averages dictates more of them are so called "neurotypical" than not no?).
"Acting Unexpectedly" can often mean following the actual laws and general guidelines for safe and/or defensive driving. I would hazard a guess that sometimes doing the intuitive thing is, in reality, unsafe and/or against the law. If the car does this in 99% of circumstances, and still gets rear-ended, who is really the problem here?
Try replacing "acting unexpectedly" in your thought process (which superficially I agree with) with the words "acting safely."
It remains to be seen if autonomous driving systems are actually safe. But if the other driver does something that is safe, there's then an onus on the first driver to have accounted for that.
These two phrases are strange to me in the context of OP:
intuit the behavior of other humans through the theory-of-mind
and:
If AVs consistently act "unexpectedly"
Are you implying that the three specific incidents quoted by the OP are acting unexpectedly? I hope not. Most good, aware drivers would do the same. If you disagree, please provide alternative driving actions that you consider expected. And, would the safety outcomes be better? Unlikely.
I would imagine that, with more experience, anticipating the (more consistent) actions of a machine would be easier than anticipating the actions of an unknown human in an unknown state.
Which raises questions for me about how traffic behaves if 25-50% of cars are self-driving. What "feedback loops" might occur? I'd be interested to see large scale tests that demonstrate how self-driving cars deal with each other in high traffic areas.
Getting hit from behind in all of these scenarios means the people behind did not maintain proper distancing between vehicles. Especially the 3 car pile up. That's why you're supposed to leave one car length for every 10mph you're going, so you have enough space to cancel out your momentum. What if instead of a branch it was a dog or a child?
And I've been to MANY places in the US where people drive terribly and completely unexpectedly. I've seen people put on a left turn signal then go into the RIGHT lane. I've seen someone pass on a one lane overpass, where the car in front was towing a heavy load
What's good about these cars is they will ALL drive consistently, and the more people get used to them the easier it well be to drive with them because you will know how waymo cars react.
Quite frankly, the vehicle in front of you is allowed to stop at any time for any reason (legally and practically, as front vehicle has better visibility on road conditions than follower), and it is always incumbent upon the driver to the rear to leave room.
If humans can't do that, the solution is probably more automation.
> Yes, but...there is something else to be said here. One of the things we have evolved to do, without necessarily appreciating it, is to intuit the behavior of other humans through the theory-of-mind.
One of the first thing my driving instructor told me was: never trust anyone on the road except yourself. That’s why you see people waiting for a car with the indicator on to visually hint they really intended to turn.
All this focus on Waymo supposedly acting "unexpectedly" but I don't see that word in the original article, and the statistics here implies the opposite -- Waymo gets in fewer accidents overall!
Also, only the 2nd item is even consistent with Waymo behaving unexpectedly (we're not given enough info to know why it stopped). In the first item, the "unexpected" thing is the branch, not the behavior (stopping), and in the third Waymo's behavior didn't contribute to the accident at all -- instead it nearly avoided it despite the other car's bad driving.
It seems like these accidents could have been prevented by humans driving cars with collision avoidance. I'm a big fan of this feature on my relatively late-model Subaru, which tends to come part-and-parcel with adaptive cruise control, which is also quite a positive change in experience driving.
I recently rented an even later-model Malibu that only had collision warning auditory alert. Better than nothing, but I'm surprised cars are still made without automatic braking.
> Better than nothing, but I'm surprised cars are still made without automatic braking.
In the EU, at least, since May 2022, all new cars do have automatic emergency braking, along with intelligent speed assistance; alcohol interlock installation facilitation; driver drowsiness and attention warning; advanced driver distraction warning; emergency stop signal; reversing detection; and event data recorder (“black box”).
Other features like eCall – a built-in automated emergency call for assistance in a road accident – have been mandatory since March 2018.
The auto-braking collision avoidance system on my 2023 Mazda CX-5 actually is exactly what caused my first collision in 20 years. I was slowing down to avoid a car that was turning off, the auto-braking decided I wasn't slowing enough (or, I might have just let go of the brake) and it proceeded to slam on the brakes bringing me to a full stop on a busy road, leading to me being rear-ended. At no time was any of that necessary. I've also had the auto-braking engage (on multiple cars) because of random debris in the road, or seemingly no reason at all.
Granted, I'm sure this will improve over time. But for the past 5ish years, all my experiences with auto-braking have been dangerously negative.
This tech is wonderful! Fun fact about the inclusion of this technology in automobiles sold in the US:
The Obama administration (2015) was able to successfully negotiate with and convince most major car manufacturers to voluntarily agree to start making new cars with automatic emergency braking. Their agreement stipulated that all new cars must have it by 2022 [1]. But this negotiated agreement is why we started to see some new car models include it post 2015.
The tl;dr is the Obama administration basically said "look, if y'all don't agree to these proposed minimal standards, we'll get congress to pass a law that is more strict. So the companies decided to take the agreement now to de-risk themselves from having to comply with potentially more stringent requirements in the future).
Getting rear-ended is almost always the other driver's fault, but 7 years ago I was involved in a serious accident (minor injuries, both cars totaled) when the driver in the fast lane decided to pull over and pick up a hitchhiker. Crossed over two lanes, hard on the brakes, and I had no chance to even get off the gas.
The responsibility was 100% his because of "an unsafe lane change".
Yup, this is the primary case where the rear vehicle isn't at fault. You change lanes into a lane that's moving faster and get hit, you were wrong even if they hit you from behind.
That last one is impressive, most humans probably wouldn’t pull it off. And just imagine when all the cars on the road are self-driving, probably none of these accidents would’ve happened.
Hit from behind is a classic blunder. Almost always, it means the other driver was following too closely or not paying attention.
Since all of these accidents happened in the US, is the driver that hits from behind normally responsible for the accident? (For a moment, let's exclude predatory behavior where the front driver is doing something toxic, like intentionally pump-breaking on a high speed road to induce a hit-from-behind accident.)
I feel like that doesn't paint the whole picture. I'm guessing incidents like [1] don't make it into those stats:
> The safety driver unwittingly turned off the car’s self-driving software by touching the gas pedal. He failed to assume control of the steering wheel, and the Pacifica crashed into the highway median.
Why are these not counted? Are they really looking at their car crashes, or just autonomous driving software being in control during those car crashes?
Maybe they want to argue the software is safe, but that doesn't change the fact that I'd still be scared of getting into that car.
This seems like an argument that you should be more worried about getting in a Waymo if there is a safety driver than if there isn't. If so, that would definitely be an interesting conclusion.
The driver fell asleep and then pressed the gas pedal… and didn’t see or hear tons of warnings and alarms from the car. Very hard to blame that on the car.
There is no standardized way of collecting safety data. Each company is able to define their own standards on what is an AV-caused accident, the training conditions, etc.
I don't even get why these count as negatives against Waymo. There's nothing it can do to stop idiot humans driving too closely or just driving into it.
I agree and I wouldn't hold them against Waymo, but I think when you are developing a self driving car, you should stop analysing it like a crash between two humans with fault and blame, and start looking at it like a system.
If Waymos were having a seriously increased rate of non-fault crashes, that would still be a safety issue, even if every crash was ultimately a human's fault.
Bad drivers are reality. If waymo drives in a way that leads to more crashes, even if theyre not its fault, its clear to me that it still deserves some responsibility for not following expected road etiquette.
Stop hard and rear end is a huge risk, this is not surprising and can happen with reasonable following distances. It takes a long time to stop and humans are bad at perceiving it. Just look at how "stop" is painted on a road compared to how you perceive that when driving. Perceived stopping distance is way shorter than actual. This is all to say, for a full and hard stop, the needed stopping distance is huge.
Thus reminds me of highways when you can see a back up a quarter mile up. I tap the brakes about 5 times before letting off the gas to cut speed by 20% before actually even braking,which again is preceding by taps on the brake.
So. I don't think the majority of these cases were even tailgaters. I would love to see the data of what the following distances were, rate of deceleration, how much space there was for the lead car to avoid the obstacle. Ade these Waymo's cars just out there brake checking people? Are they waiting to the last moment before doing emergency brake mode?
At the end of the day, drastically changing speed is up there for dangerous behaviors, human drivers go to great lengths to avoid it and signal the intent. Turning right or left off of a 50 mph road- better believe I'm signaling that turn 2000 feet away and decelerating in stages and incrementally. With luck even that vehicle 4 cars back in the convoy is going to have lots of time.
These are a good examples of the self-reproach Waymo is exhibiting. Contrast to Cruise which appears to have attempted to suppress information about dragging a pedestrian under one of its cars.
I think it is important to track these. It may be true that these are entirely the other driver's fault but it is also possible that these accidents were encouraged by unexpected behaviour from the Waymo car. If you quickly exclude things that don't seem like your fault then you will likely exclude too much. So I'd rather include everything (but maybe flag it as likely not at fault) than risking exlcuding important data.
Before jumping to conclusions, are we sure these Waymos hit from behind didn't awkwardly and randomly stop in the middle of a busy intersection (where no sane human driver would)?
I know YouTube videos aren't always representative of reality, but there are some videos of these cars randomly driving extremely slowly in very busy intersections which might be a contributing factor to getting rear-ended, even if it's not Waymo's "fault" from an insurance perspective.
I've watched Waymo cars, multiple times, from a traffic-lighted intersection, as the lead vehicle, from the left lane, stop 100% when the light it green until other cars pass in frustration and then cross 4 lanes to make the next RIGHT turn.
Traffic disruption with Waymos is UNDOCUMENTED and a real thing.
> It’s worth noting that all 3 of these incidents involve a Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver’s fault even if the Waymo acted “unexpectedly”. This is very very good news for them.
How so? If human drivers did unexpected stuff like brake for no reason, we'd have a lot more accidents.
I think this just highlights how much better humans are at cooperating on the road compared to automated systems.
Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not on the Safety Research team.
The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that. (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple diagram in the blog post, too.
Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer, and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not believe will be solved anytime soon.
That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains—which have regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds—I think we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize land use that could be more productive otherwise. More idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density transportation options available.
We could legislate around this very irrational/human fear. Personally I’d feel much safer if the roads were primarily filled with drivers that don’t get emotional and are objectively safer. Even if a few accidents confuse me and seem avoidable. I think what your analysis is missing is that most human accidents are also 100% avoidable. Why aren’t we looking at the incredibly dumb things humans do and asking the same hard questions? Why doesn’t it spook us when a human doesn't see a red light and t-bones cross traffic? Or when a multi-car pileup happens because a large pickup truck with a big car complex is tailgating someone at 85 mph and a sudden stop is required?
The problem is it's not totally irrational to be freaked out by this. Think about the distribution of the error rate.
A lot of fatal accidents can be attributed to inexperience, distracted driving, running lights, drugs, alcohol, asleep at the wheel, medical events or extremely aggressive driving.
The distribution of unsafe driving is not even. Personally I had 2 accidents in my teens and 0 for the following 20 years.
Your typical taxi driver will be fired/fined/reported over time if they drive this way. Further, if you are in a taxi where you notice a driver making you uncomfortable, you can end the ride early (I have).
However, imagine a robodriver that is 4x safer, however every single vehicle on the road has the same probability in any instant of invoking the same "no human would make this mistake" driving error fatally.
An analogy would be that at any moment, your calm, courteous, focussed spouse behind the wheel suddenly transforms into a 17 year old teen in a Mustang.
Here's a sensible way to make that transition – driving is treated as a privilege. If you are a dipshit on the road more than a certain number of times (driving drunk, running red lights, driving recklessly) then that privilege gets taken away, and you have to use an autonomous car. Over time the safety of everyone on the road goes up regardless of what they are driving.
It does spook some people, but sufficiently large portions of the population also like to engage in the very things that cause those collisions, such as using their phone or being distracted, driving inebriated, driving fast, tailgating, etc, such that most people feel okay with others being risky, since they are being risky too.
Of course, when a collision does happen and damages have to be paid, the injured party will of course start advocating for full liability even if they previously had no issues engaging in the risky driving themselves. Which is why this is not reflected at the polls when voting for a politician who would promise cracking down hard on moving violations, with things like cameras and increased police stops.
> the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make
you'd be surprised what kind of mistakes humans make.
Anyway, snarky comment aside. The biggest reason for optimism is that a world full of AI cars will remove the reptile-brained jostling for position that's 90% the cause of all crashes today, and that it will overall _slow down_ traffic. Slower, calm, tepid moving traffic, a bunch of electric golfcarts puttering around the city. That's a future of AI-only traffic worth signing up for.
It's amazing how many people seem to not see further up the road than the cars directly in front of them. Even when driving tall SUVs or trucks.
My favorite scenario is when someone super impatient pulls around (often suddenly without signaling) a car not noticing:
* The car in front of them is actually going the same speed as the car in front of them
* The lane they were all in is actually going faster than the lane they just pulled into
* Everyone is about to pass a slow person up ahead in the newly selected lane
Person predictably hits the gas to race ahead only to get stuck behind the slow car while the cars they thought they were passing proceed ahead in the lane they just left.
Sometimes frustration and increasingly eratic behavior ensues.
This is a genius reply. I 100% agree intellectually as well as from personal experience. I have a British co-worker. When he goes home for the holidays, he is always terrified of how fast people drive on two lane countryside roads with sharp turns and limited visibility. Another Swiss co-worker said the same about snowy local roads in the mountains. Locals drive very fast. As soon as AV is trained on those roads, it will drive much slower, and probably safer.
Why would traffic actually be slower? Have you driven much in busy cities? Usually in California for example, when traffic conditions allow such, the actual advice given in things like drivers ed is to keep with the flow of traffic including in situations like freeway driving where traffic might be going much faster than the posted speed limit. Certainly ai might drive slower in places flagged as actually necessitating it, but if anything I'd think the advantage of a fleet of ai drivers is that cars could go even faster than before because suddenly there's nobody stubbornly slowing a lane down unnecessarily out of either panic or simply obstinance that they're in the right because they're going the posted speed limit.
> If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains ... we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors.
Everything you said made sense, except focusing on mass transit for FSD, for two reasons:
The intent of focusing on bus/train automation comes from an illusion of control (we can control the lane/track, thereby) – hence we tend to rudimentarily attribute easy outcomes to it (low risk, high value).
If we ignore the control part and properly think about it – mass transit actually higher risk for lower value.
1. Lower value: For something that involves 100+ people on dense economic centers, it's already running at an economy of scale where a human driver just makes sense. I live in Germany where the metro trains & trams are already crazy automated. There is a human driver there just in case, more as a supervisor for the people riding (controlling hooliganism, jammed doors, helping challenged people, dealing with emergencies, etc). I see German trains as already running on FSD4. FSD5 full automation is a waste of time here. Using buses for last mile coverage for few passengers, aka treating buses as "big taxis" is probably worse environmentally than actual taxis.
2. Higher risk: By the same logic you said for cars – "far fewer unintuitive errors" – at a much higher capacity of mass transit – is far more catastrophic. Imagine a self-driving train had just 1 accident in 10 years, but it affected 1000 people. It's sheer terror. Who is liable for it? Government. The problem with going down this mass-transit-first route is, one error means legislating away the entire sector.
Cars are actually lower risk (individual choice, individual liability, accidents don't deter others from adopting) and higher value (last mile, moving away from the dense urban city plans that come with high rents and chokepoints which are crippling even to my beloved, beautiful German cities where even with all the urban sprawl, last mile is still a problem outside A zones).
German trains are not known for being automated. I'm sure you have some, but not as many as you think. No tram in the world runs crazy automation, they all currently have a human on board. Only grade separated trains run fully automated. There might be some automation on your trains, but it isn't fully automated.
Your second point is completely wrong: we have trains, and have been running them for more than 100 years. We have real statistics to show in the real world they are much safer than cars. Sure you can imagine anything you want, but when real science has real data why would anyone look at your imagined data.
The whole industry feels like the cart leading the horse to me.
Not having a track to follow on/in the road (magnets, sensors etc.) Not mandating all cars talk to each other, working together like a mesh/hive/colony.
I understand that has its own set of self starter issues, but it can be built in WHILE also doing what is currently happening. The fact that roads are being replaced TODAY and still nothing is going in them to help cars drive themselves, baffles me.
I am convinced that this will come later. If anything, "hive mind" AV cars will allow them to drive much faster on high speed roads. Imagine if one lane is protected (walled) and reserved for AV cars on an expressway. They could drive crazy fast as a team (150km/h+). Expand that over the years. In 50 years, all expressways might be AV-only and cars driving very, very fast.
I agree that the fixation on cars in urban/population dense areas is a problem and the overall use of cars in these areas should be offset by public transportation.
I feel like the one in five Americans that live in rural areas is left out of the conversation though. You can't eliminate cars for those 60 million or so people.
When you suggest 80% of people live in urban areas, that statistic has a threshold of 2,534.4 people/sq mi. That isn't very dense. You're leaving out a lot more than 20% from the conversation when you talk about eliminating cars.
And, really, that understates it. I'm technically urban per the Census--ex-urban per ESRI. But the idea that anyone near me could reasonably get by with just public transit is laughable. And I actually live quite close to a commuter rail station and there is a small regional bus system.
We’re also only talking about “good weather” regions. There’s no way an autonomous vehicle is capable of handling diverse weather, gravel roads, especially snow and ice, at the moment (my Tesla does not). The conversation is very myopically optimistic at the moment (which is fine, it should be, just pointing it out).
This feels like a straw man to me. If someone who works in construction, works a ranch, tows a livestock trailer, manages a farm, etc. wants an F-150 or F-250 or whatever, I don't think the vast majority of us will even question that decision. Rural residents and (sub)urban residents on average have very different needs and goals, and I have no problem with that. I for one am not fixated on the 20% because by and large, they aren't the problem. They don't greatly contribute to overall traffic congestion, traffic accidents, or even emissions. They also shouldn't block policy directed toward the 80%.
I'm talking about segments of the other 80% that wants a dually truck because it makes them look "alpha". Folks buying huge SUVs to feel "safe" while being more prone to rollovers, less able to avoid collisions, and far more likely to kill others—especially pedestrians—in a crash in addition to monopolizing greater and greater proportions of limited land resources.
You live three miles from your nearest neighbor? Feel free to indulge in a raised pickup with 3 tons of bed capacity and 5 tons of towing with my blessing.
You live in one of the major metropolitan areas in the US? Don't buy a Hummer, Lexus SUV, or F-150, especially if safety is your goal. In fact, those large vehicles should require a new class of drivers license due to their size and performance characteristics just like school busses require a class B and motorcycles a class M due to their different structure and place within our highways. Buy a transit pass. Per capita, folks simply don't die in car accidents when they ride the bus or take a light rail. Don't have good/fast public transit infrastructure where you live? Time to vote for folks who will make it a priority.
Because widening stroads has been tried. It doesn't work. They have never worked. They don't make traffic better, they don't make us safer on the road, they don't get us to our destinations safer, and they certainly don't make the most efficient use of land. It's time to move on. Dump all the stupid, oversized, single-level, paved parking lots and replace them with mixed-use housing, retail, and office space with a public transit hub.
Make just enough parking so that the 20% folks who actually need their daily-use vehicles can visit easily. Preferably they can park in the park-n-rides at the outskirts and hop on a train to the city center so the parking fees are as cheap as possible. Let the 20% decide whether they want self-driving vehicles or not. The 80% should leave them alone and embrace the self-driving busses and trains for themselves.
> the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public.
I'd argue safety is not a concern. There are a lot of "safe" things we could do, but don't. A significant percentage of the country doesn't even vaccinate its children. Self-driving cars aren't suddenly going to make us aware of our own mortality in ways that life itself hasn't already.
The real fear is lack of accountability. If a drunk plows into a crowd of pedestrians, he will be dragged out of it and (metaphorically) lynched. Justice makes us feel better about circumstances beyond our control. If North Korea test-launched an ICBM that erroneously hit Japan, we'd declare war over their typo. But when a self-driving car erroneously mows down pedestrians, we're told to just accept it, nothing we could do, mumble-mumble-training-data, and tragedies like this happen so we can be safer.
Nothing is going to condition us to resent the idea of Safety more than having our personal agency and sense of justice taken away from us in its name.
What do you think about a separate set of laws that determines pay outs from AV companies to people injured in AV accidents? It seems reasonable to me. For over 50 years, (life) insurance companies have offered specific pay outs for injuries. In some sense, a framework already exists. Also, if you want to make the system "bullet proof", require AV companies to put a certain amount of money on deposit with the state (or buy insurance from a separate company). (In a sense, this already exists for insurance companies through strict balance sheet regulations.) Then, you cannot have terrible AV company with many accidents that goes bankrupt from fines and cannot pay.
To be clear: I do think, in my lifetime, AV will become normal in many places. Some horrific accidents will happen that result in massive fines to the companies. As a result, some of them will go bankrupt.
Personal agency and justice are not provided by cars. To that point, how much agency do you feel you have in standstill bumper to bumper traffic. How much justice do you feel sitting in traffic, focused on the bumper stickers in front of you versus other actually productive activities while the bus or train are in motion.
Cars != Liberty
They never were. They have always been rapidly depreciating assets that are useful for one-off destinations and horrible externalities with regard to city planning.
I’ve been saying this since the 90s. Fewer cars, more mass transit in urban regions. But people are stupid: they would rather sit in traffic for 2-3 hours a day than give up a “freedom” that actively restricts them. The paradox is the size of a galaxy.
There’s no evidence to suggest that a system of self-driving vehicles are safer. The solution won’t come from the US because there are way too many red tapes. It’s coming from a smaller country perhaps Japan/Korea.
No lol we won't have fully self driving cars in our lifetime. We would need cars to fully understand human speech and understanding and be able to react with 100% accuracy 100x faster than humans.
These already exist in Hongkong, Singapore, and Paris, but they are crazy expensive. And, AV bus sounds harder than AV car due to boarding and fare payment issues. I disagree with your ideas for early AV applications.
I think you're assuming a city bus needs a fare. It doesn't. Santa Cruz County, CA has just passed a resolution where all busses in the county will be free to ride. It already is for folks working downtown, anyone under 18, anyone at the university, and for a small per-semester fee at the local community college.
This not only makes it more convenient to get around without worrying about buying transit tickets ahead of time, it means the busses can load from the front AND the back, making the time spent at each stop shorter and schedules easier to keep.
Much easier problem for autonomous setups when you remove fares and just have to monitor if anyone's in danger.
Public mass transit never breaks even from fares. What it does very well however is free up the money folks would have spent on gas, parking, car maintenance, etc., so they can move around and spend it more freely in the community.
You see this spectrum in various cities. Some cities make you pay depending on how far the light rail travels, so you naturally condition riders not to ride any more or further than they absolutely need to go. Places like New York City on the other hand just sell you a pass; taking an extra trip to the Met or to Central Park doesn't cost extra, so folks do it, socializing and stimulating the economy along the way.
New York's biggest transit mistake in my opinion is keeping the fares. They'll spend HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars on NYPD overtime to catch turnstile jumpers when they could spend less just letting people ride for free.
https://gothamist.com/news/nypd-overtime-pay-in-the-subway-w...
- What happens when all of the infrastructure gets built up around self driving cars and peoples first hand knowledge of how to drive diminishes. Once a near monopoly/duopoly is attained by a select few SDC vendors, it will become a utility. Then what fallback does society have if the likely enshittification happens. Do we just have to live with it?
- Its all fine when the companies able to do this are part of the most elite, technology first companies - but what happens when companies known to take short cuts (like the ones who can barely get bluetooth working for their audio infotainment system) start try to enter the market by focusing on lobbying the SDC oversight board.
Regarding your first point… 15 year olds learn the basics of driving in a day. Generally speaking, it’s not that difficult. A scenario where humans forget entirely how to drive and are unable to learn again is incredibly far fetched.
If you're building a new city just do public transit instead of all this inefficient nonsense. Either way it's not a naturally growing city so if you're going to plan one plan one that makes sense
I know Waymo are the investing a lot into the PR that makes them seem successful, but they are the only company I actually see on track to delivering autonomous cars (on existing infrastructure).
I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing once you consider all the second and third order effects (even more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult problem.
As others have noted, autonomous vehicles may actually lead to less car use. Currently, many people must own cars for certain use cases. Because of this, for any given trip the decision to take car vs. other means is based on the marginal cost of car usage. In contrast, if people no longer need to own cars because of autonomous taxis, the decision of car vs. other reflects the ammortized cost of car use, which will be far higher than the marginal cost. Put another way, there are plenty of trips being taken by car now simply because people have a car for other reasons, but if they didn't own a car they'd far sooner take another option vs. renting/Uber/Waymo.
People will very likely also be willing to spend much more time in cars if they don't have to actively drive. E.g. you have a 2 hour commute but you can play on your steam deck the whole time, or you can travel by sleeping in your car while it drives 8 hours.
To the extent that self driving taxi services are cheaper than human driven taxi services, they will also increase use of taxi services.
There's no reason to assume that on the balance people will end up driving less as a result of a technology that makes driving significantly more convenient simply because it might make taxi services somewhat cheaper and therefore potentially might make it easier to not own a car and encourage people to use other modes of transportation for some trips.
I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any different than the existence of taxis.
The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car usage growth.
EDIT:
Some specificity:
How would robotaxis replace commuting for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The taxi has to move at least from the storage to the rider pickup to the rider dropoff. Without sharing, that's actually more miles and the same number of cars.
Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's more miles, fewer cars in existence (since both riders dont need a car), but the same number of car trips (plus the to/from storage).
With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven is just going up unless people change their lifestyle. That doesn't do anything to curb care useage.
The problem is that (in the US) an overwhelming majority of car journeys (and traffic) occur during rush hour. And it's difficult to see how autonomous vehicles could reduce the amount of cars used during rush hour. Rush hour traffic involves a lot of vehicles moving to similar destinations, during the same time window. While some cars could certainly be used for multiple journeys during the same rush hour, most cars would likely sit in parking garages all day, just like today.
This. Uber is very expensive because a human has to get paid. If people could get a car "subscription" for X number of dollars a month and forgo cost of gas, maintenance, insurance, and all the other headaches meanwhile,a company could leverage economies of scale to do all of this I think people would move away from a private car.
This would also reduce the cost on doordash type services so if instead of paying an extra $10 for your food/groceries/everyhing to be delivered you paid orders of magnitude less.
This might reduce the traffic on the road.
The pessimist in me makes me think once they got sufficient market share price would go back up and wed be worse off than before lol.
It's far cheaper to live in an autonomous motorhome that drives around all day and happens to arrive at work just as you need to be there each morning than to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Driving about is probably cheaper than paying for parking too, especially if you deliberately head for the busiest traffic.
Especially when you can automate switching rented batteries instead of waiting to charge them. Drive 4 hours out in a random direction, then 4 hours back for work, with nary a minute of downtime
This is already happening if you pay attention to all the vans and even cars with blacked out windows parking in your neighborhood, maybe even in front of your house. Stealth campers are very real, even if they don’t stick out as much as meth RVs.
You could already commute with cheap taxis (eg in the developing world). The more important thing is that people want to live in San Francisco, they wouldn’t be happy commuting from some far off place in the first place. And as stealth campers have already figured out, not a lot of places available to camp in your car even 40-60 miles out, so might as well be where you want.
But the idea that your car could just involve itself in traffic jams all day rather than pay for parking is interesting, it could also look for time limited but free parking and move on to somewhere else when that expired, which is more common outside the city. Heck, it could park at a shopping mall that doesn’t allow walk offs…because no one is walking off.
The US has so much sunk cost in car centric urban design that all discussion of self driving cars taking investment away from public transit is all wasted words. It’s not just the roads and the number of people absolutely committed to driving on them. It’s urban design that is so sparse that we’ll be locked into personal transit for hundreds of years. Compared to Europe where Romans laid down street plans thousands of years ago, people will still be walking around in another thousand years.
Must as well have the cars in the US drive themselves so we can all get a nap at least.
I would note a lot of research shows coordinated autonomous vehicles using basic control theory can dramatically improve traffic flow with even a small percentage of vehicles coordinating (I think it was around 10%). They found they all but eliminate most human behavior caused traffic jams (I.e., most traffic except caused by emergencies or accidents). In fact if most vehicles are AV then it becomes more of a dynamic convoy model where all vehicles cooperate to maximize flow. This would require a much smaller road infrastructure to achieve the same flow as today. Rather than contributing to the problem autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the impact of transit, while maintaining individual carriage.
> even more cars on the streets, .. , and traffic will get a lot worse
I strongly believe it will go the other way, i.e. the 'robo-taxi' vision. Once cars can pick us up, take us where we want and then disappear, very few people will want to own their own car. I honestly think the vast majority of people already don't want to own one, but we don't have a better option. Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.
Cars will just show up, take us places then go away to get someone else. We won't need nearly as many of them, and we won't need to dedicate so much of our cities to them, and especially not to parking them. We will be able to reclaim our cities.
NOTE: Old School automakers who can't/won't/don't adapt are going to push back on this HARD. But I still think it will happen.
For the record, I'm a car guy. I love cars. I will likely always have one for the weekends. If I was going into a city or commuting, I would take the robi-taxi every time.
>Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.
Because it will probably still be cheaper if they use it regularly (as is owning in most cases). Because they want a specifically equipped vehicle for young kids/outdoor activities/etc. Because when they want a car, they want one right now.
I'm also skeptical that, if you own a vehicle, it would make any sense to then also rent robo-taxis locally. Certainly I can reserve a private car for an evening event today but it would be 10x or more the cost of parking/gas.
Likewise. I would really love it if robotaxis worked out and - crucially - were cheap, because I think it could feasibly increase transit usage, not decrease it. It solves the last mile problem in an elegant way. Nobody said you needed to take the taxi all the way to your destination. You could hop on a regional train or light rail, have a robotaxi near-perfectly timed (if we assume the train runs on time...) to pick you up at your destination stop, and ride it to your final destination. Same in reverse. No waiting for a bus to transfer to, no riding the bus slowly stop by stop, no walking from the bus stop to your final destination, etc.
I'm as much of a transit advocate as the next guy, but I think a lot of people blind themselves to how annoying the last mile problem is for a lot of destinations anywhere outside of urban cores. There aren't going to be train stations built at every possible origin point and destination point, and even if there's a robust bus network, transfers, slow speed/frequent stopping, and the walk to/from your destination/origin are pretty damn annoying. They're not the end of the world by any means, to be clear, (I use buses too!) but it's just, if I have a car, why wouldn't I just drive?
Taxis have the potential to solve that in a great way. But I (...and probably most people?) don't currently use them for that purpose since they're way too expensive. As they should be, it's a whole human being tending to your transport personally for twenty minutes or more. If robotaxis can lower the price, it'd be great, but I don't know how confident I am on that happening. The equipment is presumably expensive, the car itself is expensive (though EVs do have much lower maintenance costs), the R&D is expensive. We'll see. Exciting times!
We won't need as many of them but the ones we use will be almost constantly on the road, 20 cars on the road all the time is more traffic than 100 cars on the road 10% of the time and in people's garages the rest of the time
People will continue to all commute at similar times, resulting in the same traffic as before. That it is automated makes no difference.
And supposing a car can go off after and do some taxi work instead of being parked, well it still has to commute from here to there which is adding even more cars constantly onto the roads driving to where they’re needed whereas before they’d be parked.
The likely outcome is permanent rush hour as cars are constantly going back and forth on the highway.
The most relevant stat though is the number of miles of car usage. If there are ~20% the number of cars, but each car is used 10x as much, we're worse off. If nobody owns a car but always calls a cab, the cab might do twice as many miles deadheading to the pickup. And instead of lasting 15 years, a typical car might only last 2 years because it's getting 10x the milage per day. So fewer cars might result in more gridlock, noise and tire particulate pollution. Fewer cars might mean just as many cars built per year.
I agree that the autonomous cars are likely to cause a shift away from car ownership, reducing the total number of cars (which reduces the impact of making all these cars). It might also drastically cut down the required size of parking lots, which especially in America might be a big improvement.
But if you own the car, it's just waiting wherever you left it. If you have an autonomous cab, it has to make an extra trip from wherever it dropped off the last driver to wherever it's picking you up. That alone increases the number of cars on the road. And that's before you consider the cab potentially driving a holding pattern when nobody is actively using or calling it.
But most of all roads are governed by induced demand. People would take a lot more and longer trips if there was the option to just teleport to the destination. The main downwards pressure on the number of trips is the time investment. That's why adding more lanes to roads often doesn't reduce traffic (outside of a short adjustment period): faster trips means more people willing to take it, which fills up that lane. But a trip people weren't willing to do for 40 minutes behind the wheel they might take if it's instead 60 minutes watching Netflix in a driverless car. Which makes the roads fuller and thus slower for everyone.
Where I live, I can get a cheap taxi, any time, to anywhere I might want to go, through an app. The only difference between that and Waymo seems to be that it is controlled by a meat sack rather than a computer. I don't see autonomous cars as all that different to what I have now.
But just because fewer people own one personally, will that necessarily mean fewer cars on the road? Might still be an increase in cars, but with a different ownership model. It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
You're being overly pessimistic. I can see the opposite occuring on each of your points.
- less traffic due to more efficient driving: once automated driving is pervasive it's natural that cars and traffic as a whole will coordinate and optimise use of the road. You should be able to predict traffic accurately and choose the optimal time to travel. Car speeds will coordinate to maximise flow through roads. Improved public transport will increase the number of passengers per vehicle and reduce personal vehicles.
- more investment into better modes of transport due to lowered costs: the cost structure of buses (and trains) lends itself to larger vehicles with less stops. Without having to pay someone to drive you can remake public transport into something that takes less people at a time to more places, without requiring expensive infrastructure. Think small automated busses that serve a web of points instead of routes, so people can request to get from A to B and the system delivers from as close to A and to as close to B as possible as soon as possible at the lowest cost.
- less car ownership: most people don't want to own cars, so it's very likely that car ownership will drop significantly. With new privately and publicly owned forms of public transport, the need to own a car will disappear in many cases.
I feel that almost all technology is positive (not sure about social media), since it generally gives people more choices and abilities. Automated cars have very few downsides.
> and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix
This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually improve once autonomous driving is the standard.
I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over, that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people still maintain the ability to move independently of each other but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.
I can't find the report, but IIRC there was a study that calculated that autonomous driving could triple the carrying capacity of highways because they could safely reduce following distance. They also estimated fuel/energy savings due to them being able to collectively draft of each other.
You don't even need rails for traffic to improve. Just think at what happens when a traffic light goes green: human drivers slowly, one-by-one, cross the intersection. Whereas a platoon of self-driving cars can, in principle, just accelerate (or brake) simultaneously. On highways this also improves drag/energy efficiency and has already been tested in Europe as part of EU Truck Platooning Challenge.
I'm not sure why you think rails are safer than rubber tires. Metal-on-metal contact has way less friction, which makes for much worse stopping distance and worse safety especially at crossings. Having grade-separated dedicated infrastructure _does_ improve safety, especially if there's no human drivers involved, but we can do that just fine with pavement in tunnels or elevated roadways.
The thing is the average car lifetime in the US is about 12 years so, so even if you assume autonomous driving "everywhere" is available in 10-20 years, that means you probably don't have a vast majority autonomous fleet for maybe 50 years. It certainly would be politically infeasible for the government to tell people they have to buy new cars.
Another big negative I think is underconsidered is that a Google owned self driving car fleet will be absolutely plastered with video ads and physical user tracking if they dominate the market enough to get away with it.
Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.
They already have those video ads in a lot of taxis. And of course public transit has been plastered with paper ads for decades now. So what you're describing isn't much of a change from the status quo. Unless you believe the advent of self-driving cars will lead to people being okay with ads in the vehicles they own or lease themselves, which I think is highly unlikely.
As an aside, usually those gas station ads are mutable. There are unlabeled buttons on the sides of the monitor - press them. One of them mutes it. I have yet to find a gas station at which this won’t work.
You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
> less investment into better modes of transport
I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic
You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?
> I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
Now this is a bad take. Public transit is _always_ better than individual vehicles when we are talking about a metropolitan area. The amount of resources, land, and pedestrian freedom that is eaten up for roads is insane. Imagine how many people can fit in a subway, and then expand that to each of them individually being in a car on the road.
Public transit is expensive, but so are new highways, highway maintenance, road accidents, speed enforcement... Etc. The worst thing is that many times people who don't own cars pay for those services they won't use. All the while public transit is getting it's funding cut.
I think the original comment is a little off in that more autonomous drivers does not directly lead to less public transit. But it is a concern that these profit/investor driven companies will be competing with public transportation and this has a lot of implications.
I think it's absolutely fair to call public transport "better" for society.
Every single time scientists and city planners are called to answer "how we make the city more livable and reduce traffic" the answer is always better public transport (more trains especially).
The only part I could resonate with you is that we don't know whether SDC could lead to less cars. That's true if people will use more self driving taxis over personal cars.
I don't know why you think Cruise isn't on track. Their numbers are also good, although probably not as good as Waymo, but they are also much younger than Waymo. Cruise is being punished by the state of California right now because they tried to cover up their vehicle's worsening of a particular human-caused accident, not because of some problem with their overall numbers.
EDIT: If you disagree, please link to the quantitative data that suggests Cruise isn't on track.
Another aspect to Cruise (and potentially waymo, but it hasn't been publicly stated) is that they claim thousands of miles per disengagement...when on average their cars needed remote assistance every 4-5 miles[0]. Waymo does the same thing, but the numbers just aren't publicly known.
IMO stuff like this is going to lead the public to trust it less, since they're gaming numbers as hard as possible.
I can believe it. I rode in a Waymo for the first time a couple days ago and it was incredible. No problems with the rain or bad San Francisco drivers. It was a really smooth ride and I felt extremely safe.
That's just some good old Musk/Tesla propaganda. Waymo has developed a really high resolution lidar + some software magic means rain is no longer an issue for them.
Like others said. Waymo One in San Francisco is great. Smooth / confident drive. Good situation awareness (several times when it made unexpected action, only later I realized there is a person or a car it tried to avoid).
Looking forward to expand its coverage to SFO, that will be a game-changer.
Still not sure of it economics though. Its current price is on-par with Uber Comfort / a little bit over Uber X. How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion?
I don't think the price they charge for Waymo is related almost at all to their operating cost. Operating cost is undoubtedly much higher. I suspect Waymo has set fleet size based on how many cars they want operating for gathering the best amount of data and testing improvements, and then prices are set by demand (i.e., price that keeps the cars busy while minimizing wait time).
There you go - I would have said their operating cost is much lower. Paying the wages of the drivers for a year costs more than the car - even a car plus all those fancy LIDAR's.
Their development costs are a different story. I suspect only a company like Google could sustain it. But presumably it's one off, and if they spread it over 1 million taxi's in the USA it would only be a fraction of the revenue.
Those development costs have an upside too. It's a moat. If they pull if off they will have a monopoly. The will get away with being able to change just under the cost of a real driver for years. We may well be bitching here in a decades time at the obscene profits alphabet is making off us, and yet we have no obvious way out.
The price on these rides is simply a way to control demand and better approximate real world use cases, not to subsidize operating costs. If Google can make this technology commercially viable there are unlimited avenues for monetization.
I’m extremely skeptical of the economics of scaling Waymo up to a viable, profitable service. At least, not at a large scale. But the R&D that’s gone into it will require a large scale rollout to pay off.
Arizona maybe, but I wouldn't say San Francisco is straight lines. I've seen a few of these videos pop up on YouTube. This one I watched recently is full of construction, double-parked trucks, pedestrians, complicated traffic, etc.
It makes a mistake in that one, around 5 minutes in, due to not understanding a construction worker's gesture, but I presume it phones home for advice and someone gets it moving again. Everything else seemed to be handled rather impressively.
Disclaimer: Google employee. My job has nothing to do with cars. But I do love technology and hate driving, so I'd love to see this problem solved. I'm actually quite skeptical that I'll ever have a truly self-driving car, as I also live in a place with weather.
It may not get snowstorms but I would say significant areas of San Francisco are absolutely not particularly easy to drive in.
Understanding someone directing traffic is probably one of the harder problems.
To another point, to the degree that it's predictable ahead of time, I'd be perfectly happy with a car that only could self-drive in some conditions. Only highway for some subset of weather conditions? That would still be super-useful for some of us.
I don't understand the point of comments like this, and I see them all the time when it comes to autonomous vehicles.
First, as all the other respondents have pointed out, your characterization of San Francisco as "straight lines and 365 days of sun" is way, way off. But more importantly, as a consumer, I'd be thrilled to own an autonomous vehicle even if it didn't work in bad weather. There's easily enough data to have a car say "there is a storm coming in your area, can't drive autonomously" long before it would become a safety issue.
And, of course, wouldn't one expect an autonomous vehicle to start in places with better conditions vs yolo'ing it in a blizzard whiteout?
It is not just bad weather. Here in the midwest it's common for the road lines to be worn and barely visible. There are many more potholes and other problems with the pavement.
My 2023 car with cameras and radar usually cannot activate lane centering - even in good weather - because it cannot tell where the lanes are.
Having driven in both San Francisco and throughout the midwest, I agree with the parent commenter that San Francisco is a much easier environment for self-driving cars.
> I don't understand the point of comments like this,
I mean the point is pretty straight forward. A study like this is tautological. "self driving cars are safe on exactly the fraction of hand selected roads where self driving companies are willing to put them" doesn't tell us anything. It's a fluff piece.
If you want to make an actual assessment about the safety you need data from randomized, representative roads, not 0.x% of the streets in America. Which itself is a very generous country to pick. Put these things into peak traffic in Rome for an hour
SF is a fairly tricky place to drive. I mean it’s no Boston but it’s no mean feat.
Nevertheless I do believe it might be easier to deploy self driving cars in more “feral” places where anything goes as traffic rules go. In those places, what I’ve observed, is that you can at any point actually come to a complete standstill and everyone will just navigate around you (within cities that is). This actually can work in the favor of these cars to be honest.
Boston is the IDEAL place to test out autonomous driving. The narrow roads, lined as they are with trees, rocks, and parked cars, mean that when an autonomous car makes the wrong decision, the damage will be primarily to property, Waymo's and the other guy, and Waymo can just cut a check, learn some lessons, and move on.
(BTW, Boston's reputation as a place for aggressive driving is undeserved. Insurance companies pay a lot for fender repair for the reason above, making the city look bad, but for injuries against a person, insurers just pay the limit, which an injured pedestrian can run up in the first 24 hours in a hospital. Anything beyond that doesn't show up in car insurance statistics. Houston and Austin have far more aggressive drivers, for instance.)
Have you actually driven in SF? There’s plenty of rain in the winter and the roads can get quite interesting. Right turns that are actually 170 degrees and a 15% incline. Red lights that are way off to the side and obscured (one on market right after you turn right exiting 101). It’s honestly a pretty good stress test as far as American cities go.
I lived in SF and besides the occasional annoyance of parking my motorcycle in heavily inclined streets I don't remember anything remotely problematic. I remember plenty of waymo cars glitching though but that was a long time ago.
As a stress test, SF is good but not great. Autonomous vehicles seem to have huge problems dealing with snow due to the obscured lane lines. It never really snows in SF (maybe a few flakes in rare conditions but not enough to stick).
Have you seen the streets of SF? Sometimes you can’t even see what’s ahead because you’re going from a 15% up to a 15% down and all you see is the horizon
It’s funny that you’ve got several teams of thousands of engineers working on this and you label the one as “snake-oil” that has deployed their beta to hundreds of thousands of cars. Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
Obviously you roll out a safety critical system like this in the simplest scenarios first as you build confidence.
Also, frankly, humans drive in situations where they just shouldn't. There are times where the conditions are so bad that the only correct decision is to just say it is not possible to safely drive today. Personally, I don't drive in dense fog because your options are basically drive too fast and risk hitting something you can't see, or drive at a sensible slow speed and risk being hit from behind - which isn't your fault but might still kill you. Even the most advanced aeroplanes with all the latest and greatest sensors still have defined limits where they won't fly.
Also, that Arc de Triomphe example should just be replaced with a safe priority system. Priorité à droite is a silly rule, and it's especially silly on a roundabout. In my opinion, crashes there are the fault of the road, not the driver.
It was raining yesterday and the Waymos were out but it doesn't matter that much. You won't get self-driving cars in your streets in Europe and that's okay.
It's just like how iPhones are wildly popular in the US. I'm sure there's someone who's like "Yeah, try to sell a $1k device to a Romanian and see how it goes" and Apple only gets 25% market share there but they're one of the most successful companies in the world, without Romania.
I read comments along this vein every time an article on Waymo (or self driving cars) comes out, and my question is who cares? Even if it is just the sunny easy locations that get this advance, that’s hundreds of deaths and injuries avoided every year. I understand being pragmatic and practical but we should celebrate this news IMO.
people love to say this like it's some sort of "gotcha" claim, and waymo is cheating at safety by only rolling out their service in places where they're certain they can operate safely.
how about no, let's not send waymo cars into vastly more challenging conditions. i want them to keep being cautious and responsible.
I’m waiting to see how it will handle Chinese roads. A few self driving startups in China actually, although I haven’t heard anything from them recently. It would be the gold standard for a self driving car to handle Beijing roads, drivers, and pedestrians.
They did try in the upper midwest, and they failed completely. When the sensors are covered by rain, ice, snow, salt, and other road grime, the cars are basically useless.
An autonomous system doesn't just put together classifications of what it sees in the environment.
It also gets quantitative measures of how confident it should be in what it just classified. And if your confidence measures decline, for any reason, it can just slow down. Small European towns should be doable.
Getting commercial robotaxis working in even just one city is an amazing achievement. It's important to note that Uber currently operates in more than 10,000 cities, though. Even if Waymo were to launch one new city each week, it would be more than 192 years before they catch up to Uber.
Waymo drives better in San Francisco than I do, and I live here. And it drives an order of magnitude better than I did during my first few months in the city. I have friends who live in the South Bay who are still reluctant to drive when they visit SF.
I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population. The majority of people are driving most of their miles during rush hour when chances of a crash are the highest, while Waymo cars operate all day/night. Plus I'm sure that first-time drivers, drunk drivers, people out on illegal joyrides and other such extremes drag the numbers down enough that saying "I'm in the top 40%" really isn't all that meaningful anymore.
What I'm interested in knowing is how these cars drive compared to the average competent driver in the exact same environment.
>I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population
This depends on what type of drivers waymo is displacing. If it's displacing mostly professional drivers, then that substitution would be reasonable, because the choices we have are either professional drivers or waymo. However, if it's displacing "normal" drivers, including "first-time drivers, drunk drivers", then the substitution wouldn't be reasonable because banning waymo would mean those rides would be replaced with "normal" drivers, not super-safe professional drivers.
Well at the moment Waymo operates a taxi service, and the only way to use it is as a substitute for Uber/Lyft, so that question answers itself.
Even otherwise though, if at some point in the future I have the option of trading my car in for a fully autonomous one, the only thing I'm really interested in knowing is how my personal accident risk in getting from point A to point B changes compared to if I was driving myself. These benchmarks are meaningless in that regard. I'm not driving drunk, I'm not driving in bad weather conditions, I'm not being needlessly arrogant or reckless on the road. Can this car drive better than me?
I don't know that taxi or uber drivers are particularly safer. I mean drunk and joyriders sure - but that must be a tiny fraction of drivers. As opposed to the ultra-common "scared" and "distracted". The last shared drivers (including taxis) I have used did not seem particularly expert. They certainly did not seem hyper-alert (which would make sense if driving all day) or experienced (in the case of uber drivers).
>I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population.
When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are looking to replace.
Readit News
> In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV.
> In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind.
It’s worth noting that all 3 of these incidents involve a Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver’s fault even if the Waymo acted “unexpectedly”. This is very very good news for them.
Yes, but...there is something else to be said here. One of the things we have evolved to do, without necessarily appreciating it, is to intuit the behavior of other humans through the theory-of-mind. If AVs consistent act "unexpectedly", this injects a lot more uncertainty into the system, especially when interacting with other humans.
"Acting unexpectedly" is one of the aspects that makes dealing with mentally ill people anxiety-producing. I don't think most of us would automatically want to share the roads with a bunch of mentally ill drivers, even if, statistically, they were better than neurotypical drivers. There's something to be said about these scenarios regarding trust being derived from understanding what someone else is likely thinking.
Edit: the other aspect that needs to be said is that tech in society is governed by policy. People don't generally just accept policy based on statistical arguments. If you think that you can expect people to accept policies that allow AVs without addressing the trust issue, it might be a painful ride.
I've seen people reverse up a highway onramp.
I'm not scared of mentally ill drivers. I'm scared of rich 16 year olds. I'm scared of drunk drivers. I'm scared of drivers sitting so low they can't see most of what is happening around them. I'm scared of drivers having seizures while driving (my mom was hit a while ago by a man who lost his license due to seizures, and still refused to stop driving). I'm scared of drivers who drive without a license because "fuck them, I drive when I want to". I'm scared of people mixing up gas and break pedals (just got hit by one), in cars which can go 0-60 in 2.6 seconds weighing 6000lbs.
I've got some bad news for you.
"Acting Unexpectedly" can often mean following the actual laws and general guidelines for safe and/or defensive driving. I would hazard a guess that sometimes doing the intuitive thing is, in reality, unsafe and/or against the law. If the car does this in 99% of circumstances, and still gets rear-ended, who is really the problem here?
It remains to be seen if autonomous driving systems are actually safe. But if the other driver does something that is safe, there's then an onus on the first driver to have accounted for that.
> "Acting unexpectedly" is one of the aspects that makes dealing with mentally ill people anxiety-producing.
Wat.
And I've been to MANY places in the US where people drive terribly and completely unexpectedly. I've seen people put on a left turn signal then go into the RIGHT lane. I've seen someone pass on a one lane overpass, where the car in front was towing a heavy load
What's good about these cars is they will ALL drive consistently, and the more people get used to them the easier it well be to drive with them because you will know how waymo cars react.
If humans can't do that, the solution is probably more automation.
One of the first thing my driving instructor told me was: never trust anyone on the road except yourself. That’s why you see people waiting for a car with the indicator on to visually hint they really intended to turn.
A good indicator of their next move is their previous move.
Also, only the 2nd item is even consistent with Waymo behaving unexpectedly (we're not given enough info to know why it stopped). In the first item, the "unexpected" thing is the branch, not the behavior (stopping), and in the third Waymo's behavior didn't contribute to the accident at all -- instead it nearly avoided it despite the other car's bad driving.
I recently rented an even later-model Malibu that only had collision warning auditory alert. Better than nothing, but I'm surprised cars are still made without automatic braking.
In the EU, at least, since May 2022, all new cars do have automatic emergency braking, along with intelligent speed assistance; alcohol interlock installation facilitation; driver drowsiness and attention warning; advanced driver distraction warning; emergency stop signal; reversing detection; and event data recorder (“black box”).
Other features like eCall – a built-in automated emergency call for assistance in a road accident – have been mandatory since March 2018.
Granted, I'm sure this will improve over time. But for the past 5ish years, all my experiences with auto-braking have been dangerously negative.
The Obama administration (2015) was able to successfully negotiate with and convince most major car manufacturers to voluntarily agree to start making new cars with automatic emergency braking. Their agreement stipulated that all new cars must have it by 2022 [1]. But this negotiated agreement is why we started to see some new car models include it post 2015.
The tl;dr is the Obama administration basically said "look, if y'all don't agree to these proposed minimal standards, we'll get congress to pass a law that is more strict. So the companies decided to take the agreement now to de-risk themselves from having to comply with potentially more stringent requirements in the future).
[1]. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/us-dot-and-iihs-announc...
The responsibility was 100% his because of "an unsafe lane change".
Since all of these accidents happened in the US, is the driver that hits from behind normally responsible for the accident? (For a moment, let's exclude predatory behavior where the front driver is doing something toxic, like intentionally pump-breaking on a high speed road to induce a hit-from-behind accident.)
> The safety driver unwittingly turned off the car’s self-driving software by touching the gas pedal. He failed to assume control of the steering wheel, and the Pacifica crashed into the highway median.
Why are these not counted? Are they really looking at their car crashes, or just autonomous driving software being in control during those car crashes?
Maybe they want to argue the software is safe, but that doesn't change the fact that I'd still be scared of getting into that car.
[1] https://qz.com/1410928/waymos-self-driving-car-crashed-becau...
As a rider, you can't touch the Waymo steering wheel or pedals, which eliminates the cause of the accident you referenced.
Why this car, and not all cars? If I fail to assume control of my steering wheel, I will also crash.
That might make sense but this is obviously a little tricky to implement safely.
If Waymos were having a seriously increased rate of non-fault crashes, that would still be a safety issue, even if every crash was ultimately a human's fault.
Thus reminds me of highways when you can see a back up a quarter mile up. I tap the brakes about 5 times before letting off the gas to cut speed by 20% before actually even braking,which again is preceding by taps on the brake.
So. I don't think the majority of these cases were even tailgaters. I would love to see the data of what the following distances were, rate of deceleration, how much space there was for the lead car to avoid the obstacle. Ade these Waymo's cars just out there brake checking people? Are they waiting to the last moment before doing emergency brake mode?
At the end of the day, drastically changing speed is up there for dangerous behaviors, human drivers go to great lengths to avoid it and signal the intent. Turning right or left off of a 50 mph road- better believe I'm signaling that turn 2000 feet away and decelerating in stages and incrementally. With luck even that vehicle 4 cars back in the convoy is going to have lots of time.
I know YouTube videos aren't always representative of reality, but there are some videos of these cars randomly driving extremely slowly in very busy intersections which might be a contributing factor to getting rear-ended, even if it's not Waymo's "fault" from an insurance perspective.
Traffic disruption with Waymos is UNDOCUMENTED and a real thing.
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How so? If human drivers did unexpected stuff like brake for no reason, we'd have a lot more accidents.
I think this just highlights how much better humans are at cooperating on the road compared to automated systems.
The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that. (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple diagram in the blog post, too.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...
[2] https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...
Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer, and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not believe will be solved anytime soon.
That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous trains—which have regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds—I think we would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize land use that could be more productive otherwise. More idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density transportation options available.
A lot of fatal accidents can be attributed to inexperience, distracted driving, running lights, drugs, alcohol, asleep at the wheel, medical events or extremely aggressive driving.
The distribution of unsafe driving is not even. Personally I had 2 accidents in my teens and 0 for the following 20 years.
Your typical taxi driver will be fired/fined/reported over time if they drive this way. Further, if you are in a taxi where you notice a driver making you uncomfortable, you can end the ride early (I have).
However, imagine a robodriver that is 4x safer, however every single vehicle on the road has the same probability in any instant of invoking the same "no human would make this mistake" driving error fatally.
An analogy would be that at any moment, your calm, courteous, focussed spouse behind the wheel suddenly transforms into a 17 year old teen in a Mustang.
Of course, when a collision does happen and damages have to be paid, the injured party will of course start advocating for full liability even if they previously had no issues engaging in the risky driving themselves. Which is why this is not reflected at the polls when voting for a politician who would promise cracking down hard on moving violations, with things like cameras and increased police stops.
almost all our tech wants to skirt to legal system.
you'd be surprised what kind of mistakes humans make.
Anyway, snarky comment aside. The biggest reason for optimism is that a world full of AI cars will remove the reptile-brained jostling for position that's 90% the cause of all crashes today, and that it will overall _slow down_ traffic. Slower, calm, tepid moving traffic, a bunch of electric golfcarts puttering around the city. That's a future of AI-only traffic worth signing up for.
My favorite scenario is when someone super impatient pulls around (often suddenly without signaling) a car not noticing:
* The car in front of them is actually going the same speed as the car in front of them
* The lane they were all in is actually going faster than the lane they just pulled into
* Everyone is about to pass a slow person up ahead in the newly selected lane
Person predictably hits the gas to race ahead only to get stuck behind the slow car while the cars they thought they were passing proceed ahead in the lane they just left.
Sometimes frustration and increasingly eratic behavior ensues.
Never gets old :D
Everything you said made sense, except focusing on mass transit for FSD, for two reasons:
The intent of focusing on bus/train automation comes from an illusion of control (we can control the lane/track, thereby) – hence we tend to rudimentarily attribute easy outcomes to it (low risk, high value).
If we ignore the control part and properly think about it – mass transit actually higher risk for lower value.
1. Lower value: For something that involves 100+ people on dense economic centers, it's already running at an economy of scale where a human driver just makes sense. I live in Germany where the metro trains & trams are already crazy automated. There is a human driver there just in case, more as a supervisor for the people riding (controlling hooliganism, jammed doors, helping challenged people, dealing with emergencies, etc). I see German trains as already running on FSD4. FSD5 full automation is a waste of time here. Using buses for last mile coverage for few passengers, aka treating buses as "big taxis" is probably worse environmentally than actual taxis.
2. Higher risk: By the same logic you said for cars – "far fewer unintuitive errors" – at a much higher capacity of mass transit – is far more catastrophic. Imagine a self-driving train had just 1 accident in 10 years, but it affected 1000 people. It's sheer terror. Who is liable for it? Government. The problem with going down this mass-transit-first route is, one error means legislating away the entire sector.
Cars are actually lower risk (individual choice, individual liability, accidents don't deter others from adopting) and higher value (last mile, moving away from the dense urban city plans that come with high rents and chokepoints which are crippling even to my beloved, beautiful German cities where even with all the urban sprawl, last mile is still a problem outside A zones).
Your second point is completely wrong: we have trains, and have been running them for more than 100 years. We have real statistics to show in the real world they are much safer than cars. Sure you can imagine anything you want, but when real science has real data why would anyone look at your imagined data.
Not having a track to follow on/in the road (magnets, sensors etc.) Not mandating all cars talk to each other, working together like a mesh/hive/colony.
I understand that has its own set of self starter issues, but it can be built in WHILE also doing what is currently happening. The fact that roads are being replaced TODAY and still nothing is going in them to help cars drive themselves, baffles me.
I feel like the one in five Americans that live in rural areas is left out of the conversation though. You can't eliminate cars for those 60 million or so people.
I'm talking about segments of the other 80% that wants a dually truck because it makes them look "alpha". Folks buying huge SUVs to feel "safe" while being more prone to rollovers, less able to avoid collisions, and far more likely to kill others—especially pedestrians—in a crash in addition to monopolizing greater and greater proportions of limited land resources.
You live three miles from your nearest neighbor? Feel free to indulge in a raised pickup with 3 tons of bed capacity and 5 tons of towing with my blessing.
You live in one of the major metropolitan areas in the US? Don't buy a Hummer, Lexus SUV, or F-150, especially if safety is your goal. In fact, those large vehicles should require a new class of drivers license due to their size and performance characteristics just like school busses require a class B and motorcycles a class M due to their different structure and place within our highways. Buy a transit pass. Per capita, folks simply don't die in car accidents when they ride the bus or take a light rail. Don't have good/fast public transit infrastructure where you live? Time to vote for folks who will make it a priority.
Because widening stroads has been tried. It doesn't work. They have never worked. They don't make traffic better, they don't make us safer on the road, they don't get us to our destinations safer, and they certainly don't make the most efficient use of land. It's time to move on. Dump all the stupid, oversized, single-level, paved parking lots and replace them with mixed-use housing, retail, and office space with a public transit hub.
Make just enough parking so that the 20% folks who actually need their daily-use vehicles can visit easily. Preferably they can park in the park-n-rides at the outskirts and hop on a train to the city center so the parking fees are as cheap as possible. Let the 20% decide whether they want self-driving vehicles or not. The 80% should leave them alone and embrace the self-driving busses and trains for themselves.
I'd argue safety is not a concern. There are a lot of "safe" things we could do, but don't. A significant percentage of the country doesn't even vaccinate its children. Self-driving cars aren't suddenly going to make us aware of our own mortality in ways that life itself hasn't already.
The real fear is lack of accountability. If a drunk plows into a crowd of pedestrians, he will be dragged out of it and (metaphorically) lynched. Justice makes us feel better about circumstances beyond our control. If North Korea test-launched an ICBM that erroneously hit Japan, we'd declare war over their typo. But when a self-driving car erroneously mows down pedestrians, we're told to just accept it, nothing we could do, mumble-mumble-training-data, and tragedies like this happen so we can be safer.
Nothing is going to condition us to resent the idea of Safety more than having our personal agency and sense of justice taken away from us in its name.
To be clear: I do think, in my lifetime, AV will become normal in many places. Some horrific accidents will happen that result in massive fines to the companies. As a result, some of them will go bankrupt.
Cars != Liberty
They never were. They have always been rapidly depreciating assets that are useful for one-off destinations and horrible externalities with regard to city planning.
Possible? Yes, but not for decades to come.
It's a question when not if as it's clear that we haven't found fundamental issues.
The opposite happens: more people use it already than I thought and companies are stepping up with insurance to cover you.
Yes the Tesla car driving into a truck, horrible but there was no genuine global outcry.
This not only makes it more convenient to get around without worrying about buying transit tickets ahead of time, it means the busses can load from the front AND the back, making the time spent at each stop shorter and schedules easier to keep.
Much easier problem for autonomous setups when you remove fares and just have to monitor if anyone's in danger.
Public mass transit never breaks even from fares. What it does very well however is free up the money folks would have spent on gas, parking, car maintenance, etc., so they can move around and spend it more freely in the community.
You see this spectrum in various cities. Some cities make you pay depending on how far the light rail travels, so you naturally condition riders not to ride any more or further than they absolutely need to go. Places like New York City on the other hand just sell you a pass; taking an extra trip to the Met or to Central Park doesn't cost extra, so folks do it, socializing and stimulating the economy along the way.
New York's biggest transit mistake in my opinion is keeping the fares. They'll spend HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars on NYPD overtime to catch turnstile jumpers when they could spend less just letting people ride for free. https://gothamist.com/news/nypd-overtime-pay-in-the-subway-w...
It's like when Florida drug tested everyone trying to get public assistance and ended up spending far more for administering and processing the test to catch a relative small handful. https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-fl...
We're hosed until we can instruct our vehicles to act drunk.
- What happens when all of the infrastructure gets built up around self driving cars and peoples first hand knowledge of how to drive diminishes. Once a near monopoly/duopoly is attained by a select few SDC vendors, it will become a utility. Then what fallback does society have if the likely enshittification happens. Do we just have to live with it?
- Its all fine when the companies able to do this are part of the most elite, technology first companies - but what happens when companies known to take short cuts (like the ones who can barely get bluetooth working for their audio infotainment system) start try to enter the market by focusing on lobbying the SDC oversight board.
I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing once you consider all the second and third order effects (even more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult problem.
To the extent that self driving taxi services are cheaper than human driven taxi services, they will also increase use of taxi services.
There's no reason to assume that on the balance people will end up driving less as a result of a technology that makes driving significantly more convenient simply because it might make taxi services somewhat cheaper and therefore potentially might make it easier to not own a car and encourage people to use other modes of transportation for some trips.
The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car usage growth.
EDIT: Some specificity: How would robotaxis replace commuting for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The taxi has to move at least from the storage to the rider pickup to the rider dropoff. Without sharing, that's actually more miles and the same number of cars.
Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's more miles, fewer cars in existence (since both riders dont need a car), but the same number of car trips (plus the to/from storage).
With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven is just going up unless people change their lifestyle. That doesn't do anything to curb care useage.
This would also reduce the cost on doordash type services so if instead of paying an extra $10 for your food/groceries/everyhing to be delivered you paid orders of magnitude less.
This might reduce the traffic on the road.
The pessimist in me makes me think once they got sufficient market share price would go back up and wed be worse off than before lol.
It's far cheaper to live in an autonomous motorhome that drives around all day and happens to arrive at work just as you need to be there each morning than to rent an apartment in San Francisco. Driving about is probably cheaper than paying for parking too, especially if you deliberately head for the busiest traffic.
Already, though, you've got a budget of >$4000/mo for a more comfortable studio apartment.
You could already commute with cheap taxis (eg in the developing world). The more important thing is that people want to live in San Francisco, they wouldn’t be happy commuting from some far off place in the first place. And as stealth campers have already figured out, not a lot of places available to camp in your car even 40-60 miles out, so might as well be where you want.
But the idea that your car could just involve itself in traffic jams all day rather than pay for parking is interesting, it could also look for time limited but free parking and move on to somewhere else when that expired, which is more common outside the city. Heck, it could park at a shopping mall that doesn’t allow walk offs…because no one is walking off.
Must as well have the cars in the US drive themselves so we can all get a nap at least.
I strongly believe it will go the other way, i.e. the 'robo-taxi' vision. Once cars can pick us up, take us where we want and then disappear, very few people will want to own their own car. I honestly think the vast majority of people already don't want to own one, but we don't have a better option. Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.
Cars will just show up, take us places then go away to get someone else. We won't need nearly as many of them, and we won't need to dedicate so much of our cities to them, and especially not to parking them. We will be able to reclaim our cities.
NOTE: Old School automakers who can't/won't/don't adapt are going to push back on this HARD. But I still think it will happen.
For the record, I'm a car guy. I love cars. I will likely always have one for the weekends. If I was going into a city or commuting, I would take the robi-taxi every time.
Because it will probably still be cheaper if they use it regularly (as is owning in most cases). Because they want a specifically equipped vehicle for young kids/outdoor activities/etc. Because when they want a car, they want one right now.
I'm also skeptical that, if you own a vehicle, it would make any sense to then also rent robo-taxis locally. Certainly I can reserve a private car for an evening event today but it would be 10x or more the cost of parking/gas.
I'm as much of a transit advocate as the next guy, but I think a lot of people blind themselves to how annoying the last mile problem is for a lot of destinations anywhere outside of urban cores. There aren't going to be train stations built at every possible origin point and destination point, and even if there's a robust bus network, transfers, slow speed/frequent stopping, and the walk to/from your destination/origin are pretty damn annoying. They're not the end of the world by any means, to be clear, (I use buses too!) but it's just, if I have a car, why wouldn't I just drive?
Taxis have the potential to solve that in a great way. But I (...and probably most people?) don't currently use them for that purpose since they're way too expensive. As they should be, it's a whole human being tending to your transport personally for twenty minutes or more. If robotaxis can lower the price, it'd be great, but I don't know how confident I am on that happening. The equipment is presumably expensive, the car itself is expensive (though EVs do have much lower maintenance costs), the R&D is expensive. We'll see. Exciting times!
People will continue to all commute at similar times, resulting in the same traffic as before. That it is automated makes no difference.
And supposing a car can go off after and do some taxi work instead of being parked, well it still has to commute from here to there which is adding even more cars constantly onto the roads driving to where they’re needed whereas before they’d be parked.
The likely outcome is permanent rush hour as cars are constantly going back and forth on the highway.
But if you own the car, it's just waiting wherever you left it. If you have an autonomous cab, it has to make an extra trip from wherever it dropped off the last driver to wherever it's picking you up. That alone increases the number of cars on the road. And that's before you consider the cab potentially driving a holding pattern when nobody is actively using or calling it.
But most of all roads are governed by induced demand. People would take a lot more and longer trips if there was the option to just teleport to the destination. The main downwards pressure on the number of trips is the time investment. That's why adding more lanes to roads often doesn't reduce traffic (outside of a short adjustment period): faster trips means more people willing to take it, which fills up that lane. But a trip people weren't willing to do for 40 minutes behind the wheel they might take if it's instead 60 minutes watching Netflix in a driverless car. Which makes the roads fuller and thus slower for everyone.
If autonomous cars drive down the costs of taking a taxi it’ll mean more people will do that versus public transit.
Anything that reduces public transit use or increases individual car use will be disasterous for traffic and transportation in our cities.
You're being overly pessimistic. I can see the opposite occuring on each of your points.
- less traffic due to more efficient driving: once automated driving is pervasive it's natural that cars and traffic as a whole will coordinate and optimise use of the road. You should be able to predict traffic accurately and choose the optimal time to travel. Car speeds will coordinate to maximise flow through roads. Improved public transport will increase the number of passengers per vehicle and reduce personal vehicles.
- more investment into better modes of transport due to lowered costs: the cost structure of buses (and trains) lends itself to larger vehicles with less stops. Without having to pay someone to drive you can remake public transport into something that takes less people at a time to more places, without requiring expensive infrastructure. Think small automated busses that serve a web of points instead of routes, so people can request to get from A to B and the system delivers from as close to A and to as close to B as possible as soon as possible at the lowest cost.
- less car ownership: most people don't want to own cars, so it's very likely that car ownership will drop significantly. With new privately and publicly owned forms of public transport, the need to own a car will disappear in many cases.
I feel that almost all technology is positive (not sure about social media), since it generally gives people more choices and abilities. Automated cars have very few downsides.
- Increase cycling and walking because the roads are much safer
- Less noise from cars revving their engines, or being poorly maintained (holes in mufflers, underinflated tires, etc.)
- No carjacking
This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually improve once autonomous driving is the standard.
I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over, that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people still maintain the ability to move independently of each other but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.
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Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.
That ship sailed a while ago and didn't need Google to push it.
> even more cars on the streets
You don’t know that. I could make a prediction that it would lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
> less investment into better modes of transport
I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don’t think it’s fair to call them “better”. They’re hugely expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
> traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting in bad traffic
You also don’t know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if people are ok with it, then who cares?
Now this is a bad take. Public transit is _always_ better than individual vehicles when we are talking about a metropolitan area. The amount of resources, land, and pedestrian freedom that is eaten up for roads is insane. Imagine how many people can fit in a subway, and then expand that to each of them individually being in a car on the road.
Public transit is expensive, but so are new highways, highway maintenance, road accidents, speed enforcement... Etc. The worst thing is that many times people who don't own cars pay for those services they won't use. All the while public transit is getting it's funding cut.
I think the original comment is a little off in that more autonomous drivers does not directly lead to less public transit. But it is a concern that these profit/investor driven companies will be competing with public transportation and this has a lot of implications.
Every single time scientists and city planners are called to answer "how we make the city more livable and reduce traffic" the answer is always better public transport (more trains especially).
The only part I could resonate with you is that we don't know whether SDC could lead to less cars. That's true if people will use more self driving taxis over personal cars.
EDIT: If you disagree, please link to the quantitative data that suggests Cruise isn't on track.
Cruise is done.
IMO stuff like this is going to lead the public to trust it less, since they're gaming numbers as hard as possible.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...
https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-the...
few examples : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aBNYcBoLI ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8TGFA6SfAo
Looking forward to expand its coverage to SFO, that will be a game-changer.
Still not sure of it economics though. Its current price is on-par with Uber Comfort / a little bit over Uber X. How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion?
There you go - I would have said their operating cost is much lower. Paying the wages of the drivers for a year costs more than the car - even a car plus all those fancy LIDAR's.
Their development costs are a different story. I suspect only a company like Google could sustain it. But presumably it's one off, and if they spread it over 1 million taxi's in the USA it would only be a fraction of the revenue.
Those development costs have an upside too. It's a moat. If they pull if off they will have a monopoly. The will get away with being able to change just under the cost of a real driver for years. We may well be bitching here in a decades time at the obscene profits alphabet is making off us, and yet we have no obvious way out.
I guess if it's showing enough promise to be profitable on its own (workout R&D and expansion costs), Google can probably spare a few more billions.
Basically straight lines and 365 days of sun, now send them to Europe small towns/mountain roads/&c.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyEg35Stbo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7wphiL3vbo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZaoRu7okU
https://youtu.be/5wXO05s-pLc?si=5W-SW5zGXIwgnQpG
It makes a mistake in that one, around 5 minutes in, due to not understanding a construction worker's gesture, but I presume it phones home for advice and someone gets it moving again. Everything else seemed to be handled rather impressively.
Disclaimer: Google employee. My job has nothing to do with cars. But I do love technology and hate driving, so I'd love to see this problem solved. I'm actually quite skeptical that I'll ever have a truly self-driving car, as I also live in a place with weather.
Understanding someone directing traffic is probably one of the harder problems.
To another point, to the degree that it's predictable ahead of time, I'd be perfectly happy with a car that only could self-drive in some conditions. Only highway for some subset of weather conditions? That would still be super-useful for some of us.
First, as all the other respondents have pointed out, your characterization of San Francisco as "straight lines and 365 days of sun" is way, way off. But more importantly, as a consumer, I'd be thrilled to own an autonomous vehicle even if it didn't work in bad weather. There's easily enough data to have a car say "there is a storm coming in your area, can't drive autonomously" long before it would become a safety issue.
And, of course, wouldn't one expect an autonomous vehicle to start in places with better conditions vs yolo'ing it in a blizzard whiteout?
My 2023 car with cameras and radar usually cannot activate lane centering - even in good weather - because it cannot tell where the lanes are.
Having driven in both San Francisco and throughout the midwest, I agree with the parent commenter that San Francisco is a much easier environment for self-driving cars.
I mean the point is pretty straight forward. A study like this is tautological. "self driving cars are safe on exactly the fraction of hand selected roads where self driving companies are willing to put them" doesn't tell us anything. It's a fluff piece.
If you want to make an actual assessment about the safety you need data from randomized, representative roads, not 0.x% of the streets in America. Which itself is a very generous country to pick. Put these things into peak traffic in Rome for an hour
Nevertheless I do believe it might be easier to deploy self driving cars in more “feral” places where anything goes as traffic rules go. In those places, what I’ve observed, is that you can at any point actually come to a complete standstill and everyone will just navigate around you (within cities that is). This actually can work in the favor of these cars to be honest.
(BTW, Boston's reputation as a place for aggressive driving is undeserved. Insurance companies pay a lot for fender repair for the reason above, making the city look bad, but for injuries against a person, insurers just pay the limit, which an injured pedestrian can run up in the first 24 hours in a hospital. Anything beyond that doesn't show up in car insurance statistics. Houston and Austin have far more aggressive drivers, for instance.)
tbh waymo's ceo said what I said here: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo...
For what it's worth, as a pedestrian walking around SF late at night I absolutely do trust Waymo more than human driven cars.
Also, frankly, humans drive in situations where they just shouldn't. There are times where the conditions are so bad that the only correct decision is to just say it is not possible to safely drive today. Personally, I don't drive in dense fog because your options are basically drive too fast and risk hitting something you can't see, or drive at a sensible slow speed and risk being hit from behind - which isn't your fault but might still kill you. Even the most advanced aeroplanes with all the latest and greatest sensors still have defined limits where they won't fly.
Also, that Arc de Triomphe example should just be replaced with a safe priority system. Priorité à droite is a silly rule, and it's especially silly on a roundabout. In my opinion, crashes there are the fault of the road, not the driver.
It's just like how iPhones are wildly popular in the US. I'm sure there's someone who's like "Yeah, try to sell a $1k device to a Romanian and see how it goes" and Apple only gets 25% market share there but they're one of the most successful companies in the world, without Romania.
Some markets can be irrelevant.
how about no, let's not send waymo cars into vastly more challenging conditions. i want them to keep being cautious and responsible.
It also gets quantitative measures of how confident it should be in what it just classified. And if your confidence measures decline, for any reason, it can just slow down. Small European towns should be doable.
Not straight lines, lots of traffic, cars parked on both sides of roads, plenty of human drivers seemingly unable to cope.
(Admittedly, mostly sunny weather.)
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What I'm interested in knowing is how these cars drive compared to the average competent driver in the exact same environment.
This depends on what type of drivers waymo is displacing. If it's displacing mostly professional drivers, then that substitution would be reasonable, because the choices we have are either professional drivers or waymo. However, if it's displacing "normal" drivers, including "first-time drivers, drunk drivers", then the substitution wouldn't be reasonable because banning waymo would mean those rides would be replaced with "normal" drivers, not super-safe professional drivers.
Even otherwise though, if at some point in the future I have the option of trading my car in for a fully autonomous one, the only thing I'm really interested in knowing is how my personal accident risk in getting from point A to point B changes compared to if I was driving myself. These benchmarks are meaningless in that regard. I'm not driving drunk, I'm not driving in bad weather conditions, I'm not being needlessly arrogant or reckless on the road. Can this car drive better than me?
But there seems to be some stats. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/that-wild-taxi-r... got "crash rates one-third lower". Still great result from Waymo.
When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are looking to replace.
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