They’re super conservative. I rode just once in one. There was a parked ambulance down a side street about 30 feet with it’s lights one while paramedics helped someone. The car wouldn’t drive forward through the intersection. It just detected the lights and froze. I had to get out and walk. If we all drove that conservatively we’d also have less accidents and congest the city to undrivability.
Back in February, I took a Waymo for the first time and was at first amazed. But then in the middle of an empty four lane road, it abruptly slammed the brakes, twice. There was literally nothing in the road, no cars and because it was raining, no pedestrians within sight.
If I had been holding a drink, it would have spelled disaster.
After the second abrupt stop, I was bracing for more for the remainder of the ride, even though the car generally goes quite slow most of the time. It also made a strange habit of drifting between lanes through intersections and using the turning indicators like it had no idea what it was doing—it kept alternating went from left to right.
Honestly it felt like being in the car with a first time driver.
Maybe the reason they crash less is because everyone around them have to be extremely careful with these cars. Just like in my country we put a big L on the rear of the car for first year drivers.
How long ago was that? Last year I took a couple near Phoenix and they did great, lights or no. The hardest part was dropping me off at the front of a hotel, as people were in and out and cars were everywhere. Still didn’t have issues, just slowed down to 3mph when it had 15 years left or so
just slowed down to 3mph when it had 15 years left or so
Damn, spending 15 years in a car going 3mph sounds terrible.
Haha, yeah I didn’t check that, was eating. 15 yards. I’m actually still sitting there.
Because they are driving under near ideal conditions, in areas that are completely mapped out, and guided away from roadworks and avoiding “confusing” crosses, and other traffic situations like unmarked roads, that humans deal with routinely without problem.
And in a situation they can’t handle, they just stop and call and wait for a human driver to get them going again, disregarding if they are blocking traffic.I’m not blaming Waymo for doing it as safe as they can, that’s great IMO.
But don̈́t make it sound like they drive better than humans yet. There is still some ways to go.What’s really obnoxious is that Elon Musk claimed this would be 100% ready by 2017. Full self driving, across America, day and night, safer than a human. I have zero expectation that Tesla RoboTaxi will arrive this summer as promised.
You’re not wrong, but arguably that doesn’t invalidate the point, they do drive better than humans because they’re so much better at judging their own limitations.
If human drivers refused to enter dangerous intersections, stopped every time things started yup look dangerous, and handed off to a specialist to handle problems, driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.
That said, you’re of course correct that they still have a long way to go in technical driving ability and handling of adverse conditions, but it’s interesting to consider that simple policy effectively enforced is enough to cancel out all the advantages that human drivers currently still have.
You are completely ignoring the under ideal circumstances part.
They can’t drive at night AFAIK, they can’t drive outside the area that is meticulously mapped out.
And even then, they often require human intervention.If you asked a professional driver to do the exact same thing, I’m pretty sure that driver would have way better accident record than average humans too.
Seems to me you are missing the point I tried to make. And is drawing a false conclusion based on comparing apples to oranges.
Waymo can absolutely drive at night, I’ve seen them do it. They rely heavily on LIDAR, so the time of day makes no difference to them.
And apparently they only disengage and need human assistance every 17,000 miles, on average. Contrast that to something like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” (ignoring the controversy over whether it counts or not), where the most generous numbers I could find for it are a disengagement every 71 city miles, on average, or every 245 city miles for a “critical disengagement.”
You are correct in that Waymo is heavily geofenced, and that’s pretty annoying sometimes. I tried to ride one in Phoenix last year, but couldn’t get it to pick me up from the park I was visiting because I was just on the edge of their area. I suspect they would likely do fine if they went outside of their zones, but they really want to make sure they’re going to be successful so they’re deliberately slow-rolling where the service is available.
Waymo can absolutely drive at night
True I just checked it up, my information was outdated.
I specifically didn’t ignore that. My entire point was that a driver that refuses to drive under anything except “ideal circumstances” is still a safer driver.
I am aware that if we banned driving at night to get the same benefit for everyone, it wouldn’t go very well, but that doesn’t really change the safety, only the practicality.
driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.
And people wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere. Which could very well be a good thing, but still
True enough, it would not be a wise economic or political move
I think “near ideal conditions” is a huge exaggeration. The situations Waymo avoids are a small fraction of the total mileage driven by Waymo vehicles or the humans they’re being compared with. It’s like you’re saying a football team’s stats are grossly wrong if they don’t include punt returns.
I have zero expectation that Tesla RoboTaxi will arrive this summer as promised.
RoboTaxis will also have to “navigate” the Fashla hate. Not many will be eager to risk their lives with them
Considering the sort of driving issues and code violations I see on a daily basis, the standards for human drivers need raising. The issue is more lax humans than it is amazing robots.
it’s hard to change humans. It’s easy to roll out a firmware update.
Raising the standards would result in 20-50% of the worst drivers being forced to do something else. If our infrastructure wasn’t so car-centric, that would be perfectly fine.
:Looks at entire midwest and southern usa:
The bar is so low in these regions you need diamond drilling bits to go lower.
What’s a zipper merge?
Screams in Midwestern
I have spent many years in both the midwest and the south.
In some areas of the south, people drive extremely aggressively and there are lots of issues with compliance to various traffic laws but it is usually not difficult to get over if you need to. People will let you in. The zipper merge is a well-honed machine and almost everyone uses it and obeys it.
In the midwest, drivers tend to me more docile, cautious, and lawful overall but have an extreme sense of entitlement over their place in line. “How dare that person use that completely empty lane to get ahead of me! Can they not see there is a line!” They will absolutely not let you in. It does not matter if the zipper merge would improve traffic flow. It just is not going to happen.
“You don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the other guy”
We always knew good quality self-driving tech would vastly outperform human skill. It’s nice to see some decent metrics!
My drive to work is 8 minutes. This morning i almost had a crash because a guy ran a stop sigh. I don’t think the bar is very high at this point.
That’s the beauty of it - we’ve only just begun to improve the situation. It’s going to get better and better until eventually traffic accidents are a rarity.
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Indeed
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I used to hate them for being slow and annoying. Now they drive like us and I hate them for being dicks. This morning, one of them made an insane move that only the worst Audi drivers in my area do, a massive left over a solid yellow across no stop sign with me coming right at it before it even began acceleration into the intersection.
As a techno-optimist, I always expected self-driving to quickly become safer than human, at least in relatively controlled situations. However I’m at least as much a pessimist of human nature and the legal system.
Given self-driving vehicles demonstrably safer than human, but not perfect, how can we get beyond humans taking advantage, and massive liability for the remaining accidents?
how those robot food delivery “robot ai boxes”? by starship doing?
Evolution took a billion years too, so it’s kinda fair to say “well, vehicles need some training”.
Thing is, the end goal after sorting out all the bugs in the AI is no human druven cars since having both will only lead to crashes dur to AI being unable to predict a human. All the AI cars would be linked to a central system to communicate with eachother and alwats know where eachither are. Then all we have to do is make sure people only use the cross walks and traffic accudents will be solely due to idiots.
I doubt a central system would ever be viable, but they would certainly communicate to other nearby cars with more than just blinky lights
I live in Phoenix, Arizona and these are all around. Honestly I feel like the future everyone will have Waymo type services and no one will own cars or even need to learn how to drive one. Who needs to worry about car repairs insurance etc.
I’ve rode in them a few times, fell asleep even. I trust a Waymo more than most human drivers. Best test of its capabilities I saw was when school let out and the side road was covered in kids and parents and cars in random spots waiting for people. It stayed in the “lane”, no lane lines, and calmly navigated forward as people gave it space. I was in the car the whole time. Still there are some issues to be ironed out, but ultimately I don’t think I have ever had a bad riding experience.
Makes sense. There’s less automated cars than human drivers. Human drivers have also been around way longer.
They accounted for that in this report. I believe you are a troll.
I believe you are a troll.
Then you don’t know what trolling actually is.
Okay, I’m sorry. Let me clarify how it’s easy to account for the kind of bias you’re talking about. Simply divide by the population count. So, they divided the waymo crash count by the number of waymos, and the human crash count by the number of humans. This gives the waymo crash rate and the human crash rate. (In reality, it’s a bit more complicated, since the human crash rate is calculated independently each year.)
Let me clarify further: It was an attempt at humor, and not meant to be taken seriously as you are doing.
Ah. Sorry. There are some truly braindead takes on autonomous vehicles so I couldn’t tell that apart from what some people have said earnestly. My bad. 👍
I do think it would be much safer with zero human drivers and only autonomous vehicles on the road, for sure. But I also think it would be impractical to replace everything all at once. Even the best programmed thing would eventually encounter a human driver that defies all previously known data and freaks out the computer.
I don’t know anything about how autonomous vehicles work. As far as humans doing unusual things, well assuming the human driver only steers the wheel and controls the gas and breaks, it should be possible with existing technology to avoid crashing into them at least as well as any human can. So that leaves really unusual things, like the human hopping out of their car in the middle of an intersection, as the high-hanging fruit to model. I would imagine for most of these really strange cases, even if the autonomous vehicle can’t understand what’s happening, they can at least realize that something strange is happening and then pull over.
Obviously there will be truly unusual situations that cause fatal collisions. So long as that is at a lower rate, then what’s the safety concern?
Safety is a red herring IMO, as better code can fix it. There are much worse potential problems that autonomous vehicles will cause than rare collisions. NotJustBikes has a lot of points I’d never considered before in the second half of this video. (The first half, though, I found aggravating; it’s just about solvable safety risks.)
*human drivers remotely controlling cars crash less than humans directly controlling cars
But it’s not like that. There’s some kind of ML involved but also like they had to map put their entire service area, etc. If something goes wrong, a human has to come up and drive your driverless car lmao
Most trips require remote intervention by one of their employees at at least some point.
That’s what happens when you have a reasonable sensor suite with LIDAR, instead of trying to rely entirely on cameras like Tesla does.
And are limited to highly trained routes. There’s a reason you only see them in specific neighborhoods of specific cities.
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people … can drive
Citation needed
People have a brain. Well most people. AI is no replacement for brains.
Tesla go durrrrr
Tesla go 🔥🔥🔥🔥
At least the repair for a camera-only front is cheaper after the car crashes into a parked white bus
Tap for spoiler
/s
Why are we still doing this? Just fucking invest in mass transit like metro, buses and metrobuses. Jesus
Also, Note that this is based on waymo’s own assumptions, that’s like believing a 5070 gives you 4090 performance…
people in america don’t want to ride with public transport because they’re incredibly isolationistic and have a fear of other human beings; so they prefer to drive within “their own 4 walls”, in their own chassis. It’s really about psychology much more than practical feasibility.
Why sell $2 light rail fares when you can sell $40 Waymo fares? Now you’re thinking with capitalism!
That doesn’t solve the last mile problem, or transport for all the people who live outside of a few dense cities.
Almost all people can walk a mile. The remainder have special mobility needs.
Yes it does, if done properly. I have stops for four bus lines within walking distance. During peak hours, buses come once every 15 minutes. Trolleys in the city centre, every 10 minutes. Trams, every two minutes, and always packed. Most of the surrounding villages have bus stops. A lack of perspective is not an excuse.
Public transport (with acceptable intervals) is only (practically) feasible in densely populated areas, like cities and maybe the immediate surroundings. There’s no chance every tiny village in the middle of bumfuck nowhere is gonna have even a resemblance of acceptable public transport. You’d need a driver to drive around all day where most trips are completely or mostly empty.
Well if YOU have a bus stop near you then everyone must! That’s just science!
Uh, yes, actually. I know someone like you can’t even fathom the possibility of a public transit system being well-built because you’ve been gaslit into believing that whatever happens in The West is the best humanity can offer, but we’ve got 80 bus and trolley lines criss-crossing the city. As a guesstimate, three quarters of the city is within a 10-minute walk from a stop, and the elderly and disabled who can’t walk benefit from the resulting reduction in traffic.
And all the world is cities! There’s noooooooooo other type of living. Your egocentric view of the world is going to carry you really far.
Did you hallucinate that I said anything like it or something? Obviously not every situation is solved by the same concept. Dense city centres – sidewalks, bike paths, trams, human-scale infrastructure. Suburban areas – abolish Euclidean zoning, European-style grid streets, buses, local light rail services. Inter-city transit – high-speed rail. Smaller villages and towns – regional rail. It’s an issue that most of the developed world has solved.
Public transit is not supposed to replace cars altogether, but give people another choice. A transit system that is built well, operated well, and cheap, will reduce the reliance on cars, and make the streets safer for people or services that have to use cars.
Public transport can, and does work in rural areas too.
If you build it they will come
Because having a bus to pick up 7 people in a day is really efficient economically and environmentally…
Much more so than having a car-centric infrastructure. If you start cherry-picking you’ll of course find cases where a car would have been more efficient but public transportation needs to be understood as a whole.
I’m not cherry picking Im just telling you my personal experience and the town I live in
For sure. Just cruising around the countryside on the off chance that someone actually needs the bus that day. They haven’t for the past few but they have to go shopping eventually.
Yeah, all three of them.
“most of the surrounding villages”
I live on a 40mph road with no sidewalk or shoulder. That is connected to a 45mph road with no sidewalk or shoulder. My nearest bus stop is 3.2 miles away.
I’m not even that far out, I can drive to a major city downtown in 30 minutes.
That’s great that you have all this infrastructure around you, but not everyone does. Like you said, a lack of perspective is not an excuse.
That’s not out of necessity. It’s a design decision. You could have one nearby with the right elected officials and public effort. You also chose where to live, with the ability to know where existing stops are. If you chose the live away from a bus stop or other public transport then that’s on you.
So fuck everyone who can’t afford to, or doesn’t want to, live in the city?
I can, do, and will vote for officials that want to expand public transit. I also appreciate other efforts being taken, because I don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good, and I recognize that no one solution works for everyone.
So fuck everyone who can’t afford to, or doesn’t want to, live in the city?
What the hell? Were did you pull that from my comment?
We need to work to improve public transport everywhere. Switzerland can have timely consistent trains to tiny villages in the fucking alps. We can have it here. We need to push for it though.
People saying “it doesn’t work for me right now so shut up” are actively harmful to the discussion. They’re choosing to be in a position where it doesn’t work at all (though it doesn’t work well for almost anyone in America outside of DC and NYC). I’m not saying “fuck them” I’m saying “your opinion is not relevant if it’s only complaining about doing better because it’s bad for you right now.”
Its like saying we shouldn’t go to the moon because it’s hard right now, or we shouldn’t try to develop nuclear fusion technology because it’s hard right now. I don’t care if it’s hard right now. We’re discussing what could/should be.
Here’s a summary of this thread:
Guy 1 - why is anyone doing waymo when there’s public transit
Guy 2 - last mile problem
Guy 3 - it works great for me in the city surrounded by bus stops, no last mile problem
Me - it doesn’t work great for me barely outside the city. (My point being that it’ll take a lot to get public transit to within 1 mile of where I am, let alone to someone even further from the city)
You - that’s your own fault so stop complaining
Me - so fuck me and everyone farther out than me apparently.
That’s how we got here. I simply stated my situation as it relates to public transit, and you tell me it’s just my own fault and I should shut up.
We have a long way to go to get ubiquitous public transit in America. I doubt we will ever get there. It makes sense to consider other options as well.
I’m saying we should go to the moon AND develop nuclear fusion.
You want to know what’s harmful to discussion? Pricks like you telling people that their opinion is irrelevant.
It’s better to have a few self driving cars that are safer than everyone owning their own car. It’s like getting gas guzzling vehicles off the road: better to replace a humvee with a sedan than a sedan with an electric.
Good thing we basically got rid of sedans in favor of “light truck” SUVs…
ROFL ya because taking 5 separate buses to get to work is TOTALLY going to encourage people to get rid of their cars.
Fucking brilliant.
Oh ya and I TOTALLY want to give up my car just so I can be forced to sit next to rude assholes coughing in my face.
These brilliant suggestions are amazing.
You do realize that if we invest in more mass transit, then the people who want to take the bus will. That means fewer cars on the road and less traffic that you have to deal with. If you like driving your car and the freedom it gives you, advocating for more mass transit is in your favor. Imagine your commute with 90% less traffic. Doesn’t that sound appealing to you? Dedicated bus lanes that keep the slow busses out of your lane, doesn’t that sound appealing to you? I don’t know about you, but I love driving, and to me, that sounds like an absolute win
Jesus. Ten of the hottest years ever recorded were the last ten. Its time for some major changes. If more people rode public transport it would be better.
All your objections seem to be about how inconvenient it would be for you. Sound kinda self-centered. Act like the only way to get by is to continue to conspicuously consume everything. Get a fuckin grip.
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Fella it isn’t me you need to convince. It’s the billions of other people on the planet you need to convince.
If you think you can force the entire world then by all means and try.
And also clearly you. As you seem to have decided you won’t participate until every single one of the other billions do.
Pretty much. I’m not trashing my life and living in the slums while the rest of the world doesn’t care.
If the world wants more from me then they can step up too.
5 separate buses
Holy hyperbole, Batman!
To get to work 25 miles away, it takes 2 trains (commuter and light rail) and a bus. I personally don’t take transit though, not because of the other passengers, but because of how infrequent those lines run, which turns what should be an hour commute into two, each way.
I have zero problem with transit and I actually alternated between cycling and the bus to my last job based on weather, which took a out 40 min regardless of method of transport (about 10 miles away, two buses).
I can get to most popular destinations in my area with about 3 transfers, and the most popular ones would be one transfer (commuter train to light rail). The main limiting factor is ridership and feeder lines. I even have a rail line that goes right through my suburban city (and a bunch of others) that connects to light rail lines, but that extension keeps getting delayed. If they built the line, it would shave an hour off my transit commute and connect me to multiple destinations (two pro stadiums and downtown), but no, we get wider highways instead, and still have terrible traffic (sometimes it’s slower than the 2 trains + bus that takes 2 hours).
Frankly the best solution i have seen is always a combination of things. At least in the city I live in, people can take bikes on buses and trains, many people walk, and for trips that require trunk space (e.g furniture, DIY supplies etc) there is a Car sharing service that is cheaper than owning a car, or using ride share / taxi.
I don’t think waymo is a better option than a combination of what’s above, I think it can perhaps compliment it but it should not be the sole last-kilometre solution.
I would like to see waymo-like tech provide better public transit for the disabled. As of now, people in my city with disabilities can book special routes which are serviced by specialized buses/ taxis, and existing lines are all wheelchair accessible as well.
Self driving cars give the opportunity for those people to have even more freedom in booking, since as of now they can’t do last minute booking for the custom routes. It wouldn’t really create a traffic problem and massively would increase quality of life for those who are sadly disadvantages in society
Why are we still doing this?
Because there’s a lot of money in it. 10.3% of the US workforce works in transportation and warehousing. Trucking alone is the #4 spot in that sector (1.2 million jobs in heavy trucks and trailers). Couriers and delivery also ranks highly.
The self-driving vehicles are targeting whole markets and the value of the industry is hard to underestimate. And yes, even transit is being targeted (and being implemented; see South Korea’s A21 line). There’s a lot of crossover with trucking and buses, not to mention that 42% of transit drivers are 55+ in age. Hiring for metro drivers is insanely hard right now.
Taking waymo’s numbers at face value they are almost 20x more dangerous than a professional truck driver in the EU. This is a personal convenience thing for wealthy people, that’s it. Fucking over jarvis and Mahmood so we can have fleets of automated ubers…
It’s nonsensical to compare protected highway miles with surface city street miles.
Uber had a net income of 9.86 billion dollars and spent 7.14 billion in operations in 2024. That’s a single transportation company. Do you really think Uber or anyone else is going to ignore researching the technology that could significantly reduce their billions in operations costs?
I’m also not so sure that Europe is 20x safer than the US. A quick search pulled up the International Transport Form’s Road Safety Annual Report 2023 and their data disagrees. The US, even with its really poor showing in the general numbers, is safer than Poland and Czechia (Road fatalities per billion vehicle‑kilometres, 2021). I could see an argument for a 2x gap of Europe outdoing the US, but a 20x? Citation needed.
They’re not saying general road safety is 20x better. They’re comparing an automated car ONLY on surface streets with lights, intersections, pedestrians, dogs, left turns, etc… to a professional truck driver mostly on highway miles.
That’s fair. Comparing regular drivers doing typical city trips to commercial big rigs is a bit apples-and-oranges. I wonder how CDL data would compare when the self-driving semi-trucks start putting on miles. Aurora is about to launch in that exact space.
I’m honestly more scared of that. Professional CDL drivers are WAY better at driving than other people. But their trucks are way more dangerous and harder to handle. So putting driverless tech in that is going to be harder and more dangerous.
So we can have autonomous metros, buses and taxis that allow people anywhere when they need it so they don’t rely on having a car?
There’s already an autonomous metro.
Now let’s do intercity trains and tramways then
Where? I haven’t heard of any rail lines that don’t have a human operator onboard or somewhere in the loop?
I was on the newly opened Thessaloniki (Greece) subway line and it was autonomous.
i.e. Every single line in Copenhagen.
Budapest line M4 is fully automated, stations have some personnel but otherwise you can get on a train and look out straight ahead through the window, there is no cab.
Trains drive themselves, but I imagine there must be some switchboard type of thing somewhere.
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