Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans.
The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they hit the child at a lower speed than a human would have because of the reaction time.
I would rather be in an area where only Waymo's are allowed than an area where they are banned.
When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.
Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.
Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.
> I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience.
You'll probably never forget that advertisement, which is an exciting business opportunity for Waymo.
They could partner with Spotify and other media content partners so that the Waymo can generate an adrenaline-rush near crash experience when a premium advertiser's ad is playing. /s (hopefully)
Waymo as a system has crossed the threshold where I trust them more than average driver, but all this hardware is relatively new, well maintained, and their software is closely tied to it.
I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.
I am also not looking forward to the system transitioning from "big experiment, burn money to make it good" to "established business unit, tweak it to death for incrementally more money / personal promotion." We're still in the honeymoon period and I very much expect to hate Waymo in 10 or 15 years when they reach a steady state.
Waymo's software has crossed multiple generations of sensors and vehicles over almost two decades. It does not seem to be tightly coupled to a particular device.
Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc.
Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle with behave within a relatively narrow operating range.
There is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you. I know, it's all very far fetched, and Uber/Lyft drivers are almost always nice, courteous and professional, but I have experienced a few times when that hasn't been the case. With Waymo, it's not even an issue.
Blaming the kid here is absurd. The kid lives in a system where pedestrians are second class citizens in a world dictated by the auto-petro industrial complex. An industry that has co-opted unelected traffic "engineer" in the US and completely changed the way we live for the last 70 years and have made Americans fatter and less connected.
If the child lived in a neighborhood where cars went slower (it was a 25mph zone) he wouldn't have gotten hit in the first place. Praising Waymo here is like praising a priest for not molesting a child. Yes it's good that the waymo slowed down more than the average car, but really the whole system should be completely rethought. Instead, we're pouring billions into single occupancy vehicles, when we should've been pouring billions into high speed rail, subways, etc.
I'm hopeful that waymos converge on a more efficient design and improve cities in general. As it stands, they are a way for the rich to commute without having to exchange pleasantries with the underclass.
If only Waymo's were on the road I wouldn't worry about bike path dividers at all.
I sometimes pace them to act as a moving shield.
Nothing else comes close, not even eye contact and being waved on by a human. The other autonomous cars that have been introduced are at least just as scary to be around as people.
I've been observing their behavior in Atlanta for about the past year. Our roads here are fairly curvy, hilly, and lacking of expected markings, yet I haven't seen a driverless Waymo vehicle make a single odd move. One thing that brought a smile to my face was when I came to a 4-way stop at the same time as a Waymo vehicle at night & I flash my brights to tell the other vehicle to go ahead (southern hospitality) and I see the Waymo immediately begin its course through the intersection. I was so jolted that I began to tail it in order to pull up next to it to see if there was a human behind the wheel. Watching it drive down this slowly descending hilly road with intermittent speed humps and cars parked alongside the main right lane gave me a close up view of its slightly curving trajectory and braking behavior with regard to the humps. My thought on human or not was inconclusive until we reached a red light, and as I shot my eyes over and saw an empty driver seat, I smiled widely knowing that the software responds to brights flashed at 4-way stops (please don't tell me it doesn't and it just saw me indecisively not initiate at the stop). Thanks for reading
It definitely does not respond to flashing headlights in that manner. You’re observing its default behavior when at a 4 way stop with other vehicles not moving.
Unlike the traffic cops directing traffic that would likely require special programming, "proceed if the other car flashes its lights at you" is completely the kind of thing that could just accidentally fall out of a neural network learning to imitate humans.
Hopefully if they ever go to Sri Lanka they get localised tuning because I was surprised to find out flashing your lights over there doesn't mean "go ahead", it means "if you don't get out of my way I will ram you"
13X is way more impressive than it seems at first glance.
Let's take a simplistic model of accidents: that the average driver is at fault in an accident 50% of the time. So a perfect driver would only halve the number of accidents -- they only eliminate the accidents where they would otherwise have been at fault.
But Waymo's numbers are better than the "perfect" driver above. How is that possible? Because in most accidents the blame is not split 0%/100%. You can avoid a lot of accidents with defensive and safe driving.
Anecdote from 1000s of miles biking: I bike a lot in the Bay, for fun, exercise, commute, all of the above (I'm a friendly one, I promise!) and the comfort I feel when I see a Waymo alongside me or at a stop sign is immediately apparent. I have been hit 5-10x riding in NYC and SF (nothing serious, gratefully, mostly just people turning right not knowing/caring I was there), and the Waymo's awareness that I exist is immediately obvious and so different from a large percentage of human drivers. I hope the meaningful improvement in safety continues to convince people this should be a part of the future.
I live in LA and Waymos are the only cars I don't have to play chicken with when crossing the street. Even the drivers that see you will just give you a "sorry, I'm in a rush" wave as they nearly run you over.
Make sure to never be in a hurry to get anywhere because you might then get stuck behind a fleet of them going exactly the speed limit, grid locking you in.
> How do you get “stuck” behind someone doing the speed limit?
"Only 46.5 percent of U.S. drivers consider going more than 15 miles per hour over the speed limit on the freeway to be "extremely" or "very" dangerous — with 40.6 percent openly admitting to doing it at least "a few times" in the last 30 days" [1].
I'd love to cycle more outdoors, but I'm always wary of the risks. How cool would it be if you could hire a waymo as a "team car" and have it follow you around? It could also carry extra equipment...and act as a ride home in case of emergencies.
If you ride conservatively (use lights at night, use good judgement at intersections) and stay away from buses and trucks, the exercise vastly outweighs any risk.
To turn the colourful phrasing against you, I too would like a death robot to protect me from all the murder monkeys having a death race around me if I was out biking on the road/death race track.
Wouldn't the better solution be to prevent those murder monkeys from doing the death races around where people would want to cycle? Some kind of grade-separated trail? More regulations on those murder monkey death races?
The grade separated trail sounds great in theory, but in practice it's surprisingly ineffective for some unknown reason. In Sweden we have a ton of those and for some reason bikers insist on participating in the death race with the other murder monkeys. Which is annoying because it can really slow the race down! But I guess once they have a good alternative, at least their death race participation is voluntary, and so I guess they're fair game like the rest of us
“Safer” == “Safer than all other human drivers in the same city.” By their own admission, this is not a straightforward comparison. If they could do the math for the same routes, times of day, and conditions … maybe I’d believe it. Otherwise, this data is trivial to cherrypick, and they have every reason to present it as well as possible.
I believe Waymos are pretty safe, and that’s a great thing. “Safer than humans (for selected rides inside this area)” is still very good, but it’s not at all “Safer than humans (period).”
In essentially all cases where a Waymo and a human-driven car have collided, the human driver has clearly been at fault. This seems definitive and not susceptible to cherry picking.
That could just be, and seems to be in some cases at least, because Waymo doesn't behave like a human would, and people gets tripped up.
I don't doubt Waymos are very safe, but I always irk at these comparisons. Majority of human accidents are due to gross negligence and/or driving under some influence or serious fatigue. A system incapable of alcohol etc. is better than that? Well that is a substantially lower bar than you can possibly imagine. Add to that that all systems have constraints on how and where they are able to go. Combined even Tesla can be made to look good.
Depending on the context and question it might still be the question to pose. But people often make the leap to assume that a typical Waymo is x better than a typical human driver which is an entirely different question entirely.
Waymo is for sure one of the (if not the only) good players out there though, gives me some hope.
> could just be, and seems to be in some cases at least, because Waymo doesn't behave like a human would, and people gets tripped up
Driving conventions vary wildly across states and even within them. And foreign drivers are a thing. A human who gets tripped up by a Waymo acting unusually will also get confused by someone getting used to no turns on right in Manhattan, driving on the right side of the road if coming in from the Commonwealth or adapting from California's protected left turners can turn into any lane, not just the leftmost. They'll also get confused by children and pets, who aren't bound by social custom, and deer, who aren't bound by physics.
I've heard that Waymo relies on having very accurate map data for the areas where they operate, so perhaps they could perform worse than human drivers in areas where they don't have good map data.
But I also trust that the company wouldn't deploy them in those areas until the quality data they need is available. So perhaps "safer in the environments where they are actually deployed" would be more accurate, but that's also the only thing that matters.
Speculating about what would happen if they were used in ways they are neither intended to be used nor are actually used feels a little silly. Most machines can be unsafe if you use them in ways they're not intended to be used.
> By their own admission, this is not a straightforward comparison.
If they wanted to cherry pick, would they not omit that admission?
In any case, it seems plausible to me that the routes that Waymo drives are above average in human incidents, given that Waymo is probably overrepresented in high stress/traffic, inner city scenarios.
The comparison gets picked up as the headline; the admission does not. This is exploited quite often, e.g. in science reporting. I'm not saying this is what Waymo did - they don't seem to be bad actors - but absolutely, the pattern does occur.
If you were choosing between getting into a Waymo or a car driven by a human driver (where Waymo operates, for a route that Waymo would do), the data shows that the Waymo is safer.
No, it does not. For one thing, we don’t have access to all the data, just what’s being told us. For another, it at best shows that Waymo is safer than average. Safer than an attentive London Cabby? I bet not.
I appreciate the skepticism. While I suspect motor vehicles that cannot be distracted would be safer than motor vehicles that can be, it shouldn't be claimed without real evidence.
If I were Google, I'd partner with some insurance carriers to compare the number of claim events normalized to the number of drivers on the road (approximated with Android data) in a city (same time of year, etc) before and after introducing Waymo. If claims per driver decreases, then I would be more inclined to support the claim that they're actually safer and that they don't just "seem safer"
accidents are not equally distributed across humans. more serious accidents will be caused by people who are habitually doing things that are unsafe but, for various reasons, most places lack effective ways to stop these people driving so they keep causing accidents.
the metric is not some nebulous aspect of skill but the bottom decile of human drivers causing accidents. it is not difficult to believe that an AI can drive better than this group, it is not a high bar, below the 10th percentile are people who should not be driving but cause most of the accidents.
Perhaps the comparison should only be to other taxis. Since I cannot buy a Waymo, it is not really relevant whether it is better than an average driver (including all the drunk ones, and the speed racers, etc).
There are other safety differences with human-driven vehicles… interpersonal violence does happen with taxis (e.g. drivers sexually harassing/assaulting passengers, passengers robbing drivers) - by definition those things cannot happen with a Waymo
"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement weather."
I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.
I've said before that Waymo is already vastly, incredibly safer than some of my older relatives who refuse to give up their keys. Ever been around The Villages in Florida and seen a man leaning forward behind the wheel to squint at what they're driving toward, with their wife shouting at them to turn left!, turn left!? That's just kind of tolerated in some places where the cops don't want to make waves with the wealthy older community.
A self-driving car never gets tired and sleepy after driving for many hours straight. A highway-bound Waymo would be safer than a few instances of distant past me who stayed on the road longer than I was safe to. They also never get drunk, and are safer than approximately 100% of impaired drivers.
I genuinely think we'll all be safer when lots of people collectively realize that someone other than themselves should be driving.
My question is: is safer than average human good enough?
When I drive I have the option to choose to be safe or not. When a computer drives I lose that option. So for 49% of the people, safer than the average human is less safe than before.
I think we need to reach "Safer than the safest 10% of humans".
Also these reports should be done by a government agency.
Yes, it's good enough. Because you cannot control who else is on the street around you. Having cars around you that are driving safer than the average is better than them driving average.
The great deal: let's redesign our cities to be car free. Consider the economic boom that amount of renovation would produce. Consider the increased economic activity from happier and more productive people. Consider the increased space for nature, parks, real estate, development.
Cars are the worst thing to have been invented. Optimizing the personal automobile leads to optimizing for a horrible living experience in the city. Let us reconsider all of this. This is bad. We can do better. We must.
Even the most visible academic skeptic of Waymo (Phil Koopman) had to throw in the towel and admit that they've cleared every conceivable statistical hurdle to conclusively demonstrating that they are better than humans on injuries and airbag deployments. They have moved the goalposts to aesthetic arguments, for example: if it's so safe why does it sometimes do weird stuff? But to principled systems thinkers they have already shown what needed to be shown. It's safer.
Someone once said that this is because Waymos are novelty, and they still behave a bit weird, like being slow and undecisive. Which leads to humans being super-careful around them. So the Waymo safety record is actually not their own achievement.
I guess we'll have to wait to one of the two things to happen to really assess Waymo's performance:
1. They need to lose their markings and easily distinguishable features (like a big lidar on top), so they don't get any special treatment from other drivers.
2. They need to be majority of vehicles on the road.
That would make sense a while ago, but definitely not in SF for locals who have lived here a while. For me as a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist I actually feel safer around them than any other car.
The other day a human driver in front of me was doing 30 km/h under the speed limit down the middle of two lanes.
On that same drive, another driver doing around 15 under clipped a roundabout on the way in and on the way out. Guess they couldn’t decide to turn the wheel fast enough.
I refuse to believe everybody is hammered all of the time, but I’m starting to wonder.
It is less than 10km round trip, in the ‘burbs. Driving with humans scares me anymore. Bring on the robots.
Ugh - either the commons is an unregulated 3D space or we actually tag and separate moving bodies regulated by size/weight, purpose, owner, occupant type, etc. I don't necessarily hate commercial vehicles utilizing the various rights-of-way but clearly there is a difference in momentum, agency, and general "value" between some human wandering around and a heavy robot.
recently (past couple of months) they've been much more aggressive in the ways that make a good driver a good driver - confident and assertive when they should be. for me this has anecdotally been a massive improvement
one of the things that i noticed in a recent trip to austin is that the waymo vehicles were far more assertive and quick than the human drivers so maybe that has been addressed.
That info is pretty outdated: they were slow and indecisive in 2024, but now they behave pretty much like any top-decile human driver. I don’t think they get special treatment from other drivers either, I can’t read anyone else’s mind but I treat them like just another car and it seems like everyone else does as well.
Imagine creating a brand that became renowned world wide and even created its own verb.
And then throwing all that away for the genius brand name of... "x". Brought to you from the same 50 year old that decided that having car models that spell S3XY is cool.
Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans.
The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they hit the child at a lower speed than a human would have because of the reaction time.
I would rather be in an area where only Waymo's are allowed than an area where they are banned.
Waymo saved my life in LA.
When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.
Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.
Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.
> I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience.
You'll probably never forget that advertisement, which is an exciting business opportunity for Waymo.
They could partner with Spotify and other media content partners so that the Waymo can generate an adrenaline-rush near crash experience when a premium advertiser's ad is playing. /s (hopefully)
Waymo as a system has crossed the threshold where I trust them more than average driver, but all this hardware is relatively new, well maintained, and their software is closely tied to it.
I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.
I am also not looking forward to the system transitioning from "big experiment, burn money to make it good" to "established business unit, tweak it to death for incrementally more money / personal promotion." We're still in the honeymoon period and I very much expect to hate Waymo in 10 or 15 years when they reach a steady state.
enshitification should be a new certainty along with death and taxes
The self-driving software could detect that the unmaintained car isn't responding correctly to the controls and refuse to drive.
Waymo's software has crossed multiple generations of sensors and vehicles over almost two decades. It does not seem to be tightly coupled to a particular device.
Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc.
Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle with behave within a relatively narrow operating range.
The only thing an autonomous system should do with janky modified cars is drive them very slowly to the state police barracks for destruction.
Perhaps, but you can do a lot to a car while it remains street legal.
There is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you. I know, it's all very far fetched, and Uber/Lyft drivers are almost always nice, courteous and professional, but I have experienced a few times when that hasn't been the case. With Waymo, it's not even an issue.
> They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans.
You're absolutely right!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0W5v8GOPc&t=520s
Blaming the kid here is absurd. The kid lives in a system where pedestrians are second class citizens in a world dictated by the auto-petro industrial complex. An industry that has co-opted unelected traffic "engineer" in the US and completely changed the way we live for the last 70 years and have made Americans fatter and less connected.
If the child lived in a neighborhood where cars went slower (it was a 25mph zone) he wouldn't have gotten hit in the first place. Praising Waymo here is like praising a priest for not molesting a child. Yes it's good that the waymo slowed down more than the average car, but really the whole system should be completely rethought. Instead, we're pouring billions into single occupancy vehicles, when we should've been pouring billions into high speed rail, subways, etc.
I'm hopeful that waymos converge on a more efficient design and improve cities in general. As it stands, they are a way for the rich to commute without having to exchange pleasantries with the underclass.
Good thing no one blamed the kid.
Ya and they're the only ones I can count on being polite during rush hour
I ride my bike and rollerblade around Austin.
If only Waymo's were on the road I wouldn't worry about bike path dividers at all.
I sometimes pace them to act as a moving shield.
Nothing else comes close, not even eye contact and being waved on by a human. The other autonomous cars that have been introduced are at least just as scary to be around as people.
I've been observing their behavior in Atlanta for about the past year. Our roads here are fairly curvy, hilly, and lacking of expected markings, yet I haven't seen a driverless Waymo vehicle make a single odd move. One thing that brought a smile to my face was when I came to a 4-way stop at the same time as a Waymo vehicle at night & I flash my brights to tell the other vehicle to go ahead (southern hospitality) and I see the Waymo immediately begin its course through the intersection. I was so jolted that I began to tail it in order to pull up next to it to see if there was a human behind the wheel. Watching it drive down this slowly descending hilly road with intermittent speed humps and cars parked alongside the main right lane gave me a close up view of its slightly curving trajectory and braking behavior with regard to the humps. My thought on human or not was inconclusive until we reached a red light, and as I shot my eyes over and saw an empty driver seat, I smiled widely knowing that the software responds to brights flashed at 4-way stops (please don't tell me it doesn't and it just saw me indecisively not initiate at the stop). Thanks for reading
It definitely does not respond to flashing headlights in that manner. You’re observing its default behavior when at a 4 way stop with other vehicles not moving.
How are you saying that so confidently? Waymos respond to traffic cops directing traffic manually
Unlike the traffic cops directing traffic that would likely require special programming, "proceed if the other car flashes its lights at you" is completely the kind of thing that could just accidentally fall out of a neural network learning to imitate humans.
Hopefully if they ever go to Sri Lanka they get localised tuning because I was surprised to find out flashing your lights over there doesn't mean "go ahead", it means "if you don't get out of my way I will ram you"
This is true for India too though traffic there isn't known for its rules.
That's not how Waymo works, though. Waymo doesn't imitate humans. Waymo is trained to obey traffic laws and avoid collisions.
A quaint, positive anecdotal comment?? On MY internet?!?!
13X is way more impressive than it seems at first glance.
Let's take a simplistic model of accidents: that the average driver is at fault in an accident 50% of the time. So a perfect driver would only halve the number of accidents -- they only eliminate the accidents where they would otherwise have been at fault.
But Waymo's numbers are better than the "perfect" driver above. How is that possible? Because in most accidents the blame is not split 0%/100%. You can avoid a lot of accidents with defensive and safe driving.
Anecdote from 1000s of miles biking: I bike a lot in the Bay, for fun, exercise, commute, all of the above (I'm a friendly one, I promise!) and the comfort I feel when I see a Waymo alongside me or at a stop sign is immediately apparent. I have been hit 5-10x riding in NYC and SF (nothing serious, gratefully, mostly just people turning right not knowing/caring I was there), and the Waymo's awareness that I exist is immediately obvious and so different from a large percentage of human drivers. I hope the meaningful improvement in safety continues to convince people this should be a part of the future.
I live in LA and Waymos are the only cars I don't have to play chicken with when crossing the street. Even the drivers that see you will just give you a "sorry, I'm in a rush" wave as they nearly run you over.
Make sure to never be in a hurry to get anywhere because you might then get stuck behind a fleet of them going exactly the speed limit, grid locking you in.
Isn't the correct answer to this, lobbying for higher speed limits? Rather than chastizing obedience to current rules.
Yes, agreed. Though speed limits higher than 75 are not something I will ever support.*
* Unless we're talking about removing a speed limit altogether and regulating unsafe driving using other criteria.
Is this something that I’m too European to understand? How do you get “stuck” behind someone doing the speed limit?
> How do you get “stuck” behind someone doing the speed limit?
"Only 46.5 percent of U.S. drivers consider going more than 15 miles per hour over the speed limit on the freeway to be "extremely" or "very" dangerous — with 40.6 percent openly admitting to doing it at least "a few times" in the last 30 days" [1].
[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/11/30/why-so-many-u-s-drive...
Being forced to drive the speed limit isn't that big of a deal
I'd love to cycle more outdoors, but I'm always wary of the risks. How cool would it be if you could hire a waymo as a "team car" and have it follow you around? It could also carry extra equipment...and act as a ride home in case of emergencies.
If you ride conservatively (use lights at night, use good judgement at intersections) and stay away from buses and trucks, the exercise vastly outweighs any risk.
Personally I avoid riding at night entirely, and use at least a tail light during the day.
I get your idea, but it does rather sound like asking a 4,000lb death robot to follow you around closely and hope that it doesn’t screw up …
To turn the colourful phrasing against you, I too would like a death robot to protect me from all the murder monkeys having a death race around me if I was out biking on the road/death race track.
Wouldn't the better solution be to prevent those murder monkeys from doing the death races around where people would want to cycle? Some kind of grade-separated trail? More regulations on those murder monkey death races?
Crazy thought, I know.
The grade separated trail sounds great in theory, but in practice it's surprisingly ineffective for some unknown reason. In Sweden we have a ton of those and for some reason bikers insist on participating in the death race with the other murder monkeys. Which is annoying because it can really slow the race down! But I guess once they have a good alternative, at least their death race participation is voluntary, and so I guess they're fair game like the rest of us
“Safer” == “Safer than all other human drivers in the same city.” By their own admission, this is not a straightforward comparison. If they could do the math for the same routes, times of day, and conditions … maybe I’d believe it. Otherwise, this data is trivial to cherrypick, and they have every reason to present it as well as possible.
I believe Waymos are pretty safe, and that’s a great thing. “Safer than humans (for selected rides inside this area)” is still very good, but it’s not at all “Safer than humans (period).”
In essentially all cases where a Waymo and a human-driven car have collided, the human driver has clearly been at fault. This seems definitive and not susceptible to cherry picking.
That could just be, and seems to be in some cases at least, because Waymo doesn't behave like a human would, and people gets tripped up.
I don't doubt Waymos are very safe, but I always irk at these comparisons. Majority of human accidents are due to gross negligence and/or driving under some influence or serious fatigue. A system incapable of alcohol etc. is better than that? Well that is a substantially lower bar than you can possibly imagine. Add to that that all systems have constraints on how and where they are able to go. Combined even Tesla can be made to look good.
Depending on the context and question it might still be the question to pose. But people often make the leap to assume that a typical Waymo is x better than a typical human driver which is an entirely different question entirely.
Waymo is for sure one of the (if not the only) good players out there though, gives me some hope.
> could just be, and seems to be in some cases at least, because Waymo doesn't behave like a human would, and people gets tripped up
Driving conventions vary wildly across states and even within them. And foreign drivers are a thing. A human who gets tripped up by a Waymo acting unusually will also get confused by someone getting used to no turns on right in Manhattan, driving on the right side of the road if coming in from the Commonwealth or adapting from California's protected left turners can turn into any lane, not just the leftmost. They'll also get confused by children and pets, who aren't bound by social custom, and deer, who aren't bound by physics.
I've heard that Waymo relies on having very accurate map data for the areas where they operate, so perhaps they could perform worse than human drivers in areas where they don't have good map data.
But I also trust that the company wouldn't deploy them in those areas until the quality data they need is available. So perhaps "safer in the environments where they are actually deployed" would be more accurate, but that's also the only thing that matters.
Speculating about what would happen if they were used in ways they are neither intended to be used nor are actually used feels a little silly. Most machines can be unsafe if you use them in ways they're not intended to be used.
> By their own admission, this is not a straightforward comparison.
If they wanted to cherry pick, would they not omit that admission?
In any case, it seems plausible to me that the routes that Waymo drives are above average in human incidents, given that Waymo is probably overrepresented in high stress/traffic, inner city scenarios.
The comparison gets picked up as the headline; the admission does not. This is exploited quite often, e.g. in science reporting. I'm not saying this is what Waymo did - they don't seem to be bad actors - but absolutely, the pattern does occur.
If you were choosing between getting into a Waymo or a car driven by a human driver (where Waymo operates, for a route that Waymo would do), the data shows that the Waymo is safer.
No, it does not. For one thing, we don’t have access to all the data, just what’s being told us. For another, it at best shows that Waymo is safer than average. Safer than an attentive London Cabby? I bet not.
I appreciate the skepticism. While I suspect motor vehicles that cannot be distracted would be safer than motor vehicles that can be, it shouldn't be claimed without real evidence.
If I were Google, I'd partner with some insurance carriers to compare the number of claim events normalized to the number of drivers on the road (approximated with Android data) in a city (same time of year, etc) before and after introducing Waymo. If claims per driver decreases, then I would be more inclined to support the claim that they're actually safer and that they don't just "seem safer"
accidents are not equally distributed across humans. more serious accidents will be caused by people who are habitually doing things that are unsafe but, for various reasons, most places lack effective ways to stop these people driving so they keep causing accidents.
the metric is not some nebulous aspect of skill but the bottom decile of human drivers causing accidents. it is not difficult to believe that an AI can drive better than this group, it is not a high bar, below the 10th percentile are people who should not be driving but cause most of the accidents.
Perhaps the comparison should only be to other taxis. Since I cannot buy a Waymo, it is not really relevant whether it is better than an average driver (including all the drunk ones, and the speed racers, etc).
There are other safety differences with human-driven vehicles… interpersonal violence does happen with taxis (e.g. drivers sexually harassing/assaulting passengers, passengers robbing drivers) - by definition those things cannot happen with a Waymo
https://waymo.com/safety/impact/#methodology
Worth reviewing the methodology, rather than making stuff up.
"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement weather."
I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.
They're definitely aware and working on it: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/2028863520037867820
Living in SF (and dad of a toddler), this seems like a no-brainer. I can't wait for fewer human drivers.
I've said before that Waymo is already vastly, incredibly safer than some of my older relatives who refuse to give up their keys. Ever been around The Villages in Florida and seen a man leaning forward behind the wheel to squint at what they're driving toward, with their wife shouting at them to turn left!, turn left!? That's just kind of tolerated in some places where the cops don't want to make waves with the wealthy older community.
A self-driving car never gets tired and sleepy after driving for many hours straight. A highway-bound Waymo would be safer than a few instances of distant past me who stayed on the road longer than I was safe to. They also never get drunk, and are safer than approximately 100% of impaired drivers.
I genuinely think we'll all be safer when lots of people collectively realize that someone other than themselves should be driving.
My question is: is safer than average human good enough?
When I drive I have the option to choose to be safe or not. When a computer drives I lose that option. So for 49% of the people, safer than the average human is less safe than before.
I think we need to reach "Safer than the safest 10% of humans".
Also these reports should be done by a government agency.
Yes, it's good enough. Because you cannot control who else is on the street around you. Having cars around you that are driving safer than the average is better than them driving average.
Car centric design is ruining this country.
The great deal: let's redesign our cities to be car free. Consider the economic boom that amount of renovation would produce. Consider the increased economic activity from happier and more productive people. Consider the increased space for nature, parks, real estate, development.
Cars are the worst thing to have been invented. Optimizing the personal automobile leads to optimizing for a horrible living experience in the city. Let us reconsider all of this. This is bad. We can do better. We must.
> let's redesign our cities to be car free
Or, let's not spend trillions of dollars on a behavioural experiment and get pedestrian safety with now-proven kit.
This page is old, but they just refreshed the data shows Waymo is 13x safer than human drivers (in the cities it operates in).
https://people.com/waymo-exec-reveals-company-uses-operators... might be relevant content as well
Even the most visible academic skeptic of Waymo (Phil Koopman) had to throw in the towel and admit that they've cleared every conceivable statistical hurdle to conclusively demonstrating that they are better than humans on injuries and airbag deployments. They have moved the goalposts to aesthetic arguments, for example: if it's so safe why does it sometimes do weird stuff? But to principled systems thinkers they have already shown what needed to be shown. It's safer.
Is this an independent study?
as a motorcyclist I often feel more comfortable riding near waymos
at this point I trust that they have seen me, know that I'm there, and won't behave unpredictably
Relevant: https://youtu.be/cJER6WtOkjk?si=pfUMpqgCL8IHewKy&t=28
non-X source: https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/waymo-safety-impact-update-170...
Ah. That's the link I was looking for.
Someone once said that this is because Waymos are novelty, and they still behave a bit weird, like being slow and undecisive. Which leads to humans being super-careful around them. So the Waymo safety record is actually not their own achievement.
I guess we'll have to wait to one of the two things to happen to really assess Waymo's performance:
1. They need to lose their markings and easily distinguishable features (like a big lidar on top), so they don't get any special treatment from other drivers.
2. They need to be majority of vehicles on the road.
That would make sense a while ago, but definitely not in SF for locals who have lived here a while. For me as a pedestrian/bicyclist/motorcyclist I actually feel safer around them than any other car.
How slow and indecisive?
The other day a human driver in front of me was doing 30 km/h under the speed limit down the middle of two lanes.
On that same drive, another driver doing around 15 under clipped a roundabout on the way in and on the way out. Guess they couldn’t decide to turn the wheel fast enough.
I refuse to believe everybody is hammered all of the time, but I’m starting to wonder.
It is less than 10km round trip, in the ‘burbs. Driving with humans scares me anymore. Bring on the robots.
Ugh - either the commons is an unregulated 3D space or we actually tag and separate moving bodies regulated by size/weight, purpose, owner, occupant type, etc. I don't necessarily hate commercial vehicles utilizing the various rights-of-way but clearly there is a difference in momentum, agency, and general "value" between some human wandering around and a heavy robot.
I'm only a little weirded out when they're right next to me stopped at a light and that thang is spinnin and making note of me
recently (past couple of months) they've been much more aggressive in the ways that make a good driver a good driver - confident and assertive when they should be. for me this has anecdotally been a massive improvement
one of the things that i noticed in a recent trip to austin is that the waymo vehicles were far more assertive and quick than the human drivers so maybe that has been addressed.
That info is pretty outdated: they were slow and indecisive in 2024, but now they behave pretty much like any top-decile human driver. I don’t think they get special treatment from other drivers either, I can’t read anyone else’s mind but I treat them like just another car and it seems like everyone else does as well.
More boring, too. Can't meet cool people if it's yet again just me left to throw a proverbial tennis ball against the proverbial wall.
why does HN still use links to twitter.com and not x.com?
Optimism. Someday the blue bird will be free.
Imagine creating a brand that became renowned world wide and even created its own verb.
And then throwing all that away for the genius brand name of... "x". Brought to you from the same 50 year old that decided that having car models that spell S3XY is cool.
Presumably that was the submitter's choice.