When I was much younger, I worked for a couple companies that had (what I would consider) large fleets of vehicles, and they all were insured through an insurance company. I guess I just assumed that's how it was. I wasn't aware self-insuring was a possibility. Thanks.

The ratio of 3.2 trillion to 56.7 million, which is already incredibly generous to Waymo's position, is 5 orders of magnitude in difference. So any calculations from Waymos data are going to be insanely inaccurate and not something you can extrapolate from.

The main, and most obvious case, evidenced by this, is Waymo does not operate where snow falls. Human beings do.

We're missing so much of the picture I don't think you can say Waymo's are 75% less accident prone, or 80% less likely to hit a pedestrian. Those are just nonsense numbers.

Drunk people being known for having exceptionally poor judgement and self awareness.

It suggests that they _could_ cut fatalities by that much. Then again, a whole new mode of accident, where the inebriated decide to step out of a moving vehicle and injure themselves that way.

This is a dynamic system where human decisions are never fully removed from the loop.

> Building on that, the Collision Avoidance Benchmarking paper presents a novel methodology to evaluate how well autonomous driving systems avoid crashes. The study, which to our knowledge is the first of its kind, introduces a reference model that represents an ideal human state for driving—the response time and evasive action of a human driver that is non-impaired, with eyes always on the conflict (NIEON). Put simply, unlike an average human driver, NIEON is always attentive and doesn’t get distracted or fatigued¹. The data showed that the Waymo Driver outperformed the NIEON human driver model by avoiding more collisions and mitigating serious injury risk in simulated fatal crash scenarios.

(From https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety)

AIUI (I'm not on that team), a major challenge is getting good baseline data. Collision reports may not (reliably) capture that kind of data, and it's clearly subjective or often self-reported outside of cases like DUI charges.

> You do not get to counter-argue: “What matters is the rate of cases per mile driven” without actually presenting that number with supporting evidence. Otherwise the only sound conclusion is the default presumption of non-safety.

I then pointed out how Waymo does present such evidence. But, if you applied that argument to Cruise you would be wrong. That demonstrates how that argument (when not presenting the numbers) can be used to support both good and bad and is thus a bad argument.

The correct argument when somebody points to anecdotes of bad outcomes is to present statistically sound data of good outcomes, not argue they did not present statistically sound data of bad outcomes thus you get to assume it is good.

> In the case of Waymo, we have some tentative supporting evidence from this and other studies Waymo has run. However, that is still insufficient, even ignoring the lack of audits by non-conflicted parties, to strongly conclude Waymo is safer than a human. The evidence is promising, but it is only prudent to wait for further confirmation.

You are not making a distinction between concluding unsafe and not being able to conclude safe. It is standard practice to not presume safety and that positive evidence of safety must be presented. Failure to demonstrate statistically sound evidence of danger is not proof of safety. Failure to disprove X is not proof of X. This is a very important point to avoid fallacious conclusions on these matters.

To discuss your specific points. Yes, the data is promising, but it is insufficient.

Traffic fatalities occur on the order of 1 per 60-80 million miles. Waymo has yet to reach even one expected traffic fatality yet. They appear to be on track to doing better, but there is not enough data yet.

The reports Waymo present are authored by Waymo. Even the Swiss Re study is in cooperation with Swiss Re, not a independent study by Swiss Re. The studies are fairly transparent, they point to various public datasets, there are fairly extensive public reporting requirements, and Waymo has not demonstrated clear malfeasance, so we can tentatively assume they are “honest”. But we have plenty of examples of bad actors such as Cruise, cigarette companies, VW , etc. who have done end-runs around these types of basic safeguards.

Waymo operational domain is not equivalent to standard human operational domain. They attempt to account for this in their studies, but it is a fairly complex topic with poor public datasets (which is why they cooperated with Swiss Re) so the correctness of their analysis has not been borne out yet. When Waymo incorporates freeways into their public offerings this will enable a less complicated analysis which would lend greater confidence to their conclusions.

Waymo is still in “testing”. As their processes appear to be good, we should assume that their testing procedures are safer than should be expected out of actual deployment or verification procedures. That is not a negative statement. In fact, it would be problematic if their “testing” procedures were less or even equal in safety to their deployment procedures. That is just how testing is. You can and must apply more scrutiny to incomplete systems in use and prevent increased risks especially while under scrutiny otherwise you are almost certainly going to be worse off in deployment where there is less scrutiny. We have yet to see how this will translate out to deployment, so we will need to wait and see if safety while under test will appropriately apply to safety while in release. This is analogous to improved outcomes for patients in medical studies even if they are given the placebo because they just get more care in general while in the study.

Anyways, Waymo appears to be doing as well and honestly as can be determined by a third party observer. I am optimistic about their data and outcomes, but it is only prudent to avoid over-optimism in safety-critical systems and not accept lazy evidence or arguments. High standards are the only way to safety.

For now, yes. My point is that there's very often big gap between "how safely does it work in a lab when the people running it are trying to play up its safety" versus "how safely will X actually work once we start using it everywhere."

Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well!

If we want self-driving cars to retain the same safety later, there needs to be something which prevents humans from flicking the safety-versus-speed dial a little bit over and over in order to make quarterly earnings projections.

(You also only get into this scenario when your stopping distance is shorter than your reaction time and perception length. Something automated drivers can manage better than humans.)

As someone who grew up BEFORE ABS, drove in the winter (in Canada), including first winter owning my own car with sport tires because I couldn't afford winter tires, spun / slid a few times even with top-of-the-line winter tires, etc.

ABS is a game changer in the snow. I used to go to an empty parking lot every winter during early snowfalls to play around and skid, start/stop, etc. Even EARLY ABS ('94 VW) means that 98% of the time (IMHO), the answer even in snow/ice is "slam on the brakes". Sure, you might have a few percent longer stopping distance than an expert who can do threshold braking - are you an expert? And the fact that you don't lose control of the steering is a huge advantage.

do you also maintain a long following distance when there's a car right next to you in the next lane? I try to, because I don't want to stay in someone's blind spot, but sometimes it's not really possible to fall back.

If you drive a lot (like the person in the countryside) the car that is there when you want to is worth owning vs a shared car that you might have to wait for. Plus by owning the car you can just leave your golf clubs in the trunk.

If you can stand being in a used car you will discover that shared cars are all more expensive just because at the first sign of cosmetic wear they get rid of it while seats that have been sat in a few times are still good enough for many more years. (unless you almost never drive anyway)

Because of the above I don't see much growth in the shared car market. There will be some because there are people who don't have parking, people who don't drive much, and people who demand a new car that they don't otherwise care about. However the vast majority of people will still own their own car.

OTOH, if I'm in a decent-sized car (minivan?) for 45 minutes+, I can get work done. I can then stay less time at work.

They're probably too stupid to think like that, though.

Dooring people aside, what do you do if someone just leaves the door open when they leave their ride?!

Flock is the same way. For example here's the Flock privacy policy from one of SF's fine local shopping centers: https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-poli...

> Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely. Should any information from the LPR Dashboard be needed to assist with a security or law enforcement matter, it may be retained indefinitely, in paper and electronic form, as part of the security file until it is determined it is no longer needed; in addition, it may be shared with local law enforcement who may retain it in accordance with their own retention policy.

If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. The one on their website is conspicuously labeled Waymo Web Privacy Policy lol

No, that says “Accidents (unintentional injuries)” as a category are collectively the third leading cause of death, and that category contains a lot of things.

CDC “Underlying Cause of Death” dataset sez… https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg

- “Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic” is the 50th leading cause of death at 0.4% of deaths.

- “Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)” is the 108th leading cause of death at 0.2% of deaths.