Not surprising.
> To scale up, they would need to drive less conservatively
Can you quantify this? I think that self-driving cars should drive conservatively. Human drivers who are aggressive or risk taking are idiots even if they get to where they are going on time.
Driverless cars should drive like public transport buses (at least around here) / school buses. Conservative, slower than you would like and safe.
For example, if they need to make a lane change for a turn on a congested street, they will wait for someone to let them in rather than “pushing” their way in like a human driver (especially a bus driver) would. When that inevitably doesn’t happen, they are forced to go around the block and try again.
That exact behavior happened during the “Uber” ride I took on a Waymo, and it is possible they have improved since then.
I agree, but the specifics get tricky. It is possible to drive so conservatively that it’s unpredictable and therefore dangerous.
I’ve known some terrible conservative drivers in my time; I was a passenger with someone who stopped abruptly in an intersection despite having a green light because they were afraid someone else was going to run the red (while it’s fair to say the person who rear-ended us was at fault, it was an accident that would not happen with a more normal driver).
Maybe I’m nit picking on the difference between conservative and unsurprising.
If you compare a traffic light intersection where there is a clear moment at which you should stop or continue with a roundabout where you need to make a judgement call; being overly conservative would mean stopping at the roundabout until there is 0 traffic.
There was a discussion on this in ep 454 of Freakonomics radio.