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Comment by sinuhe69 | Hacker News Reader

I believe for the insurance purposes, this difference is irrelevant. The point is under the current condition, Waymo driverless cars are safer than human controlled cars, thus the question of liability and permit to operate should be cleared.

The question whether humans are truly inferior to robots in term of controlling cars is rather a question of ego than a practical one.

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If you had insurance for a human whose vehicle could only operate between 9pm to 6am, would it still be more expensive than Waymo's?

Probably, because Waymo runs 24/7 in San Francisco and has been for a while.

Fatalities are significantly more likely if you're driving at night than during the day, so probably yes.

Not sure that can be concluded easily as you would need to synthetically create a human driver profile with the same restrictions as Waymo. It does not say that in the linked article.

If the accident data for humans contains information about weather, location, additional complications, then it should be possible to only filter out accidents that are within Waymo's restriction. You'll similarly need to filter the human-driven miles, but a statistical approach doesn't seem to hard.

So ... possible, but TFA doesn't say, of course.

Of course insurance data doesn't contain that.

Have you worked in the real world?

You've unfortunately gotten back in the habit of breaking the site guidelines regularly - not just in this comment but in many others. Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37110814

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36874717

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36633867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36624768

I had the impression that you'd largely fixed this for quite a long time, which was great, but this is not acceptable. We have to rate-limit and eventually ban accounts that post like this. I don't want to ban you so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick properly to the rules, we'd appreciate it.

You need the driving data to contain that, too, not just the accident data to create similar driving profiles. Might not be so easy.

> I believe for the insurance purposes, this difference is irrelevant.

Can you explain this some more?

My understanding is that an insurance policy is valid in a certain set of circumstances.

They can argue that if you drive in in unintended conditions, it's your fault and they won't pay?

(But if it's true, it just make me want a self-drive car even less)

My insurance covers me driving any road in the US. I can't drive in Mexico but if it is a legal road in the US I can drive it any time. They assume i'm mostly driving near my house, but I can drive elsewhere.

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