It's good to be skeptical of the source, but I can't remember seeing any substantive criticism of the methodology or conclusions.
Humans drive in all weather conditions on all types of roads and also many types of personal vehicles of varying ages and conditions.
Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather and is limited to a relatively large and safer expensive SUV that is maintained professionally in a fleet.
Studies like this rarely account for such factors , they are compare optimal conditions for self driving to average conditions for humans.
Even if waymo was better when accounting for these factors , if it was much worse in the conditions humans typically are expected to drive [1] they self driving is still less safe than humans on average .
A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft).
I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group .
[1] no study will ever show this as they wouldn’t be able to trial it under those conditions if it is not safe enough
There have been promising progress and there have been hints of a New York trial soon, but it it well known that self driving cars have not done large scale trial in cities with bad weather.
[1] Yes, I am aware SF gets a bit of bad weather with fog and rain but not nearly not as much to make driving quite unsafe like somewhere that gets a feet of snow in 24 hours in winter, and likely promixity to engineering HQs and favourable regulatory climate influenced the SF choice.
Every time someone thinks this is some gotcha, but it isn't. Their methodology clearly attempts an apples-to-apples comparison.
Seems they intend to come to Washington D.C. next year, which does get a pretty wide gamut of weather.
If you've been in both a human drive cab and a Waymo, you'd definitely not say this. I see cabs have accidents all the time. Never seen a Waymo have one.
Also, being in a Waymo feels much safer than a human driven car, even my own when I'm driving!
I highly doubt taxicabs are safer than Waymos.
In fact, here is some data:
Over every 1 million miles driven, there are 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars. And according to Waymo, they have 2.1 crashes per million miles.
> Waymo 2.1 crashes
The numbers become much less 80+% plus claim in the article as you remove factors. It comes closer to 30% with professional drivers.
Livery car is still not always well maintained a high sitting SUV with better visibility[1], perhaps with all these factors included if it is 20% better it is impressive technical achievement for sure, but not going to create headlines anywhere.
The point is the methodology is not as objective as it could be, and this is biased/selective claim, not that self driving cannot be better than humans.
[1] Also there is major difference in the price point between Waymo and Livery cars, I cannot say how it will influence rates but the different rates means different class of clients using at different times of day/night to different locations that needs to be normalized for.
The % matters because it is close enough excluding these factors, so we can not definitely say it currently better than humans yet, close but not conclusively so.
That is not a argument against them. It is a simple function of economics, i.e. as long as it better than Lyft/Uber(they are already) that is the price point that Waymo operates at, so it is safer for most users and easy choice to make.
However if you can afford and regularly use high quality private livery car services then the data has to be lot clearer to make the switch.
the study is comparing Waymo to accidents occurred in the same cities where Waymo operates, and my understanding is that Waymo drives 7 days a week, 24h a day in those cities, so same roads, same weather. Seems a legit comparison
In America driving is a economic necessity, from going to work to even the grocery shop needs cars and dependency increases inversely with affluence [1]
Mass public transit is non existent barring very few regions.
So car (for commute) and flight (for long distance) are the only two viable transit options .
People cannot choose to not work because weather is bad, and remote work / work from home applies to only some jobs.
[1] food and other service deserts are more likely less affluent neighborhoods meaning you will need to drive and for longer for food , pharmacy or any other services if you are low income .
This is all low speed so wasn’t a safety issue (aside from road rage it might trigger in someone), but focusing only on safety also ignores incidents like this.
Aside from the criticisms about the safety methodology outlined in another chain, I think there’s a bait and switch here where they don’t talk about negative impacts to traffic, freezes, inability to handle situations and don’t evaluate their performance against other drivers.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Waymo is doing well to being the first to truly autonomous, but they’re intentionally putting their best foot forward and trying not to draw attention to any of their shortcomings.