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> 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.

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.

> 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars.

> 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 percent improvement doesn't really matter though. The fact that it is better than even just professionals still means that there are fewer crashes, and therefore they are improving overall road safety.

* In a better car, serviced much better than the average professional vehicle.

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.

> Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather

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

Also there is some sort of bias not accounted for: People drive when most people drive and most people are stuck in the most dangerous area: traffic. Waymo driving at night on empty streets is not a good indicator for accident prevention when measured against the average human, who is stuck mostly in traffic.

Why do you believe Waymo's miles are from driving at night on empty streets? They drive when there's rideshare demand, a majority of which occurs during daytime and in the busiest areas of a city. They are no less stuck in traffic than the average human.

Not the same cars though, people are not driving newish mid range SUV with professional maintenance all the time.

Waymos drive in all weather in the cities they're deployed in; cities where people crash all the time in all types of weather.

Waymo ( and self driving programs as well) have been careful not to go for public large scale deployments in any city with difficult weather and for good reason focused on cities like Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, SF[1] so far with easy driving weather.

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.

They only compare to human accidents in the areas they operate. It doesn't matter where they don't operate today as they don't try to include human crash numbers from those cities either for the comparison.

Every time someone thinks this is some gotcha, but it isn't. Their methodology clearly attempts an apples-to-apples comparison.

This isn't even true because the dataset compares against conditions IN THE CITY they operate in. They operate year-round in SF and in the same conditions human drivers do.

I am very curious where waymo is at in adverse conditions. Do the cars totally lock up and become useless? Or are they at the level of your 65 year old mother driving in a thunderstorm at night? Passable, but nothing they are gonna put their name on.

Seems they intend to come to Washington D.C. next year, which does get a pretty wide gamut of weather.

Maybe humans shouldn't drive in those conditions then.

It may not be option to most people in the US (most self driving use case is built around the US market)

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 a chicken and egg scenario. Before we had cars, people got to work fine. Now we're OK with killing 40,000 people a year and injuring many more so that people can "get to work".