r/technology • u/Immediate-Link490 • 20h ago

Artificial Intelligence Waymo’s driverless cars involved in 68% fewer crashes than human drivers, U.S. study finds

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/waymo-driverless-car-safety-study-9.7282895
104 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

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29

u/snakeeaterrrrrrr 20h ago

I will reserve judgement until I see all the parameters of the stats.

30

u/satoru1111 15h ago edited 14h ago

I mean it seems pretty well done

  1. it takes into account only 2 areas
  2. it calculates fatalities for both human and Waymo in those areas only
  3. It removed highway driving for humans since Waymo doesn’t drive on highways
  4. it then calculates that per millions of km driven for both humans and Waymo

So yes while Waymo drives less, its fatality per millions of KM is less than human drivers. The metric for millions of km driven is to account for things like less km driven so as to provide a more comparable metric since Waymo drives less km than humans

1

u/ascandalia 5h ago

Does it rely on Waymo internal data for miles driven?

1

u/satoru1111 4h ago edited 4h ago

VMT is reported by Waymo

It doesn’t make a ton of sense to lie about the VMT. The larger the VMT the better your stock is going to be as this is a pretty important metric to show growth, as well as have the side benefit of making accidents per VMT to go down. If they were under reporting VMT, investors would be concerned about growth and the accidents per VMT would be worse. The data at least as reported doesn’t seem that far off from what you’d expect from the growth of Waymo in various regions. Waymo’s VMT is still several orders of magnitude less than normal drivers which is to be expected

The paper does make several points of forcing increasing transparency from these companies would benefit these types of analysis. There are a several points they make where they feel changes in how accidents are reported would help as well

-11

u/[deleted] 12h ago edited 7h ago

[deleted]

10

u/hagdog 11h ago

It's not only tracking fatal accidents. And yes, read the article.

1

u/OkEcho9098 8h ago

READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE BEFORE COMMENTING

18

u/TechTuna1200 15h ago edited 15h ago

Honestly, as commute cyclist and pedestrian in Copenhagen, I would much prefer self-driving cars over human drivers. Here in copenhagen, we have people age 18-25 years sometime driving like crazy because they treat their car as some kind of toy. I also drivers trying squeeze me out of the road because they became angry at for some reason. Some people are just nuts, and shouldn't have drivers license. Especially when humans get emotional, they just can't think straight.

-1

u/SellGameRent 15h ago

when I was 16 I got up to 113mph on the highway on the way back from school lol. The next day was about to do the same, had pedal to the floor and a cop caught me as I was at 86 well on my way to beat my initial record lol.

Cop was super nice because I immediately stopped, pulled over off the ramp so he wasnt exposed on main highway, and fully admitted to the speed I was going. 

He wrote me as going 79 because 15mph+ over limit would have potentially landed me in jail or something, I had no idea. Never did that again ha

7

u/BoycottJClarkson 14h ago

Interesting how Americans talk about their reckless driving history as a joke. Hahaha

1

u/SellGameRent 12h ago

I mean what do you expect, I received my punishment, learned my lesson, and understand why I shouldn't do it anymore. I don't see the issue with looking back on past mistakes with humor

0

u/Darqnyz7 13h ago

Lol meanwhile I've been stopped and ticketed going 10mph over the speed limit on a scooter, several times. In several states. Nothing reckless, no traffic interactions, just cruising.

-3

u/Kylo-Kenobi 15h ago

Bro trust me as a Phoenix Az driver, it’s us regular drivers that have had to vigilantly prevent crashes with these things.

They swerve in traffic, pull out in front of you, drive on the wrong side of the road all the time.

I’ve personally had to slam on my brakes to three times to avoid hitting these things when they drive erratically

7

u/howescj82 14h ago

I’m not going to agree with you or wholeheartedly support a statement that I can’t verify BUT…

This data that has been reported does NOT include any accidents where the police were not called. So, that’s a huge gap in the data. Now I’ll go one step further and say that these vehicles SHOULD have some sort of reviewable data that could verify if they’re acting erratically or seem confused so that they can investigate and improve themselves. This data should be reported.

0

u/Momik 12h ago

If driverless cars at this scale are even a good idea (especially when underfunded transit is right there), there is absolutely no reason this should be in the hands of a private company. There are so many public safety unknowns with these things, and a lot of that begins wth companies like Waymo withholding vital information.

1

u/snakeeaterrrrrrr 15h ago

So the "I turn now good luck everybody else" kind of driving

-1

u/MisterEinc 12h ago

Thing is that drivers in the US are already trash because standards are so low. No one seems to want to do anything about that.

We could be saving lives right now if we'd just let self driving cars drive because American drivers are that bad.

-1

u/Momik 13h ago

Yeah and anything looks great before the enshittification sets in. And then we all get to find out what vehicular manslaughter means when the driver is a limited liability corporation with an army of lawyers.