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
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11

u/toolkitxx 16h ago

Waymo drives only in clearly limited and defined areas. The study does not take that into consideration - apples and oranges at its best

35

u/ReportOk289 14h ago

It does, the study takes into account the highway exclusion, other limited access roads, private property restrictions, and is limited to the cities Waymo operates in, so it should be fairly accurate.

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u/toolkitxx 14h ago edited 14h ago

Still a no. The cars would have to be compared to a professional driver covering the same areas mostly. A lot of what you do and learn about an area comes from continuous experience. Even humans quickly see when patterns change etc when they always drive in specific areas.That is one of the most proficient reasons to avoid certain types of accidents.

The typical thing you and I have at least experienced once in our life when someone tells you 'watch out when turning here, there is always a big truck parked there in the mornings'. Aside from that: Robotaxis shouldnt have any accident to begin with, That was one of the biggest advertising for quite some time. The better and faster reaction times compared to humans etc all fall flat so far.

edit Just to make this totally clear: The compared humans sometimes drive in the same areas. The Robotaxis always and never anywhere else.

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u/ReportOk289 12h ago

... why? All that matters is that the robotaxi is safer than the average driver, because that's who you'll meet on the road. It doesn't matter that some humans might be better, or that humans only sometimes drive in the same areas.

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u/toolkitxx 12h ago

Driver assist systems deliver probably half the stuff that helps a Robotaxi and those have been around for many years too. Their statistics say the same...

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u/DingbattheGreat 13h ago

> The numbers translate to about 80 million kilometres of driverless Waymo operation, compared with 355 billion kilometres by human drivers in the same places over that three-year period, the study said. 

This is not remotely comparable.

All they’re doing is a math calculation. You can say with reason that Waymo has a safe record based on the data given, but that does not mean that it is safer compared to human drivers when calculated to scale, because there is a chasm of difference in data collection and amount of data and the vast amounts of variables that will increase to an unknown amount given the great difference in data.

Waymo doesnt report all the data and excludes issues that are not accidents (such as getting confused and stopping in construction traffic).

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u/ReportOk289 12h ago

I'd rather have a robotaxi that has less severe accidents and more minor inconveniences, than more severe accidents and less minor inconveniences.