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Jonathon Vandezande's avatar

Interestingly, due to the required reporting by Waymo and Cruise, we effectively have a highly accurate record of the ability of normal drivers. Obviously, these records may be slightly biased by the driving style of a driverless car; however, but when stopped they are indistinguishible from cars with drivers. Waymo was hit 17 times while stationary, compared to hitting 2 stationary vehicles—this is a vast improvement in safety!

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt's avatar

I think that while you are definitely considering this, you still aren't seriously _enough_ considering the heterogeneity of human driver behavior. Waymo/Cruise vehicles are (a) not driving in rural settings (b) not driving in bad weather (mostly; SF and Phx don't have a lot of bad weather) (c) always driving expensive, late-model cars (d) are driven at fairly low speeds. Combined with the factors you do mention, the human crash rate and even more the human serious injury rate for that situation is most likely very low, but crucially we have no real idea what it is. Giving every driver in the US a Jaguar I-Pace would almost certainly reduce the accident rate a bunch too.

Of course, how relevant that is depends on what question we're trying to ask about self-driving (eg, is Waymo increasing the safety of ride-hail in SF?). The Waymo study of high-severity accidents in Phoenix is useful for that, but there are still a lot of confounders.

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