Human drivers keep rear-ending Waymos

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/human-drivers-are-to-blame-for-most-serious-waymo-collisions/

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

73 125 2 years ago

xnx• 2 years ago

Same source information as "Human drivers are to blame for most serious Waymo collisions" 3 days ago | 94 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41516934

nkingsy• 2 years ago

Strange headline for a very positive article about Waymo safety

codeflo• 2 years ago

It’s also possible that Waymo's erratic braking contributed to a few of those rear-end crashes

It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake. The article doesn't say whether Waymos are rear-ended more often than human drivers, but it's plausible that this could be the case. Human drivers have a mental model of what other drivers will or won't do, and that model might not work well for autonomous vehicles. It's very possible that Waymos are faster to put on the brakes in unclear situations than a human driver would be, and/or that they categorize different situations as dangerous than a human driver would. I'm sure human drivers will eventually adapt to the behavior of these robots sharing the road with them, but that might take a bit of time and experience.

ghaff6• 2 years ago

You can definitely cause accidents without technically committing a traffic violation. We all assume that other people behave "normally" in traffic while providing some margin.

falcolas2• 2 years ago

You can definitely cause accidents without technically committing a traffic violation.

Yup. Just drive the exact speed limit on every highway you're on. And if you're on larger width highways, you can do that in the left lane, since you're at the legal maximum allowed speed.

Driving safely and driving perfectly legally are not always compatible.

dmurray3• 2 years ago

If you brake more aggressively, you will be involved in more accidents, but in fewer accidents that are considered your fault (courts and insurance companies will almost always find against the rear-ender).

You might also be involved in less serious accidents: a low or moderate speed rear end collision is safer overall than hitting a pedestrian, T-boning someone, or colliding at the higher speed from before braking.

That's a trade off that Waymo presumably know about, and are taking intentionally. It would be interesting to know what they prioritise: is it fewer overall deaths and injuries, or fewer accidents where they were determined to be at fault?

kube-system5• 2 years ago

You really can't control the behavior of the driver behind you, you just have to trust that they're going to do their job of not hitting things in front of them, just as you are. If humans are hitting things in front of them more often because they're concerned that the person behind them might not stop, that's probably indicative of a flaw in human driving behavior. The rules surrounding accident fault exist because of the individual responsibility assigned to driving behavior. If someone would have rear-ended a hesitant waymo, they would have rear-ended an equally hesitant human.

isthatafact• 2 years ago

"If you brake more aggressively, you will be involved in more accidents"

Is that statement based on evidence?

While that seems plausible, it also seems counter-intuitive to me. I suspect that many crashes happen because someone was afraid to apply maximum brakes, either out of fear that someone might hit them from behind, or simply due to being unfamiliar with braking hard.

Suppafly• 2 years ago

If you brake more aggressively, you will be involved in more accidents, but in fewer accidents that are considered your fault (courts and insurance companies will almost always find against the rear-ender).

I was talking to a kid once that was bragging about how his dad always got rear-ended, due to aggressive braking, but it was 'never his fault'. I was like "your dad is an asshole, that isn't something brag about."

happymellon2• 2 years ago

Of you brake aggressively and someone rear ends you, could it not also be that the person behind was too close in the first place?

Not to be rude, but American drivers are not normally considered great, and San Francisco is number 7 on the list of cities you are most likely to get in an accident in the US.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/auto-accident/cities-mo...

mnahkies• 2 years ago

I was going to make a similar comment. One important aspect of being a safe driver is being predictable. Cars (or cyclists/pedestrians for that matter) that suddenly change speed or direction without warning create a lot of risk.

Edit: I've been down voted so as clarification I mean a sudden change without any obvious/predictable reason. Think the person that realized too late that they wanted to turn here and instead of continuing and turning around they slam the breaks. Yes you need to be ready for this, but it's still more risky.

kjksf• 2 years ago

Consider famous autonomous Uber crash that killed a person illegally crossing the road at night.

The right thing to do for the autonomous software would be to break hard to avoid killing that person.

If there was a car behind that Uber car, it would likely rear end the Uber. That would be preferable to killing the human. The software would be right. Unpredictable but right.

If the read ending happens because Waymo erroneously did phantom break (i.e. it did break because software was confused), then software would be wrong.

Without analyzing rear ending accidents to decide if the software was right or wrong, we can't say if Waymo did the right thing or not.

In human-to-human crashes, rear-ender is presumed guilty.

CalRobert4• 2 years ago

One big issue is that pedestrians includes kids. And kids change speed or direction very suddenly. In that scenario, the risk comes from the car, though, not the kids. Unless getting bumped in to by a 3 year old is fatal.

Having a child who's a runner made it clear just how much the world is literally asphalt ribbons of death right out everyone's front door.

specialist2• 2 years ago

One important aspect of being a safe driver is being PREDICTABLE.

Bingo. (Emphasis mine.)

Design knowing full well that humans are error prone, and account for that. Wisdom popularized by Donald Norman's book Design of Everyday Things [1988].

We added a 3rd brake light, distinct from left & right turn signal lights, to reduce rear-ending. It worked, right?

Changes will be needed to accomodate robotaxis. For instance, one suggestion I read, repeated here without any judgement, is adding blue running lights, so that humans know a vehical is autonomous.

From the hip, because I don't know anything about robotaxis or road safety rules: Waymo could use those blue lights to signal when someone is tailgating too closely. As in too close for the robotaxi's own stopping distance.

Who knows? Someone will figure something out.

spacecadet• 2 years ago

I tend to agree with you, I have decades of driving experience across a huge range of model years and vehicle types. Im very cautious and maintain distances as Im often driving something with subpar stopping power or lacking ABS. My observations have been similar, first when breaking assist appeared and now with self-driving. Those vehicles are quicker to react, more prone to over-react, slower to return to normal, and apply too much breaking power. Ive watched other cars in front of me hard break in a series of what appears to me as erratic decisions, because of what I assume is noise created by traffic patterns, pedestrians, and latency. I also wonder if humans will adjust their behavior... people seem so distracted while driving today.

CalRobert4• 2 years ago

When I was taking motorcycle safety they made it clear you needed to ride only at a speed where you could stop in the space you knew to be clear. That means if the car in front of you turned in to a stationary boulder, you needed to be able to stop.

Hopefully human drivers learn to apply the same wisdom to their own driving.

nh2• 2 years ago

Indeed.

Most countries' driving laws for good reason demand that you must maintain enough distance to the vehicle in front of you so that if it hard-breaks surprisingly for _whatever reason_, you will not touch it.

Lots of people ignore that. They are bad drivers. This normalises bad driving.

Robot cars being very good at breaking quickly just makes that more obvious, and will hopefully educate more people to drive in practice how they should have been driving all along.

whaleofatw2022• 2 years ago

Tbh it's gotten worse post covid. Following distances seem shorter than ever and on top of that people are doing 10-15 over when in 2019 it was only 5 over in most of my state.

freeopinion• 2 years ago

As a human driver I have to be prepared to drive behind first-year drivers, teenage racers, great-grandmas, people late for work, people on a Sunday tour, people putting on their makeup, people talking on their phone.

I don't really see autonomous vehicles as adding some vastly different curve at me. Wait, what?! They obey the law? How will I ever adjust to that?

moffkalast• 2 years ago

That is a problem isn't it? For human drivers seeing a line of cars drive 20 over the speed limit almost always makes us follow herd instinct and "keep up with traffic" even if it's technically illegal. Something a self driving car (I presume) won't do. The problem is entirely on the human side though and needs to be solved there.

HarryHirsch• 2 years ago

Experienced drivers have a mental model of other drivers - when you see someone driving slowly and erratically you know to keep at a distance, that fellow is going to hit the brakes suddenly or make an unexpected turn.

Waymos on the other hand, they are so new that other traffic participants don't know what to make of them. Maybe it improves in the future because people get more experienced, maybe it doesn't because the alien intelligence is not compatible with human intelligence and those things are inherently unpredictable. We'll see.

martindbp• 2 years ago

I wonder if the NHTSA-stop is partially to blame

psychlops• 2 years ago

Or if they have aggressive regenerative braking on their cars.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Or just vote them of the roads forever.

Modified30192• 2 years ago

It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake

Yeah I experience that in my own truck (a 2022 dodge ram provided by and for work) has this awful delay in acceleration. It’s almost like it needs to “spin up” before there’s power to move, and it’s generally slow when it comes to moving up gears.

This results in people misjudging my vehicular body language, thinking that I’m waiting/indecisive when I’m not. So by the time I’ve started moving from a stop, the other guy got convinced I was letting them go first and is also moving.

Activating “Tow Haul” mode every time I start up seems to mostly, but not entirely mitigates the lethargy.

Also the wheelbase is too damn long, which makes reasonable turns in parking lots into curbs scraping or 3-7 point affairs to get out of.

I‘ve driven boats with better handling than this stupid vehicle.

Vrondi• 2 years ago

What model truck do you have?

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

It's possible confuse other drivers without technically making a mistake

Exactly this. One of the most important things that enhances safety is to avoid doing anything that surprises others.

yadaeno2• 2 years ago

No, the most important thing is not causing a collision.

We don’t need to guess here, Waymo is way safer than human drivers as a car and a pedestrian. So clearly optimizing for “not confusing human drivers” is not correct.

Human drivers frequently run into stationary objects and plow over bikers/pedestrians so maybe there’s a huge category of situations where they *should* be surprised

carapace4• 2 years ago

I'm a fan of self-driving vehicles (can we please call them auto-autos?) because they are, as this article points out, already safer than human drivers.

Still, it is and always has been completely and totally insane to test these heavy fast robots on public streets. I never in a million years would have thought we would do that.

The obvious thing to do is:

A) Start with light slow robots, like a golf cart covered in foam, and work your way up to Knight Industries Two Thousand. Going directly for KITT is a fetish.

B) Test it in one of those artificial cities with, you know, people who have at least signed waivers to be human test dummies for your two-ton high-speed killer robots?

E.g.:

Mcity is a 32-acre simulated urban and suburban environment that includes a network of roads with intersections, traffic signs and signals, streetlights, building facades, sidewalks and construction obstacles. It is designed to support rigorous, repeatable testing of new technologies before they are tried out on public streets and highways.

https://news.umich.edu/u-m-opens-mcity-test-environment-for-...

TZubiri• 2 years ago

can we please call them auto-autos?

Proposal accepted.

carapace4• 2 years ago

Thank you. :)

abound• 2 years ago

You have described more or less exactly how Waymo did their rollout.

A. They used to have these cute little cars (e.g. golf cart sized) that couldn't go over 30 mph, long before they rolled out the Chryslers and Jaguars

B. My memory is fuzzy on the details, but I'm sure there's public info on this: Waymo owned or leased some massive plot of land where they did exactly that, testing all sorts of chaotic scenarios (weird construction, skateboards coming out of nowhere, etc)

carapace4• 2 years ago

That's great! It's probably why they haven't killed anybody yet.

dopylitty• 2 years ago

The other thing that should be done is to create a uniform federal test that computer driven cars must pass before being allowed on the streets. The test would have a large variety of environments (fast, slow, construction zones, farmers markets) as well as conditions (wet, dry, light, dark). The test would also measure how the computer driven car reacts when one or all of its sensors are damaged. Only after passing the test should a car be allowed on the road. Any software or hardware changes would necessitate a full re-test.

None of this "well the manufacturer says it works so let's just let 'er rip" that has already gotten people killed.

And yes human drivers should have to pass the same test in the vehicle they intend to drive.

bastawhiz2• 2 years ago

a uniform federal test

Just like the existing uniform state run test that shows how all licensed human drivers are safe? It shouldn't need to be pointed out how any kind of standardized test isn't going to prove or even realistically evaluate the safety of a system like this. We can't even get a standardized test for GPU performance that manufacturers don't cheat on.

The test would also measure how the computer driven car reacts when one or all of its sensors are damaged.

I do agree with this, though: we already expect cars to behave well in the face of hardware failures. Autonomous or no, cars should have requirements for failure modes.

bastawhiz2• 2 years ago

Still, it is and always has been completely and totally insane to test these heavy fast robots on public streets

Another comment pointed out that Google did roll out in an extremely safe way, but to this point: do you still consider this to be the testing phase? You might call it that but if we're at a point where "they are, as this article points out, already safer than human drivers" (and in particular, nearly 2^3 times better in some cases) that would suggest that the fundamental concept of the vehicles no longer need testing.

It's simply not possible to develop autonomous vehicles completely in simulated environments. There's two kinds of testing:

1. Testing that the car behaves appropriately such that it's suitable for public use. This is the phase where you're not sure that it's safe.

2. Iteratively improving the vehicle after it's been deemed safe. This is where you're rolling out changes that you believe will improve safety and comfort on an existing safe product.

Google already did #1. They did it for over a decade. If you believe that #1 and #2 are not two separate phases, then if #1 can't be evaluated with real human drivers you can't ever get to a place where you deem the vehicles safe. There's no threshold where you can confidently say the cars will behave well because you've never put them in front of real, unpaid humans on real, non-simulated roads. How could you call them safe in good conscience if you've never tested them outside of a test environment? How do you know you've controlled every last variable? You simply don't and can't.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

Makes you wonder about the decision to allow human drivers.

duxup• 2 years ago

It was the best option at the time.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

Fair

CalRobert4• 2 years ago

You're not alone! When the car showed up there were a lot of people very upset that their cities were now much more dangerous. The car industry pushed a lot of changes to push the blame for getting killed on the dead pedestrians. It helped that cars were much liked by the wealthy and disliked by the poor.

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

yial• 2 years ago

I haven’t driven behind a waymo. So this is just curiosity.

But, having used and been behind other assisted driving vehicles. (Which one thing I find exhausting with auto cruise is that people pass, usually on the right, and then cut in constantly if you have the distance set safely)…

But as another commenter said about mental models of drivers. I wonder if part of it is they brake sooner, and perhaps more completely.

Example: someone turning left. Most human drivers will slow and go around if safe. Does waymo brake far away, and abruptly?

Again, I can’t comment on waymo, but I know my own vehicle too will sometimes brake late and harder if set to auto because of sensor distance. (I try to not let this happen and over ride and brake sooner of course, gradually slowing vs flying up, detecting a stop or slowdown, and then braking aggressively )

robrenaud• 2 years ago

I just moved to SF a couple weeks ago. In city driving, I really like driving near Waymos as opposed to human cars. You quickly learn that the Waymos drive well and passively, which enables safe, assertive driving near them. Being able to condition on them not being aggressive and dumb (like some fraction of humans drivers, mostly young/male) makes driving easier.

wrp• 2 years ago

This sounds eerily like the difference between men and women drivers, as in the traditional explanations for why male drivers are more often judged to be at fault.

jaharios• 2 years ago

Many accidents are because humans are in a hurry, something slow self-driving cars won't even know what it is.

Comparing self-driving cars with human car drivers is stupid, a more fair comparison is trains or trams, which also are less prone to accidents and you can't be in a hurry when taking a ride and make them go faster.

m4632• 2 years ago

I drove a tesla with "full self driving (supervised)" and with the default settings, the car will only go up to the speed limit. You would think this should be ok, but there are plenty of 25 mph zones where even conservative drivers will do 30 or 35 mph.

I had to take over the driving in these places because cars would pile up behind me, drivers would get impatient, and in some cases people would get angry and tailgate or try to pass where they shouldn't.

Turns out there is a FSD setting that lets the car adjust to conditions, and it will "go with the flow", even going over the speed limit, but matching the traffic and harmonizing.

Note there is a concept traffic engineers use called "the 85th percentile rule" that helps design highways by setting the speed limit for maximum compliance. Using this rule leads to the safest roads.

Some folks seem to be outraged that people don't comply with the speed limits, but when they are set artificially low, speed variance increases and roads become more dangerous. I think driving the speed limit or below in these places might amplify this.

data on speed variance vs safety (fig 4):

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/17098/...

crote3• 2 years ago

Note there is a concept traffic engineers use called "the 85th percentile rule" that helps design highways by setting the speed limit for maximum compliance. Using this rule leads to the safest roads.

The fundamental flaw in this concept is that it completely ignores that 1) the ideal speed depends on external circumstances and intended road use, and that 2) road design heavily influences driving speed. If you want to have a safe road network, you have to design it for a specific speed. When done properly, drivers will naturally be driving at the intended speed. Speeding doesn't happen because it doesn't feel safe to speed.

Highways have to be straight and wide, without any level crossings. People are supposed to drive at high speeds, so it is designed in such a way that it is safe to do so, and it feels safe to do so. Local access roads are narrow, twisty, have relatively poor visibility, and are equipped with things like speed bumps. You're supposed to drive at slow speeds because there are lots of level crossings and driveways, so they are intentionally designed to make high-speed driving unsafe to the point of being physically impossible.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41516934

harmmonica• 2 years ago

Since Waymo is very heavily California-biased at this point, a possible explanation for this, and one I think is responsible for a lot of rear-end collisions all across the world, is the "California roll." For those unfamiliar, in California (and, again, almost everywhere) it's super typical for people to approach a stop sign and not actually come to a complete stop. Instead, the driver slows down and then continues to "roll" through the stop. Many drivers here in CA expect the driver in front of them to do the California roll and so their calculation of when they will reach the actual stop sign/line will be wrong if they assume the car in front of them will roll.

I've said this on here many times before, but one of the reasons I love riding in Waymos is because they (in my experience) obey all traffic laws to the letter of the law. So if there's a stop sign, they all stop.

Would love to know the specifics of these rear-end collisions because I'd bet that they're either California rolls at stop signs or doing the same roll behavior when turning right on red traffic lights.

AStonesThrow2• 2 years ago

They obey laws on the open road, but their parking decisions are ATROCIOUS around here. Taxi drivers always annoyed me by deliberately parking badly or even illegally, and Waymo follows suit. Red curbs, unsafe egress, blocking off three spaces outside my home, too far to walk, business that hates me. Sometimes I contact Support because there's no other way to move the thing when your trip's ended.

baggy_trough2• 2 years ago

Super typical behavior like this should be legalized. It is super typical because it is safe and efficient.

edward28• 2 years ago

Or just replace useless stop signs with give ways.

ghaff6• 2 years ago

Well, and a lot of the time you have to creep out to peek around various obstructions so, in practice, there really isn't a hard stop line because you need to go a bit further to see around that tree that hasn't been trimmed.

thirdtruck2• 2 years ago

Oh stars no. Xe heart skips a beat every time a driver goes right back the stop sign and the white line, especially when they practically put their nose in the traffic lane.

We put far, far too many entrances and exits directly into traffic here in the US. The behavior to normalize should be directing folks onto back roads with much saner speed limits.

hilux2• 2 years ago

You believe that not stopping at STOP signs is safe?

fallingfrog• 2 years ago

Funny, in New England we call this a “New Jersey stop”.

Animats• 2 years ago

The classic rear-ending Waymo collision, from DMV reports, looks like this:

- AV approaches intersection where some obstacle blocks cross-street visibility.

- AV slowly enters intersection to get better visibility.

- AV detects cross traffic and stops quickly.

- Trailing human driver following too closely rear-ends AV.

Back when Google was testing in Mountain View, this was the most common accident. One particular intersection had a tree in the median strip, at a height that blocked the vehicle-top LIDAR, forcing a slow, careful entry to the intersection. At least two Google AVs were rear-ended there.

As the article says, there are no recorded incidents where a Waymo AV entered an intersection with legit cross-traffic and was hit. There's one where a human driver ran a red light, clearly not the fault of the AV.

One partial solution would be to have AVs flash their brake lights rapidly when they're in this may-brake-suddenly situation. That would warn humans to back off. AVs know when they're being tailgated.

AStonesThrow2• 2 years ago

I've logged 762 Waymo miles and over 2,500 ride minutes, as a passenger, so here goes:

Waymos indeed make odd and non-human maneuvers. A quite frequent one is inching forward jerkily as it pulls over (<5mph) at which point there's usually no-one moving nearby either.

Waymo has veered into oncoming lanes a few times, though traffic was stopped at that intersection. I've really never witnessed any risky maneuver that would endanger property, humans, or even warrant a ticket.

BUT... motorists and pedestrians HATE Waymo with a passion. I was literally spit upon when riding a scooter-share and it may get worse in those comfy white Jaguars.

No overt incidents yet, but several passers-by have vocally expressed their ire, and there is no shortage of folks who deliberately block our path just because I have no control. But I suspect, violence will arise as the pressure rises.

hacoo• 2 years ago

Yep, some incidents may be caused by human drivers being extra aggressive around the waymo. I work in this industry and this definitely happens. That said, weird / unexpected braking is a frequent problem for self driving cars too.

Kalanos• 2 years ago

Probably stopping at yellow lights and for pedestrians at crosswalks. It's a good way to get rear ended in Boston.

cut3• 2 years ago

Waymos are notorious for signaling for half a second and then cutting you off to merge. Ive almost hit a couple that cut me off only to then immediately brake in front of me.

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

I’ve observed Waymos pulling over in neighborhood streets when aggressively tailgated. They then continue on.

I’d submit aggressive drivers aren’t used to that.

Fezzik• 2 years ago

As a tangent: if you have not ridden in a Waymo you owe it to yourself to take a ride. I was in LA last weekend and took a 60 minute ride from my cousin’s house to a concert and, after flying, or maybe even before, it is the most futuristic thing I have ever experienced. And it feels far safer than any human driver I have been in a car with, including myself.

Human drivers keep rear-ending Waymos

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