Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo

by ra7 • 2 years ago

41 41 2 years ago

waymo.com

jqpabc123• 2 years ago

How to do better than humans:

- Never drive on unfamiliar roads

- Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely

- Slam on the brakes at the earliest sign of any trouble. If a human driver rear ends you in the process, it's their fault and will be reported as such.

- Never drive on the freeway --- i.e. at high speed where reaction times are more limited.

Bascially, only address a safe subset of what human drivers do and then delare victory.

ra72• 2 years ago

- Never drive on unfamiliar roads
- Never drive on the freeway --- i.e. at high speed where reaction times are more limited.

The paper says human benchmark being used is only from the zip codes Waymo operate in, so they are quite comparable. In fact, they have this bit about including freeway mileage in the human benchmark:

Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk.
- Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely

How is this a bad thing?

leobg2• 2 years ago

Who says that the people driving in that zip code are locals? Using the zip code normalizes for accidents in that location. But it doesn’t normalize for familiar vs unfamiliar roads.

ToDougie• 2 years ago

How is this a bad thing?

re: Speed limit -- Besides the obvious, it's because not every vehicle on the road is part of the lowest common denominator.

honkycat• 2 years ago

If we can get fully autonomous public transit by driving slower, but it eliminates traffic, I think that is an absolute win.

panick21_5• 2 years ago

The idea that autonomous cars lead to no traffic is delusional.

itishappy• 2 years ago

Is it really an apples to apples comparison when Waymo can't even hold a cell phone in one hand an a latte in the other?

minwcnt5• 2 years ago

Those points will help, but they aren't sufficient. Sometimes it's necessary to have an instant reaction time and do more than just slam the brakes, like this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1hfvb5o/waymo_visual...

macspoofing• 2 years ago

You nailed the source of my skepticism as well. I'm sure Waymo has a good self-driving system, but it operates in highly constrained environments. I'm very skeptical that if you controlled for all variables, that self-driving today would show a significant safety improvement. But so far, so good.

- Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely

I would give credit to Waymo and Self-Driving systems for this. The promise of self-driving is that it won't do stupid things that humans may do that increase chance of accident.

jfengel• 2 years ago

Those highly-constrained environments are actually the ones that scare me most. There are people and everywhere -- crossing the street, coming out of parking spaces, changing lanes, stopping suddenly. There are signs everywhere, and I'm terrified of missing one, especially since I'm having to keep an eye on all of those other things.

Highways are so much easier. Everybody just wants to go straight. They do change lanes, but they usually know it's coming well before.

aanet• 2 years ago

Direct link to the Waymo paper (PDF) [1]

TLDR: Waymo claims its autonomy is safer than the "best human drivers with latest cars with latest safety features" and way safer than the "average human driving population"

I'm still digesting the paper, but a few quotes below:

QUOTE: When examining claims filed under third party liability policies, the Waymo ADS yielded 9 property damage and 2 bodily injury claims, arising from 10 unique collisions, over 25.3 million miles. Two of the property damage claims and both bodily injury claims are still open (unresolved) and could close without any liability payment. In comparison, the overall driving population benchmark was expected to have 78 property damage and 26 bodily injury claims for an equivalent amount of driving exposure in the deployed driving regions. The latest-generation HDV benchmark would be expected to result in 63 property damage and 21 bodily injury claims.

When compared to the overall driving population benchmark, the Waymo ADS saw an 88% reduction in third-party property damage claims (ADSPDL: 0.36 [0.163, 0.675] vs OverallPDL: 3.08 [3.063, 3.088] claims per million miles), and a 92% reduction in third-party bodily injury claims (ADSBI: 0.08 [0.010, 0.285] vs OverallBI: 1.04 [1.035, 1.047] claims per million miles), respectively.

...

When compared to the latest-generation HDV benchmark, the Waymo ADS recorded an 86% reduction in third-party property damage claims (ADSPDL: 0.36 [0.163, 0.675] vs Latest-GenerationPDL: 2.49 [2.461, 2.515] claims per million miles) and a 90% reduction in third-party bodily injury claims (ADSBI: 0.08 [0.010, 0.285] vs Latest-GenerationBI: 0.82 [0.809, 0.839] claims per million miles) were observed

/QUOTE

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents...

xnx6• 2 years ago

It's probably even better than that. Currently, Waymo vehicles would be displacing rideshare drivers who are more dangerous than average.

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

Is there evidence human drivers are safe? I’d think this would be obvious.

someotherperson• 2 years ago

Anecdata, but I've been in a Waymo that avoided an accident that I wouldn't have been able to. It would have been a head on collision around a tight, two-way bend with parked cars on either side. That alone gave me a fair bit of comfort, given that it's 1-0 in Waymo's favor so far.

tharmas• 2 years ago

If all the cars on the road were driven by machines I speculate their would be fewer accidents than there are today. Human drivers can be unpredictable, making it hard for a machine to anticipate.

There are also unpredictable events not propagated by humans or human drivers which would possibly result in an increase in these sorts accidents if all the cars were driven by machines.

veidr• 2 years ago

What were the circumstances here? A human driver speeding he wrong way down a one-way street with tight curved?

metalman• 2 years ago

this is a completely false statement "waymo" is infinitly more dangerous than any human driver, and has failure modes that are impossible for humans,as it could be hijacked or go out of control, and kill every rider at once. ..,.beep.....beep....click.....whirrrrr....new unlimited speed mode enabled,...beep...,.beeep......zoooooooooom...... kersmashafuckingboom.,..beep..,.

rogerrogerr• 2 years ago

I have very bad news for you about modern cars that don’t drive themselves under regular circumstances.

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

hulitu• 2 years ago

Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles

on Waymo.com. No conflict of interest, whatsoever. /s (Intel is also better than AMD on benchmarks on intel.com)

Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles

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