> I don't understand the point of comments like this,
I mean the point is pretty straight forward. A study like this is tautological. "self driving cars are safe on exactly the fraction of hand selected roads where self driving companies are willing to put them" doesn't tell us anything. It's a fluff piece.
If you want to make an actual assessment about the safety you need data from randomized, representative roads, not 0.x% of the streets in America. Which itself is a very generous country to pick. Put these things into peak traffic in Rome for an hour
No, you don’t. This study is very clearly comparing to human drivers on the same streets and time period. Thus, you definitely can say that the human drivers are worse.
Tautological puff pieces are what Tesla does with many of its cherry-picked stats, but this data is much more definitive.
>you definitely can say that the human drivers are worse
No, you can't. You can say the drivers are worse only on the segments where Waymo was willing to test it, and that is worthless. It literally is cherry picking. What does it matter to people driving in Boston, Chicago, New York, Paris or Berlin if cars can drive safely on a suburban grid in Arizona?
If you get to pick the sample you get to pick the outcome. We could literally put these cars on the worst 1% of roads and get the opposite result. In fact we could put them on the worst 90% of roads and get the opposite result. Even the average American consumer gets no meaningful info out of this.
This makes no sense. Waymo is not saying their cars outperform human drivers in all situations. They are saying they outperform human drivers in the location where they've been deployed. It's exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.
> You can say the drivers are worse only on the segments where Waymo was willing to test it, and that is worthless.
That's not worthless at all. There are tons of places in the US, maybe even a majority, that are quite similar to something between SF and Phoenix. Yes, absolutely, there are tons of places it's not. Again, so what? I just don't understand why anyone would expect that Waymo would not start with a progressive rollout.
Waymo is doing a level 4 rollout to specific areas where they are confident they can operate them safely. This study shows they are doing a good job with that. People in these markets get access to safer transportation once they can scale. Indeed, the majority of the US population lives in areas that are roughly comparable in driving complexity to either SF for Pheonix.
The real question is if these safety rates can be maintained while reducing the operational costs to the point where this can be scaled.
I mean the point is pretty straight forward. A study like this is tautological. "self driving cars are safe on exactly the fraction of hand selected roads where self driving companies are willing to put them" doesn't tell us anything. It's a fluff piece.
If you want to make an actual assessment about the safety you need data from randomized, representative roads, not 0.x% of the streets in America. Which itself is a very generous country to pick. Put these things into peak traffic in Rome for an hour