Although the arrival of self-driving cars and taxis in particular seems to be eternally ‘just around the corner’ for most of us, in an increasing number of places around the world they’re already operational, with Waymo being quite prevalent in the US. Yet despite approval by the relevant authorities, the city of San Francisco has opted to sue the state commission that approved Google’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise. Their goal? To banish these services from the streets of SF, ideally forever.
Whether they will succeed in this seems highly doubtful. Although Cruise has lost its license to operate in California after a recent fatal accident, Waymo’s track record is actually quite good. Using public information sources, there’s a case to be made that Waymo cars are significantly safer to be in or around than those driven by human operators. When contrasted with Cruise’s troubled performance, it would seem that the problem with self-driving cars isn’t so much the technology as it is the safety culture of the company around it.
Yet despite Waymo’s better-than-humans safety record, it is regarded as a ‘nuisance’, leading some to sabotage the cars. The more reasonable take would seem to be that although technology is not mature yet, it has the overwhelming advantage over human drivers that it never drives distracted or intoxicated, and can be deterministically improved and tweaked across all cars based on experiences.
These considerations have been taken into account by the state commission that has approved Waymo operating in SF, which is why legal experts note that SF case’s chances are very slim based on the available evidence.
The link behind the “Using public information sources, there’s a case to be made that Waymo cars are significantly safer to be in or around than those driven by human operators.” text leads to Verge article with Weymo’s study using Weymo’s data.
Later we get “Yet despite Waymo’s better-than-humans FSD safety record, it is regarded as a ‘nuisance’, leading some to sabotage the cars.”
“full self-driving” is a Tesla marketing term which refers to a car that is not fully self driving
Yeah. I’ve gone in and edited the article to correct that, actually. Because those particular words only cause confusion.
Are these the same hippies that went after nuclear power? Because they were dead wrong about that too. Who’d have thought they didn’t know anything about technology (and still don’t).
San Francisco has a lot more and larger problems it should be addressing.
This lawsuit may just be a way of shifting focus away from those problems.
Actually, robotaxies have caused important problems in SF streets. They don’t seem to understand emergency vehicles, and there have been numerous times they’ve stopped in a way that impedes fire and EMT services, which various agencies have stated impedes emergency services. Not to mention that dozens of them sometimes converge on one point blocking traffic. Not to mention sometimes they randomly stop, leaving the passenger stranded in whatever random neighborhood. Not to mention that they frequently stop in a manner that disrupts local public transportation, blocking busses and light rail (when theyre not ramming into busses). Not to mention the various accidents they’ve been in. This all for a couple of very small fleets of cars, that the state has decreed are regulated by a completely different, largely unregulated process than regular taxis, when the only real purpose is eliminating jobs. If you actually knew anything, one single thing, about the subject you were talking about.
Invalid comparison. Experimental self driving cars don’t belong in city streets.
You’d think they’d test them in another country where ‘Life’ is a lot cheaper.
No, you test them with a test driver behind the wheel.
Yeah, they’ve tried that, too… and because the “test driver” wasn’t paying attention to the road ahead, she (they?) ended upon slamming into and killing a woman crossing the road. That’s what happens when you “test driver” is little more than just another human required to exist so a “safety” checkbox gets its little mark.
Never heard of nuclear self driving cars. Most of them are electric vehicles, true, but calling them nuclear is a bit … inappropriate.
Unclear self-driving cars perhaps? :P
The key difference is that nuclear power is a proven technology. FSD cars are still in beta. Also, when an electric car fails, it doesn’t spread radioactive material within a wide radius.
Having the autonomous cars being “saver” then “human drivers” is not good enough. As a passenger I would never enter a car with a drunk driver. I would not go sit next to an over confident 18-year old who likes to zigzag around other cars on the highway. How many “accidents” are the result of road rage?
I would also not go sit next to a driver who can’t keep their attention to the traffic and is distracted all the time.
I am guessing that already reduces the amount of “accidents” in the human driver category significantly. There are plenty of drivers with 30+ years of driving experience and a million driven kilometers without ever having had an accident.
Great point actually.
I think it’s similar to shark attacks or whatever. If you don’t go swim in the ocean your chance of getting eaten by a shark is pretty darn small compared to the total attacks / “population of said country” statistic.
I wouldn’t trust Waymo’s reports based on Waymo’s data coalesced by Waymo’s personnel as far as i can throw any of their vehicles. It has been repeatedly getting called out for cherry picking based on incredibly skewed criteria and examples. Like basing it on the results from a bunch of them driving only within a sunny low-traffic and low-environmental-variance suburbia region, while counting as “human error” pretty much anything from active collisions to environmentally caused reasons like obstructed/destroyed traffic signs.
Their report is really just a piece of marketing nonsense.
The city also has traffic accident reports, though, and on that front Waymo does very well.
They seem to drive over-conservatively. They are very often hit, very seldom do the hitting.
You can definitely argue whether it’s a traffic problem to have cars that suddenly stop with no apparent justification, though…
Based on the weird places I’ve seen them park to assumedly wait for a passenger, I wouldn’t be surprised they are being hit while standing still.
I see them often. I spend a fair amount of time near what seems to have become their native or at least preferred habitat.
I’m not sure when or if I’ll get over the uneasy feeling of seeing a car with no driver.
I was going to say this – the cause of an accident is different from which car hit which other car, and it is different from which car was at fault. If we could strip out some of the confounding factors, I wonder if we might find that some self-driving cars are considered the victim in more of the accidents they’re involved in, but that human drivers who behaved as conservatively as the AI would have avoided being victimized.
A not entirely perfect example that shows the sort of thing I mean: Fred drives at a consistent speed, then puts his blinker on, slows down a lot, and edges to the side as he approaches the side road or driveway you’re trying to turn right from. Every human being who’s ever done that has proceeded to turn in, so you pull out, and he hits you. Turns out, he wasn’t going to turn where he acted like he would, but you’re at fault because you failed to yield. (You might get Fred on improper signaling, but let’s pretend you don’t because I’m sure there’s other situations where you couldn’t.) Maybe Fred is an AI, maybe Fred is just weird, but if he had just behaved normally the accident wouldn’t have happened, even if he’s not at fault.
> it never drives distracted or intoxicated
That’s a moot point. If a “driver” is too dumb to tell a flying plastic bag from a running child, or misses the latter as a false positive because of having to account for the former possibility, isn’t that just as bad?
Plus, these cars navigate around thanks to a massive surveillance campaign of the areas they can drive around in. This system is also a massive mechanical turk with people vetting the data all the time, and it’s always out of date since it’s not real-time, so you can’t really eliminate problems caused by running the cars according to the map instead of the real territory.
I find it interesting how some people seem to believe that they’ll someday soon own their own self-driving car.
Sure, some people could afford it, but I suspect it will be quite some time, if ever, before fully authorized vehicles are affordable to the average person. I look at the sensors (that I can actually see) on a Waymo, consider the necessary compute power and support infrastructure, and then realize I’ll probably never own such a vehicle.
When considering the amount of inspection, maintenance and certifications that will be required, at least in the more “nanny states” in my country, I expect that the overhead (pun semi-intended) will likely be more like owning an airplane, or maybe a helicopter; probably not a lot different from the eventual flying car. I then realize that I’ll probably never even afford to lease a real self-driving car, at least not in my lifetime. And it would just be downright silly of me to lease one after my lifetime.
Then the move will be to outlaw human driven cars, and then the concentration of wealth and power increases, and citizen independence decreases. Though, I don’t necessarily expect to be around to see this.
Welcome to Johnny Cab.
Even if their cars get into fewer crashes, that is NOT THE ISSUE. The issue is that their cars fail in any slightly unusual circumstances, and do stupid things that snarl traffic, impede emergency services, arguably cause *other* vehicles to have to do unsafe things, and just generally make everybody’s life difficult. The usual stupid thing they do is to just get stuck and decide that they can’t move.
San Francisco has more experience with these vehicles than any other city in the US, and probably more than any other city on Earth. They’re trying to exclude them because the police, fire department, and ambulance operators got tired of dealing with the chaos they create.
You can’t own a jumbo jet but can lease a little itty bitty bit to take you to the other side of the world.
I guess you could own one (autonomous car) but I think the marketing goal is timeshare style. ie a taxi. At least that was what Musk said on some TV interview.
It is not a good sign that the one city with significant autonomous car mileage wants to ban autonomous cars.
Yes it is, this means, someone with responsibility finally started to wake up. Hopefully for the right reasons.
it has been many years since I’ve nearly been run over by a human driver and I’ve nearly been run over by waymo cars at least ten times in the past three months.
besides which they have a tendency to stop randomly and obstruct traffic, sometimes forming multiple-waymo-car pileups (biggest I saw was 4-deep)
to be clear the 4-deep figure is biggest i’ve seen in person. I’ve seen videos of entire blocks filled up with waymo cars that got stuck
I wonder why my last post was deleted.
There’s still a belief amongst promoters and fans of self-driving cars that these, alone, will improve safety, reduce gridlock, and improve urban traffic, without having to rethink or modify the urban core. City planners wet themselves over that.
It’s a pipe dream. The most successful implementations of driverless environments are things like container ports where the “streets” are heavily modified, and vehicle control is coordinated centrally. Second, as a transportation solution, self-driving cars won’t scale all that well, so only a small set of people will benefit. (ie the affluent who can afford to buy or hire them regularly). Whereas if we design our city cores around PEOPLE, not just cars – maximizing the opportunities to walk/cycle (and assistive devices for the elderly/disabled), and incorporate more and better public transit – more people will benefit, better use of land and spaces, and it’s definitely more sustainable.
San Francisco has trialed self-driving vehicles, and they have found them not ready for prime-time. We should learn from their experience.
I live in SOMA and these cars are constantly causing issues, traffic jams, near accidents, etc. Its super frustrating to have to deal with. I’ve made bumper stickers “Self Driving Cars Have No Soul”, they’re available at http://www.selfdrivingcarshavenosoul.com
There are concerns the autonomous vehicles may accidently hit a carjacker.
Good for SF. I personally want to see a halt to self driving cars so I can horde this technology for myself.