Anecdata, but watching the Waymo cars compared to Cruise (preban) was night and day. Before Cruise was banned in SF, I would often see them violate traffic laws and fail to navigate basic intersections. Waymo isn't perfect, but its better than Cruise and the average SF driver, which is good enough for me.
that's cool. until it's not. it's very easy to release an upgrade of stopping less on stop signs and see data increasing profit and not increasing accidents. same with code updates that will make cyclist life worse, unless there's actual change in a kpi they track. you're not really their main concern, specially after they ipo and get acquired by Apollo or billionaire du jour
In the United States there are few legal repercussions when a human driver kills someone as long as they are sober and utter the phrase "I didn't see them". Therefore, biking on US roads means trusting in the inherent goodness (and attentiveness) of the drivers around you.
Driverless cars run by a company protecting itself from reputational and legal risk seems less dystopian than the status quo.
Yes, I don't understand how anybody who's ever ridden a bike in a major American city isn't super excited about high-quality self driving vehicles. The crazy stuff I see on a daily basis while out biking in Seattle (and statistically we are one of the best places to bike in the US) means I can't wait until these things take over :-)
I apologize if I was unclear. In response to a cyclist saying they prefer being near Waymo vehicles to human drivers you said:
>> that's cool. until it's not...same with code updates that will make cyclist life worse...you're not really their main concern
I agree and expect that the wide safety tolerances driverless cars currently have will become tighter as they gain more experience, and that this will make them more efficient but potentially less pleasant to be around than they used to be.
But even if pedestrian and cyclists lives are not a main concern for self-driving car companies, some concern is better than none. For some human drivers their concerns seem to be things like not getting arrested, getting to their destination as quickly as possible, checking social media to satisfy their boredom, and not scratching the paint on their vehicle. Some drivers consider vulnerable road users like cyclists to be sub-human [1].
My point is that the bar in the US has been set so incredibly low that even if the code updates make their products worse for cyclists than they used to be or even killing some vulnerable road users that may still be safer and preferable to the incompetence and complete indifference on the part of human drivers.
Having said that, the same calculus may not apply in countries that don't issue drivers a license to kill people, so the bar for driverless cars is likely to be much higher in such places.
If Waymo hits a cyclist which leads to death, and Waymo is found to be at fault, that's definitely going to make headlines and potentially lead to a pause of the entire operation.
That's just being a cynic for cynicism sake. They are already owned by a billionaire company, so there is no ipo. And they still have at least a couple of decades where the game they need to play is get riders and legislators to trust them, so they are incentived to make their car very safeful so they can roll out to more cities and countries. It takes one bad accident to get the public to turn against them, and there is no technological edge that can save you if the government decides to make your entire business illegal.
Because once the current safety scrutiny has passed you might get more trips done by setting the ai to be more aggressive in traffic. Then you are into VW style software updates with a profit motive and no mechanism to hold them accountable?
>And not sure why you think running stop signs or any anti safety measures would increase profits.
Because this big companies like Google are actually evil. As an example the mobile YouTube app does not let you use it if you turn off the screen. So Google decided that wasting energy and killing batteries is an acceptable thing to do, this is pure evil - I would accept they adding more advertising or whatever but killing the life span of a device and wasting energy is truly evil shit.
