Waymo cars have now driven 1 million miles with no human behind the wheel.<\/p>\r\n
Waymo posted a blog post<\/a> about that in February, focused on Waymo\u2019s safety record during those first million miles. That post links to a paper<\/a> with many more details.<\/p>\r\n During those first million miles, Waymo vehicles were involved in 20 \u201ccontact\u201d events with other vehicles or with objects. None of those events resulted in an injury to a human. Most of them were very minor (such as a human-driven car backing into a Waymo car that was parked to pick up a passenger, or a portable plastic sign stand being blown by wind into the side of a Waymo car).<\/p>\r\n Two of the events met the criteria for being included in the NHTSA\u2019s \u201cCrash Investigation Sampling System\u201d (CISS) database of collisions: one in which a human who was looking at their cell phone rear-ended a Waymo vehicle that was stopping for a red light; and one in which a human driver cut in front of a Waymo vehicle and immediately braked, and the Waymo vehicle ran into the human-driven vehicle.<\/p>\r\n More generally, \u201cEvery vehicle-to-vehicle event involved one or more road rule violation[s] and\/or dangerous behaviors on the part of the human drivers in the other vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\r\n Neither the blog post nor the paper provides a direct comparison (that I saw) of serious-collision rates for human-driven vs Waymo-driven vehicles. I\u2019m guessing that that\u2019s because the human-driver collision rates that I\u2019m seeing elsewhere are expressed in terms of things like injuries-per-100 million<\/em>-miles-driven. As the paper more or less notes, if you\u2019re looking at very rare events, then you need a lot of data to come to statistically relevant conclusions.<\/p>\r\n But even so, no injuries in a million miles of driving (roughly equivalent to 80 years of an average American human driving) seems like a good start.<\/p>\r\n I know that many of you continue to be very skeptical about Waymo, and about autonomous vehicles in general. And certainly there\u2019s a lot to be wary about.<\/p>\r\n But fwiw, my position continues to be that (1) there\u2019s huge potential here for saving lives, at such point as autonomous vehicles are even a little better at driving than humans are; and (2) Waymo is doing a significantly better job than any of the other autonomous-vehicle companies, in a variety of ways.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19718"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19721,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19718\/revisions\/19721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}