this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago by vegeta@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 52 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (10 children)

I am once again begging journalists to be more critical ~~of tech companies~~.

But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.

[...] Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.

This is the wrong comparison. These are taxis, which means they're driving taxi miles. They should be compared to taxis, not normal people who drive almost exclusively during their commutes (which is probably the most dangerous time to drive since it's precisely when they're all driving).

We also need to know how often Waymo intervenes in the supposedly autonomous operations. The latest we have from this, which was leaked a while back, is that Cruise (different company) cars are actually less autonomous than taxis, and require >1 employee per car.

edit: The leaked data on human interventions was from Cruise, not Waymo. I'm open to self-driving cars being safer than humans, but I don't believe a fucking word from tech companies until there's been an independent audit with full access to their facilities and data. So long as we rely on Waymo's own publishing without knowing how the sausage is made, they can spin their data however they want.

edit2: Updated to say that ournalists should be more critical in general, not just about tech companies.

[–] wccrawford@lemmy.world 12 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I was going to say they should only be comparing them under the same driving areas, since I know they aren't allowed in many areas.

But you're right, it's even tighter than that.

[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 weeks ago

These articles frustrate the shit out of me. They accept both the company's own framing and its selectively-released data at face value. If you get to pick your own framing and selectively release the data that suits you, you can justify anything.

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