Totally fair to be concerned about pervasive surveillance for the _potential_ of privacy violation. Not sure what to do about that.

That being said, just speaking with some knowledge of current state: the scans don't live forever. At this point, all the data they collect is way too big to store even for a short period. They'll only keep data in scenarios that are helpful for improving driving performance, which is a tiny subset.

Personally identifiable information is also redacted.

You should probably be more worried about what gmail knows about you than Waymo.

Traffic isn't the right place to be if you demand not to be seen. If you do not want your data to be stored that's a different matter, but I'm still gonna look at you while driving to not crash, I have to.

> Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/

It's not going to be stored forever.

That would be incredibly expensive.

Those cars are taking in TB of information each daily. Scale that to 10s of millions of cars.

It's just not going to happen.

Maybe an ultra compressed representation of you that shares maybe 1 bit in 1 weight somewhere in a NN will live forever.

Maybe.

Human drivers have dash cams, too. Maybe without as sophisticated a data ingestion system as google, but they could theoretically put their dashcam footage on youtube if they wanted to.

There are a lot more Tesla cameras than Waymo cameras. Tesla also has a history of sharing private/intimate video from inside the cars.

There are somewhere between several hundred and a couple thousand Waymo vehicles per city being served. Even if that expands tenfold, it will be a small fraction of the number of cameras you pass by every day.

See non-Waymo, human driven car?

Fear not, your images and recordings will get piled on somebody's dashcam to do as their heart desires.

I got a dashcam in my Camry recording front and back everytime i drive. I have no interest in preserving those images outside of an accident, but who knows what sommebody else will.

We have no expectations of privacy in public spaces and ultimately I would trust Googles IT security more than some dude with a dashcam

Buy your scramble suit now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc

man, the Googs already has a library of images of you. If there's anything about you that the Googs doesn't already know, I'd be shocked. the Googs probably knows you better than your therapist, because you've only shared with your therapist what you wanted. the Googs gets data about you from places you know nothing about.

being concerned that a Waymo car took your picture isn't invalid, but man is it a tear drop in the rain of everything else the Googs is doing.

Second this gripe. At this rate they're going to turn American cities into copies of beijing or london with cameras every other place you look. "Oh but the police will then be able to subpoena footage to catch criminals more easily" yes I don't want a world in which the government can instantly do that. It sucks.

Do you dislike it enough to be happy with the increased car incidents that a human dominated driving world implies?

Why are you so worried of something snapping tens of thousands of pics of your body (mostly identical) that don't tell much about you while the world's biggest ad companies know you better than any single human ever will. I feel popular western sci fi has made people fear companies taking some visual data of their bodies covering minutes at max while fully overlooking the dangers of having your behavioural data covering years at a very granular level.

Yes, I know it's not a choice, both are bad. But I find people everywhere, including here in HN, are overly conscious of getting a few minute worth pictures of their bodies uploaded to some private servers while they are nowhere near as conscious when it comes to non-visual data about them (which I would argue mostly covers behavioural data imo).

Definitely a big privacy concern, especially for people like you who aren't using the technology, and haven't consented to giving your data.

But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm). As a society, I think the benefit outweighs the cost in this case, and we can (theoretically) continue to make progress on privacy as a society. Seems like much more of a step forward than a step back to me

Good point

It's probably measuring the temperature of your bodily fluids.

> This would be a trivial software change in the specific case of Teslas

Tesla already has dooring prevention. If it detects a bicycle or something coming, it prevents you from opening the door the first time, and shows a warning. You can override it by trying to open it the second time, if you are sure.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1gwjq4v/new_an...

Waymo already warns you if it detects road users when you open a door. They just don't actively prevent you from opening the door, but they could implement it in their next generation vehicles.

You won't hear the end of complaints about how cyclists are now making cars more expensive...

That would lead to ridiculously overengineered car doors. It's already incredible how such a simple thing like a door can be so unreliable on newer cars, with handles that sink into the doorframe when not in use, or a locking system that only works with battery power. I'm not sure that adding more complexity would be a net benefit for society.

You could just design infrastructure and road rules such that cyclists aren't encouraged/required to ride in the dooring zone, or even hold people accountable for their actions beyond just the cost of the damages they cause. Car based damages are so normalized that we allow reckless or negligent behavior around cars that we would never allow in any other part of our cities.

You could probably design the latch jaws to have an electronically controlled second catch. It would activate whenever a cyclist is present so if someone tries to slam the door open it would catch with the door slightly open and trigger a warning. A second pull then opens the door no matter what for safety.

It's only more than a 9/11 every day of the year

Nah, insurance companies will change their coverage rates based on the feature, and / or it'll become another legally mandated feature like backup cameras.

If the "stopped" vehicle made the turn as the Waymo made the presumably-illegal turn into the "stopped" vehicle that was now moving?

You are missing all the times where you are enough faster that you catch a green while the other person gets there on red and so they never catch up. It is easy to see/remember the times they catch up.

Interesting - I'm definitely substantially faster on a scooter than walking. Part of it is knowing the best routes, but I think even if there are crossing signals, if you're going further than a few blocks there's just no comparison to walking.

This is also why streets inside cities in the Netherlands are converting to be single-lane, except at intersections - the ability to overtake doesn't make traffic flow faster.

Please don't do this here.

Or just implement vastly more automated ticketing systems. They are standard in many countries. They could be implemented with limited-purview privacy preserving architectures where that aligns with expectations and values.

But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.

signaling humans for bad behaviors tend to backfire. it program us to recreate that situation in anger. we aren't smart enough to naturally learn lessons that way.

good thing drones are getting smarter

Commute time still matters, and congestion pricing will become the norm.

I can read on the subway, but while a 20 min subway ride is fine, an hour each way is still a lot, and a two hour train commute just doesn't leave much time in your life for doing social things.

Also, I think there's going to be a huge surge in in-demand AI buses. Rideshares will take people to a random spot, you'll wait 2 minutes for a predetermined seat on a specific bus, and then switch to a rideshare van for the last 5 minute drive to your office in the city.

It's just going to be so much cheaper. With economies of scale and urban congestion pricing, you'll have to choose between dropping $45 on a dedicated hour-long door-to-door car trip, or $6 for the car-bus-van version which is only 20% slower anyways.

Waymo can drive cars but it can't magick new roads into existence. If car usage goes through the roof, so will traffic jams.

well, I guess my hope is that renting a car whenever needed is cheaper than the cost of purchasing, maintaining, insuring, and storing a personal robocar. It would be quite hard to make the US more car-dependent than it already is! But I am speculating - you may very well be right

I sincerely believe this thesis and desperately want a REIT that owns real estate in a 2 hour radius of major urban downtowns.

Returning to Houston after living abroad for 10 years, the biggest culture shock was that everyone runs red lights.

Every time the light turns green for you, you can expect 1-3 cars to keep rolling through until you can go. I've almost been rear ended by not running a light that just turned red because the person behind me also wants to floor it through. Yakety sax shit.

Then I found out in 2019, the Texas legislature outlawed the use of red-light cameras.

Muh freedum.

Not sure if this is the study but this looks like a good study where they found it was 7% when the study was done.

https://economics.uchicago.edu/news/study-finds-gender-pay-g...

About half of commercial drivers is my conclusion. (though I'm not collecting statistically valid data) Just judging by the number of commercial vehicles who drive into the crosswalk I use often.

>a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.

no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.

Ultra Safe Even if it's Slower Chauffeur company doesn't exist and doesn't have data that can be compared. This is a comparison against the thing Waymo is actually replacing.

> It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late.

Good. I don't want my kid who's crossing an intersection to be endangered by an Uber driver that you paid $30 to go extra fast. Nothing like externalizing your poor planning skills onto others.

DoorDash (so food not people) will give you a report for hard braking / acceleration but it doesn't actually affect anything afaict.

> A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft). > I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group.

If you've been in both a human drive cab and a Waymo, you'd definitely not say this. I see cabs have accidents all the time. Never seen a Waymo have one.

Also, being in a Waymo feels much safer than a human driven car, even my own when I'm driving!

I highly doubt taxicabs are safer than Waymos.

In fact, here is some data:

Over every 1 million miles driven, there are 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars. And according to Waymo, they have 2.1 crashes per million miles.

> Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather

the study is comparing Waymo to accidents occurred in the same cities where Waymo operates, and my understanding is that Waymo drives 7 days a week, 24h a day in those cities, so same roads, same weather. Seems a legit comparison

Waymos drive in all weather in the cities they're deployed in; cities where people crash all the time in all types of weather.

This isn't even true because the dataset compares against conditions IN THE CITY they operate in. They operate year-round in SF and in the same conditions human drivers do.

I am very curious where waymo is at in adverse conditions. Do the cars totally lock up and become useless? Or are they at the level of your 65 year old mother driving in a thunderstorm at night? Passable, but nothing they are gonna put their name on.

Seems they intend to come to Washington D.C. next year, which does get a pretty wide gamut of weather.

Maybe humans shouldn't drive in those conditions then.

> Cleanliness doesn't seem that related to how expensive the tech is either - if anything it would only go down if it ceased to affect willingness to pay.

If a service is necessarily expensive, it will more by wealthy people, who have a higher willingness to pay for cleanliness.

> As it stands, clean cars are important to their customers.

This varies depending on the customer.

> If usage increases, cleaning can ostensibly increase too, no?

Greater usage can lead to economies of scale that push down the cost of cleaning, but I think we're already at the scale (hundreds of cars) where most of the economies of scale have been reached. I expect it's close to linear from now on.

Yea, but I strongly suspect the current Waymo price is much higher than their operating costs. I don't think we should infer to much from the price they are charging.

Polestar is Volvo, inventor of the three point seat belt.

White people smoke, too, in my experience.

Yeah the human drivers in socal are really choosy at night. Many a times I’ve waited 20 minutes for a ride because I was not in a choice neighborhood to deadhead rides I guess.

The vehicle code not only permits cars to enter the bike lane prior to a turn, it requires them to do so (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....). My brother failed his first driving test because he didn’t know that he had to enter a bike lane on the left side of Fell St right outside the DMV (back before they separated the bike lane).

I hope that means yield to cyclists ahead of them. To me the whole point of getting in the bike lane is to avoid cases where the cyclist going straight is in a blind spot during the car's right turn. As a cyclist I'll sometimes get into the car lane at intersections to make sure I'm seen. seems like the car being required to let the bike behind them go straight is exactly what you'd want to avoid

A vehicle that becomes blocked in a crosswalk is unsafe for pedestrians who want to use that crosswalk if it forces the pedestrians to walk around the blocking vehicle. There are crosswalks in SoMa that provide for 45 seconds or more of crossing time. A Waymo that enters one of these crosswalks after 15 seconds into the 45 seconds allocation blocks the crosswalk for the remainder of the 30 seconds. This presents an unsafe situation for all existing and future pedestrians (e.g., a pedestrian who inadvertently steps into the intersection while trying to go around the blocking vehicle).

We also know that in North America that the municipal services skimp on grade separation for bike lanes for budget and political reasons. I did bike in San Francisco when I lived there, and these non-shared colored lanes never ever felt safe.

I can guarantee that if you leave your North American context for a couple of years and come back to it you'll find CA Vehicle Code § 21453 unsatisfactory.

There's some nuance to it. You're first at a light and a semi across from you is trying to take a left, the right thing to do is to wave him through rather than mat it when it turns green. You don't stop a line of traffic to be nice to someone who can take their own damn turn. As with everything else, people who don't Get It(TM) ruin it for everyone.

Yeah and we should definitely leave deciding the appropriate speed to the drivers. Because, uh, throughput is important, got it. Is safety important? Who knows, but throughput definitely is!

It’s an issue for everyone not in a car

The above comment is getting downvoted, and I suspect it's due to a misunderstanding of their intent. Yes, high speeds can make collisions (especially, as another commenter points out, to pedestrians and cyclists) more dangerous. However, just as human drivers subconsciously speed up when part of a group of cars, they are not often conscious of the environmental queues informing the speed at which they drive. Given the poster's allusion to 'stroads', I suspect that they're in favor of traffic engineering patterns that encourage speed reduction based on safe context queues without solely relying on an unenforced and often unobeyed traffic speed.

Consider this video on Dutch traffic calming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA.

Lane narrowing, raised walkways, curves in the road (chicanes), etc. are all environmental queues that enforce safe traffic speed based on context, without relying on conscious human compliance.

I would expect "most roads" to be comprised of residential roads, and I find it hard to believe speeding on those roads is not a safety issue.

I’d argue that’s more straightforward collision avoidance than a swerve since the rider was to the side when Waymo turned. As such, there wasn’t a choice between braking and swerving. One had to do both, and there was no real optionality as to whether to swerve right or left.

> quick swerve could cause another collision so I guess it's which decision on average causes the least harm/death? I agree though that most people's extinct would be to brake

If it’s 1989 and you don’t have ABS, yes. Otherwise, swerving is a gamble [1]. If you don’t have time to stop, you physically don’t have time to evaluate and choose a right or left swerve. You’re trading the certainty of a head-on collision with whatever is in front of you against the uncertainty of what’s to the right or left, compounded with all the fun that comes with a side/tumbling collision and increased risk of not hitting a car.

[1] https://peterhancock.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/201...

If you cannot brake you are following too close. I know everyone else does it (except 3/4ths of semis!), but you can be the one who maintains a long following distance and thus can stop in time. Every time setup the long following distance 5 cars jump into the gap - but then the gap remains as no more do.

Right, so you've created a dangerous scenario by speeding and by the direct consequences of your actions you're now forced to execute a dangerous manoeuvre of swerving. Maybe, just maybe, the solution is not speeding.

> I agree though that most people's extinct would be to brake. Mine never has been though.

...

You operate a motorized vehicle and your first instinct when seeing anything dangerous ahead is to do something other than braking?

The correct answer is to not drive so fast (or at all) in conditions where braking might lead to a skid. I'd expect an autonomous vehicle to be rather better at this given they can hook directly into the electronic stability control system in a vehicle and constantly monitor temperature (and ideally measure upcoming road temperature).

Also, shifting into neutral is really only a thing for old vehicles without ABS/ESC. In modern vehicles, you let your foot off the gas slowly.

> snow and ice, where “hit the breaks” Is the wrong answer, and the correct is to drop the car into neutral

This is only true with 2WD and no automatic stability control, and if you’re going down a slope. For every other case, ABs will out perform in snow and gentle braking will evenly distribute traction force with stability control doing microsecond evaluations.

I spend about 5 months every year driving in snow and ice - this is the first I'm hearing about dropping it into neutral. Can you elaborate on when that would be appropriate? Obviously you shouldn't be slamming on the brakes, but they do work fine in snow and ice. I don't see how rolling into things while not in gear is an improvement?

If hit the brakes is the wrong answer, you are driving too fast.

? just brake and rely on the abs

One big difference in favor of the software is your "after you've confirmed there is no one in the left/right adjacent lane or close enough behind you." The car has been looking in every direction the whole ride. The car already knows what there is to know about all the neighbours. A huge advantage over the human driver.

I feel also that the car having a far better experience of its kinematics / dynamics / features is also a huge advantage - see the good old drifting parallel parking videos.

After that there is the concern about computing reaction time. Can it get stuck hesitating? Clearly the cars hesitate a lot in generally safe places. But we have seen some videos already of a Waymo very smoothly dodging someone running out from in between cars (they were already tracked), and someone mentioned a scooter incident. Hopefully we'll see more videos of emergency responses.

Another comment mentions "r/waymo or r/selfdrivingcars for lots of videos of Waymos avoiding objects."

I agree that the US needs to invest far more in public transport.

I don't think that's mutually exclusive with Waymo working on their electric autonomous vehicles, nor that halting Waymo's testing would lead to greater access to public transport. Safer cleaner roads should hopefully even benefit busses, coaches, trams (and bikes) that have to share the road with cars - and the same self-driving technology can likely be adapted for use on public transport vehicles.

China, for instance, has extensive public transport in addition to a fast-growing autonomous vehicle sector. As useful and underutilized as trains are, there will likely still always be a non-negligible portion of transportation that road vehicles are just better suited for, which should be made as safe as possible.

There is also that it seems unfortunately difficult to get financial/political momentum behind building public transport in the US, whereas Waymo's services are something that's already happening and GP is implying should be stopped - which I feel flips the "Why not just" in terms of which is the course of least resistance (but, to be clear, we should definitely still be pushing for public transport).

In many states, including CA, individuals can post a bond instead of carrying insurance. Companies with fleets of vehicles can also self-insure. In both cases the car owner is liable to pay any damages that insurance would normally pay.

Large companies with fleets of vehicles often self-insure.

It has been classic lore that Bill Gates couldn't get anyone to insure him after his younger years (see classic mugshot photo used as the silhouette) so he had to self insure. Not sure if completely true but I remember the stories.

My point is you're not going to get much more than half[1] of those Uber drivers into a Waymo control center, even if they're facing unemployment. The workers have to come from somewhere. And it has to be somewhat regular hours, surge oversight doesn't make sense.

[1] Edit - I meant 5% not half, I was on the train and very frustrated with these comments. (not yours, though it seems bad faith to say "not remote driving" when I said "problem solving." The problem has always been the 1-5% of driving which truly requires sophisticated intelligence, that's why the oversight is there.)

Every Lyft driver I've spoken to drives because a) they like driving b) they like choosing their own hours and c) they don't want a boss. Telling them to go into an office for an 8 hour shift with a manager is not gonna work, they will find something more appealing. It's a different kind of employee. (I would enjoy that line of work but I would hate to drive for Uber, way too stressful.)

That might be what human overseers are mostly doing minute-to-minute but it's not why it's necessary. The problem is AI simply does not have the real-world problem solving ability to handle all the minor inconveniences and surprises on the road.

If they keep pushing the hours between requests down like I saw on https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-number-of-full..., that might be feasible.

What determines whether 300k is scalable ?

Waymo doesn't say very much, but other self-driving services have been more open. It is things like "the fire truck is at a weird angle and the car didn't know what to do, draw a path where it pulls slightly into an oncoming lane so it can get around." A lot of common sense stuff which is far beyond the reach of AI in 2025.

Not even my point and this isn’t about the tech but about the societal context.

a few megacorps cornering an entire market is Not Good

Why do you think they don't do root cause investigations?

I've personally read through the root cause reports for most of the notable AV accidents. They're not always quite as intensive as aerospace, but I'd be hard pressed to describe any of them as wacky statistical arguments.

Obviously most of those reports aren't public, but I'm assuming you also have industry access.

The real shame is we don't investigate normal human drivers the same way.

Was your intent to disprove or back up the claims of parent?

0.4% and 0.2% sound low, but make up for ~110,000 deaths. Spread across a 5 year period does indeed equal “tens of thousands” every year.

It sounds like you are refuting the parent's claim. But those two categories add up to ~110,000 deaths over a 6 year period, which seems like can be reasonably described as 10000s per year.

But, more importantly, you missed a bunch of relevant categories:

V89.2 (Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic) 80,434

V87.7 (Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)) 29,982

V09.2 (Pedestrian injured in traffic accident involving other and unspecified motor vehicles) 27,934

V03.1 (Pedestrian injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, traffic accident) 15,129

V43.5 (Car occupant injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, driver injured in traffic accident) 9,810

V29.9 (Motorcycle rider [any] injured in unspecified traffic accident) 8,410

V29.4 (Driver injured in collision with other and unspecified motor vehicles in traffic accident) 7,688

V47.5 (Car occupant injured in collision with fixed or stationary object, driver injured in traffic accident) 6,379

V49.9 (Car occupant [any] injured in unspecified traffic accident) 6,349

V23.4 (Motorcycle rider injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, driver injured in traffic accident) 5,851

V43.6 (Car occupant injured in collision with car, pick-up truck or van, passenger injured in traffic accident) 3,728

V27.4 (Motorcycle rider injured in collision with fixed or stationary object, driver injured in traffic accident) 3,504

The mcdrive is the most dangerous road.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. By all accounts, Waymo operates more safely than a human driver. It's operated tens of millions of rides in several major cities over several years, hence all the useful data. There is absolutely nothing stopping the continued expansion of self-driving vehicles, Waymo or otherwise, and there are myriad factors moving it forward rapidly.

> The burden of proof lies with the manufacturer to present sound, robust, transparent, third-party audited evidence.

Waymo releases its safety data: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/, which is backed by public reporting requirements.

To say that it is wholly insufficient to make any safety claims on publicly driven 50M miles, is ridiculous. At the very least, it appears sound, robust and transparent, and able to be validated.

> https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo

Is Swiss Re a valid third party? They also address peer-reviewed and external validation in the above safety impact page.

I can understand being skeptical because of Cruise and especially claims made by Telsa, but there is a preponderance of supporting data for Waymo.

Given all of this evidence, you would still conclude Waymo is unsafe?

> The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless.

No, that's not how statistics works.

The percentage data's accuracy depends mainly on the number of incidents recorded (and somewhat on the rate of incidents). But the percentage of the whole is completely irrelevant.

If you are basing something on 10 incidents but it's 50% of the total, it's still terrible accuracy.

Whereas if you are basing something on 100,000 incidents but it's only 0.1% of the total, it's still going to be quite accurate, assuming the incidents come from the same overall distribution.

> The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless.

Your third sentence doesn’t follow from your first two. On what grounds do you draw this conclusion?

How would you compare single-incident reports to get to a meaningful conclusion?My guess is that Waymo makes mistakes that a human wouldn't, and vice versa. At that point the overall safety record, which normalizes those differences, seems the most relevant.

> 50% of fatalities involve alcohol or drugs and are often single vehicle accidents.

This suggests that Waymo is cutting traffic fatalities by 50% (per million miles) right off the top.

You'll be happy to know, then, that the NHTSA publishes the data you're looking for at https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde..., in addition to Waymo's own reporting in their safety hub. For me personally, I find summary data to be more informative than a pile of individual reports, but I hope your comparison goes well!

I do want to know how Waymo compares to middle ages adults who are not on alcohol/drugs. However that they are better than humans overall is still a big deal even if the data is somewhat suspect by not doing that additional breakdown.

This is the statistic I was hoping to see. It wasn't in the paper as best as I looked.