Let's be honest, anyone making any type of conclusion based off the information in the article is just giving in to their biases. None of us know enough to actually have any serious opinion on this specific collision.
I'm drawing the conclusion that this is a non-issue, or would be if autonomous vehicles hadn't got to be so political over the last year in San Fransisco. There are many people out for blood, they want a follow-up to the Cruise scandal.
One fact of the matter is that the cyclist wasn't seriously hurt, and Waymo has had many minor contact events in its 10 million+ miles of driving on public roads. We're hearing about this event because politics.
> We're hearing about this event because politics.
I think reporting on integrating autonomous driving into roads is a news worthy subject even outside of the agenda of a particular publisher. The good things are reported for autonomous driving as well. I don't live in SF but know that Waymo and Cruise both had fully autonomous vehicles in SF.
Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.
> Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.
Agreed!
I wasn't commenting from a safety perspective, but from a news perspective. Recently Cruise has had regulatory action taken against them from the California Department of Motor Vehicles due to an autonomous vehicle accident. Waymo, another company working on autonomous vehicles also has an accident! Sounds news worthy to me.
Of course reporting on a crash will always have some negative connotation for Waymo, and I hope the regulators look at more than individual incidents to evaluate the safety of Waymo's autonomous vehicles. I did learn that Waymo recently had an accident in a time period of scrutiny for autonomous vehicles as they further integrate into roads.
When Waymo was known as the Google Self-Driving car project they were cavalier about safety, but became much more conservative after spinning out as Waymo under John Krafcik in 2017.
Waymo has not had any serious incidents and these days it seems they're doing what they can to remain low-key and avoid attracting negative attention to themselves. Like you said, when Cruise, Uber or Tesla behave recklessly, it can't help but bode poorly upon Waymo in the eyes of the public.
We can't directly compare what these companies have going on under the hood because it's all quite proprietary. Waymo nonetheless has been chipping away at the problem for longer and with more resources at their disposal than any competitor. Waymo's 'Driver' is far and away the most experienced. While I'm fully confident making that claim, there's no easy way to measure it or make an emprirical comparison to other drivers.
If you want to play this game and you aren't very experienced, you can fake it by being reckless. You can make it seem to investors that you're better than you are by putting hundreds of vehicles on the road. Investors want results. You have to be able to point to a line on a graph that goes up and to the right and say "look at all these new benchmarks we hit! More cars! More miles!"
Waymo is effectively patronized and will run at a loss for as long as they need to without any pressure to fake it until they either make it or break it. It's Larry and Sergey's pet project. It's the one they won't let go of. A single scandal can really mess things up.
You are just proving my point. You are pro-autonomous vehicle so you are interpreting the few facts we know in way that benefits your side of the debate.
Referencing the cyclist not being seriously hurt is the most obvious example. It doesn't take much for a car to seriously injure a cyclist. It often just comes down to luck of the cyclists physical position and where they fall. Onto the hood of the car is safest, but they could have easily been caught under the vehicle, pushed into other traffic, or dangerously thrown down to the pavement. A cyclist walking away from this collision doesn't necessarily mean the next time a Waymo hits a cyclist will be just as safe. If there is some fault in the system that increases the odds of it hitting a cyclist (something that is impossible for us to know) it would be only a matter of time until an unlucky cyclist gets seriously hurt.
I think at the very least we can interpret the situation as car hits cyclist in a blind spot and the cyclist was not seriously injured. Sources say there were 49,000 vehicle-cyclist injuries and 846 fatalities [1] and there were 3.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled [2] in 2019. So my math comes to around .015 injuries and .00003 fatalities per 1 million vehicle miles traveled. Waymo’s traveled 20 millions miles by 2020, so more by now but Im not finding a more recent number. This is the first time I’ve heard of a Waymo-cyclist injury (maybe it’s not; I’m not able to google around this new headline) and would put their injury rate at .05 per million miles significantly higher than the other statistic but to get away with minor scratches is nonnegligible since it’s easy for injuries to be worse. At 20 million miles Waymos this rate doesn’t make them look good. I want to be optimistic about their injury rate getting better as they program around blind spots safer.
This is the same type of math that Tesla uses to suggest that their Autopilot is safer than humans, but the problem with this approach is that not all miles driven are equal. I guarantee that the injury rate per mile is much higher on the road in which this collision took place than the 0.015 national average. There are obviously roads in which collisions with cyclists are incredibly rare like interstate highways in which a cyclist even using the road is rare. That means there needs to be roads which greatly exceed the national average and those are often city streets with heavy cyclist traffic like this one where the collision occurred.
I'm not pro-autonomous vehicles. Under the hypothesis that they worked well enough that they proliferated widely and people came to rely on them, they would be the most enshittifiable service ever.
Also I ride a bicycle everywhere, I don't own a car. I've had many crashes while cycling, a handful of which involved another moving vehicle.
Speed is a good predictor of how much harm a moving vehicle can cause to a cyclist or pedestrian, and given that the Waymo was turning left off a 4-way stop, it couldn't have been going that fast, and even if it was, the waymo stopped soon enough to avoid doing serious damage. Maybe the cyclist veered into the Waymo, we don't know. Maybe we'll get video and then we can really pick it apart.
There is a battle going on right now between the Governor of California and SF city council over the city's inability to regulate the existence of autonomous vehicles on their streets after the fast proliferation of Cruise's AVs led to all kinds of traffic snarls and general irritation amongst the public.
Cruise has been operating in SF since 2019 and has had many incidents more severe than the one we're discussing now, but they got little attention because it wasn't so political then. Nowdays SF is looking for any excuse they can find to get AVs out of their city.
In legal terms I doubt the city will find what they need with this incident. With regards to public sentiment, the headline "Waymo hits cyclist in SF" is about as much as most people will read, and the details of the crash don't matter.
Maybe not, but you are clearly coming from an anti-anti-autonomous vehicle stance. That likely plays into why you are downplaying this collision despite admitting "we don't know" basic details about what happened here. You are able to recognize that this issue is politicized, but like everyone you are considering your own political bias as the neutral position when in actuality the neutral position here is to wait until we have more details on what actually happened.
This feels like the "no vehicles in the park" all over again.[0] We're all naturally inclined to have assumptions, but I think many are not aware of this. I think all have the capacity, just not the habit.
