this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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The data coming out from an independent study of Waymo autonomous vehicles is, frankly, amazing. Swiss Re, one of the largest global insurance firms based out of Zürich, reports that 25.3 million fully autonomous miles drive by Waymo vehicles resulted in a 92% reduction in car crash injuries.

In plain English, Waymo self-driving tech is 12.5x safer than human drivers.

Let's dig into what that means!

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[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 58 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I work in vehicle testing, specifically on ADAS and autonomous driving features. One thing that gets overlooked with Waymo is the fact that that fucker has a 6-figure price tag on the sensing equipment on it. You'll never see that on a production level vehicle

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 29 points 6 days ago (1 children)

"Never" is a long time. Technology is always getting cheaper, I see no reason why that sensing equipment won't end up on a production vehicle at some point.

[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

In the auto industry pennies matter. Inevitably some higher-up will convince himself that they can accomplish the same thing with just a camera and some software. Margins tend to be more important than quality. I'm not saying that's right, its just what tends to happen

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Isn't that already happening with Tesla?

[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

Happened awhile ago. It was and is still a bad idea IMO

[–] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That sensor array is fuckin sweet. If I'm going to trust a car to drive me, I want it to have laser beam eyes that see through pitch blackness and blizzard conditions.

You're the engineer, I'm just a pickup truck driving comedian, so I'm assuming that I've just accurately described a commercial-grade LiDAR array.

The LiDAR arrays are dropping very quickly in price - they're now low six figures. I anticipate they'll eventually make production, probably with fewer sensors, but sensors of equal quality. Probably sooner than most folks realize.

[–] Nanook@lemm.ee 5 points 6 days ago

Next week at your local big box for the price of a DJI drone

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

The real point of self driving cars is not to have to buy one. They should be ubiquitous fleets of taxis that never sleep, not personal possessions that sit in the driveway 90% of the time.

[–] lohky@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

"Welcome to Johnny Cab!"

[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

From where I'm sitting that's very far from reality for a whole lot of reasons. I'd be happy to be wrong (because cars are unacceptably unsafe as-is) but there's a long way to go

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Okay, feel free to tell me all the reasons.

[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm not going to write you an essay

There are good video essays on the subject by Benn Jordan, Not Just Bikes, and Adam Something that (mostly) are a good overview of the problem and their videos explain things better than I'm ever going to write

Also the eternal taxi idea just seems like a shit excuse for not building other transit options. Like why not build trains and bike lanes instead of that

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Well I wasn’t asking for an essay. Benjamin Faraday’s well known video about the effectiveness of automated taxi trials in St. Germaine and the Transportation Policy Institute numerous published case studies, which you can go Google, show how self driving taxis take net cars OFF the roads AND free up parking spaces for OH I DONT KNOW bike lanes and bus stops so perhaps these ideas aren’t so mutually exclusive as you suggest.

[–] pc486@sh.itjust.works 10 points 6 days ago

Even if it was a quarter million bucks, it would quickly pay itself off. Keeping a taxi car available and operating 24/7 is a big deal for operational costs. $25/hour on a $250k device is a recovered in just over a year. It's all profit after that.