Tim Lee runs the numbers:
Waymo and Cruise have driven a combined total of 8 million Driverless miles, including more than 4 million in San Francisco since the start of 2023.
And because California law requires self-driving companies to report every significant crash, we know a lot about how they’ve performed.
For this story, I read through every crash report Waymo and Cruise filed in California this year, as well as reports each company filed about the performance of their driverless vehicles (with no safety drivers) prior to 2023. In total, the two companies reported 102 crashes involving driverless vehicles. That may sound like a lot, but they happened over roughly 6 million miles of driving. That works out to one crash for every 60,000 miles, which is about five years of driving for a typical human motorist.
These were overwhelmingly low-speed collisions that did not pose a serious safety risk. A large majority appeared to be the fault of the other driver. This was particularly true for Waymo, whose biggest driving errors included side-swiping an abandoned shopping cart and clipping a parked car’s bumper while pulling over to the curb.
Cruise’s record is not impressive as Waymo’s, but there’s still reason to think its technology is on par with—and perhaps better than—a human driver.
Human beings drive close to 100 million miles between fatal crashes, so it’s going to take hundreds of millions of driverless miles for 100 percent certainty on this question. But the evidence for better-than-human performance is starting to pile up, especially for Waymo. And so it’s important for policymakers to allow this experiment to continue. Because at scale, safer-than-human driving technology would save a lot of lives.
Driverless cars never break the speed limit, the driver is never drunk, nor distracted by their cell phone or the fight they had with their spouse. Another advantage that people might not think of is that these cars are far better for cyclists as Parker Conrad notes:
It’s so, so obvious to anyone riding a bike in SF that autonomous vehicles are WAY safer for bicyclists than human drivers. They see me every time; human drivers constantly turn right into the bike lane without thinking.
Why? Because driverless cars literally have eyes in the back of their heads.
Driverless cars are in general less good at edge cases but the advantages add up.
I would qualify this only slightly by noting that some locations are more difficult than others and while San Francisco is quite difficult terrain, Phoenix, Arizona was chosen because of flat terrain and sunny weather. Still, the bottom line is absolutely correct. Driverless cars are safer and more capable than many people think and we should always measure their defects relative to realistic alternatives and not to some idealized notion of perfection.
The post Driverless Cars May Already Be Safer Than Human Drivers appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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