> Similarly, in a more statistically robust dataset of over 35 million miles during autonomous testing operations, the Waymo Driver, together with a human autonomous specialist behind the steering wheel monitoring the automation, also significantly reduced both bodily injury and property damage claims per million miles compared to the human driver baselines.
Link to the full research paper: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.01206.pdf
If autodrivers are creeping around very carefully for instance, taking half again longer to get anywhere, it's reasonable to ask if that increase in statistics is enough compensation?
I do wonder whether a world of autonomous vehicles moving more slowly but safely is still a better world than ours — is there reason to the current speed/safety trade-off is optimal?
Road-hours are absolutely fixed, for a given set of roads - 24 hours in a day times physical road miles divided by car spacing is a hard limit.
Slow cars are on the road longer.
Ideally all the cars would go the speed of light and use the roads for milliseconds per trip.
Surely we're not optimal now - speed is set by arbitrary limit signs placed largely politically. Then people go whatever speed they feel is right anyway.
Just saying, the measure of autodriving is a larger space than accident-rate.
But anyway, I have a feeling that in the long run they probably will be. In the meantime they share the road with human drivers and the real benefits won’t be seen until its just autonomous vehicles all carrying out the same rules.
Fair, the litmus test would be whether Swiss Re charges less for (re)insuring autonomous vehicles vs regular drivers.
> But anyway, I have a feeling that in the long run they probably will be. In the meantime they share the road with human drivers and the real benefits won’t be seen until its just autonomous vehicles all carrying out the same rules.
Agree.
