I saw the Tesla Robotaxi:
- Drive into oncoming traffic, getting honked at in the process.
- Signal a turn and then go straight at a stop sign with turn signal on.
- Park in a fire lane to drop off the passenger.
And that was in a single 22 minute ride. Not great performance at all.
Human drivers struggle with edge cases also. I’ve seen a lot you drive, and as an old medic who has done his share of MV accidents, I can tell you y’all ain’t that good at it.
While I have no dog in this hunt, all any self driving vehicle needs to be is just a bit better than a human one to be an improvement and a net win, (never let perfect be the enemy of good enough). And historically, as soon as any new technology becomes affordable, humans adopt it and use the snot out of it. The problem is, humans aren’t very good at projecting future harm that any new tech tends to drag along with it.
All other things being equal, it would save a lot of lives to replace every human driver with a Waymo car right now. They’re already significantly better than the average driver.
But, there are a few caveats. One is that so far they’ve only ever driven under relatively easy conditions. They don’t do any highway driving, and they’ve never driven in snow. Another one is that because they all share one “mind”, we don’t know if there are failure modes that would affect every car. Every human driver is different, but every human is more or less the same. If a human sees a 100 km/h or 60 mph speed limit on a narrow, twisty, suburban street with poor visibility, most of them are probably going to assume it was a mistake and won’t actually try to drive 100 km/h. We don’t know if a robo-vehicle will do that. AFAIK they haven’t found any way to emulate “common sense”. They might also freak out during an eclipse because they’ve never been trained for that kind of lighting. Or they might try to drive at normal speeds when visibility is obscured by forest fire smoke.
There’s also the side effects of replacing millions of drivers with robo-cars. What will it do to people who drive for a living? Should Google/Waymo be paying most of the cost of retraining them? Paying their bills until they can find a new job? What will it do to cities? Will it mean that we no longer need parking lots because cars come and drop people off and then head off to take care of someone else? Or will it mean empty cars roaming the city causing gridlock and making it hell for pedestrians and bikers? Will people now want to live in the city because they don’t need to pay for parking and can get a car easily whenever they need one? Or will people now want to live even farther out into the suburbs / rural areas because they don’t need to drive and can work in the car on the way into the city?
Personally, I’m hopeful. I think they could make cities better. But, who knows. We should move slowly until we figure things out.