At this point, being let’s say a “transportation safety activist” in the Bay Area, they seem about the same.
That said, I’ve seen Waymo still being too cautious relative to Cruise. Like I was waiting on the crosswalk with my bike at a 45-degree angle, and Waymo seemed terrified that I was going to bike diagonally through on-coming traffic. It was kind of hilarious.
That said when I’ve tried to test the safety parameters on Cruise while on my bike or skateboard and the system has called my bluff. I don’t know if this means Cruise is less safe. Or they’ve found a way to give the AI a sense of confidence and assertiveness against people using micromobility to aggressively bypass urban traffic congestion.
Are we seeing a similar phenomenon here with autonomous vehicles, for example Waymo has had a steadier approach it seems than others: while, for example Cruise seems like it didn’t.
fwiw, my personal experience testing both has been that Waymo's vehicles are noticeably better at driving, and also drive more aggressively. It's to the point where sitting in a Waymo vehicle is unremarkable and I don't even pay attention to its driving, while Cruise still typically has at least 2 "that wasn't great" moments per ride.
After riding in both Cruise and Waymo cars in SF, I think that Waymo cars are so much more road-ready. While my Waymo rides all seemed pretty smooth albeit with a timid driver, my cruise rides featured extremely skittish behavior around other cars, missing several turns to avoid being around others, and stopping in odd places, especially for dropoff and pickup.
Glad this calls out Cruise specifically, and not 'robotaxis' in general. Been seeing a lot of coverage lumping Waymo & Cruise together, but Waymo, while it has its own share of mistakes, is generally a large step up in terms of driving performance compared to Cruise. (Source: I've ridden in both many times, and its pretty clear)
Cruise and Waymo have been as cautious as they can reasonably expect to be. They both have months long training courses for their safety drivers, and camera in the vehicle that monitor driver attention. While the vehicles are still challenged by complex scenarios, basic object detection and emergency braking are pretty good. Neither has had an at-fault accident, excluding an ambiguous but non-injurious incident between a Cruise car and a lane splitting motorcyclist.
> Cruise and Waymo have both done tons of closed course testing, that's where they validate their respective systems against mission critical stuff. But eventually they've got to go out into the real world and learn to deal with real traffic on real roads.
Waymo has been doing that longer than anyone, though.
It's not too useful to lump Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo together here. Tesla is years behind Cruise and cruise is years behind Waymo in terms of driving capability. Waymo doesn't even drive on highways, so we don't know how safe it would be (probably very safe).
Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety - I would feel safer riding in a Waymo than driving myself.
My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.
Yes, but you're choosing only one metric to evaluate on. Waymo/Cruise are level 4+. Anecdotally (does anyone have comparable data?), they also have a much lower accident rate. Solving a problem partially for all conditions and areas rather than ~completely for a specific but large area and set of conditions doesn't seem like it puts you meaningfully ahead.
Edit: and surely Waymo/Cruise could launch everywhere with performance that's lower than their current launch cities, but they choose not to. I don't think there's any compelling reason to assume their tech doesn't work outside of SF or Arizona or wherever, they just don't want to be in the news for their cars plowing someone into a highway divider or running over a pedestrian.
Looking for the truth in statistics is very tricky. Important to note that Cruise is extremely different from Waymo and shouldn't be used to represent self-driving as a whole.
Waymo and Cruise are being much more careful. Consequently, they’re finding out that self-driving cars cannot be deployed yet without being dangerous to people. It’s not a surprise that Uber and Tesla have killed people.
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.
Waymo appears to be the real deal. Last night I saw one navigate a situation with a hesitant pedestrian better than most human drivers. And before people chime in with "ideal conditions," it was at night in the rain.
I never trusted the Cruise cars, they would drive like a teenager that was afraid of the road. But Waymo seems a step up even from the Uber drivers.
15 years ago I worked on robot tanks for the US Army, I currently am in machine learning and I live in Phoenix, so I was very interested in this and have taken several rides on Waymo (never been in a Cruise). The Waymo felt very safe- and is definitely trying to convince you of that fact. Most seats have a screen that shows the cars current situational awareness of all obstacles around it- you can even see pedestrians, parked cars, etc., and when you come up to a stop light it will display a little icon with the correct light so you know that it is reading the red/yellow/green correctly. It plans routes such that it rarely takes an unprotected left turn (though the current generation of vehicles seem to be more willing to do that- on the old Pacifica minivans I don't think I ever had one do that, the iJag's have done it occasionally though not often). They are clearly thinking about trying to make it feel safer, and convince riders of that safety.
Now, I will note that the Phoenix area is by far the easiest driving I have ever encountered in 25 years of having a license. Wide roads, little traffic, few pedestrians (I moved here from NYC!), little weather, and I don't see them out as much at night. They crucially also completely avoid the most unpredictable driving in the area, for example Sky Harbor Airport, and near construction sites (there is construction in our kids school parking lot, and the Waymo won't go in- they will only drop us off next door and make us walk). But this too builds my confidence in the system- the people who are operating it seem to understand that it has limitations, which suggests to me that they are wearing their engineers hats and not management or, God forbid, salesmen hats. Is it perfect, I'm certain not. But I definitely prefer it to Uber or anything like that- no tip, no worry about the driver doing something concerning, just gets me where I want to go.
In SF, waymo isn't particularly slow, and drives remarkably humanlike to me, unlike Cruise which regularly took 2x as long to drive anywhere as a human would, and drove very much not like a human would.
There were clear signs that Cruise was rushing things with their expansion, but I didn’t know the performance was this bad. Based on developments from the past few days [1], their safety culture seems to be closer to Tesla’s than it is to Waymo’s.
That said, I’ve seen Waymo still being too cautious relative to Cruise. Like I was waiting on the crosswalk with my bike at a 45-degree angle, and Waymo seemed terrified that I was going to bike diagonally through on-coming traffic. It was kind of hilarious.
That said when I’ve tried to test the safety parameters on Cruise while on my bike or skateboard and the system has called my bluff. I don’t know if this means Cruise is less safe. Or they’ve found a way to give the AI a sense of confidence and assertiveness against people using micromobility to aggressively bypass urban traffic congestion.
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