I drove down a main road here in Chandler, Arizona yesterday and saw three in five minutes. Based on all my experiences on the road with them in the last few months I’d say the chances of them having an incident similar to Uber are much less.
I actually trust the waymo cars more than regular ones now when I'm on my bicycle or motorcycle. Granted they are absurdly "cautious drivers" and can be mildly annoying to be stuck behind in a car.
This strikes me as a risk factor that no one is really discussing. We talk about the dangers of Level 3/4 autonomy, where the driver is still responsible for the car, but autopilot is doing most of the work, leading to a bored/disengaged driver who's not ready to react when it's actually necessary. We don't hear as much pedestrians taking it for granted that a car will stop for them, right of way or no, because of their experience with self-driving cars. Leading to the inevitable accident when they step in front of a human-piloted car who isn't paying attention / can't see them.
That habituation will work in the other direction too.
1: cars driving super cautiously will become the norm, so human driving behaviour that is normal now may become seen as abnormal and dangerous. I expect to see a lot more traffic tickets for driving 10mph above the speed limit, blowing through yellows, et cetera.
2: crashes will be increasingly blamed on the driver. Right now when a driver crashes into a pedestrian or cyclist, most of the time the driver is let off the hook relatively easily. But if it's an accident that a self-driving car would have avoided, the public will be seen as much more avoidable and the driver will be blamed.
There's also the factor that a majority of accidents are caused by a minority of drivers; people who think they are bad drivers are more likely to adopt self-driving cars. Sure there's a large dunning-kroger effect: 80% of drivers think they are above average, but the other 20% are probably really bad.
So I do expect the widespread presence of self-driving to make human drivers much better.
But as you said pedestrians and cyclists will likely become worse. I think it'll balance into many fewer fatalities, but we'll see...
Excellent points. Yes, I can see an increasing intolerance for reckless and inattentive driving as autonomous cars become more prevalent and set a good example.
Maybe that's what happened here. The LIDAR would be visible from afar and that lady just watched the car run into her without flinching.
In all seriousness, what you're describing happens on college campuses across the country today, where students are conditioned to drivers yielding right of way.
My suggestion for pedestrians is to treat cars like guns. Just as you assume a gun is loaded, you should assume a car does not see you. I see people stepping into crosswalks staring at their phones after barely glancing up to see the light has changed. They have no idea if the oncoming traffic is slowing/stopping for them. It's a problem now, and I think self-driving cars have the potential to make it worse (as, at the same time, they are making it better in other ways).
I wonder if this is because waymo has shown more details of how their lidar operates (and how it would have detected the pedestrian who was hit by the Uber car), but Uber is refusing to show the inner workings of their lidar's abilities to the regulators.
The manufacturer of uber's lidar system recently came out and said that they do not believe it failed, but that the input from it failed somewhere inside Uber's software.