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by mdorazio 1040 days ago
A quick search on Google News shows at least 3 human drivers did the same thing in the last 3 months, so this doesn't bother me all that much.
4 comments

I'm not saying this is damning evidence, but how many human drivers are on the road versus AI? A quick Google search says there are 300 Cruise vehicles operating at night currently. I am confident I could survey 10 times that many taxi drivers and not find a single one who has accidentally driven into wet concrete.
The problem with that analysis is that "driving into wet concrete" is not even in the top 1000 problems affecting road users.

It is non-fatal for starters, which makes it in a separate category completely from the worst idk ~200 or so problems on roadways.

Ask how many of those taxi drivers how many have interacted with their smartphone while driving, and you will find that 100% of them have been part of a common roadway problem that leads to fatalities.

That's the difficulty with n=1

Was this a freak accident, or indicative of expected performance.

I guess we'll only find out if more Cruise cars turn themselves into modern art.

True, but presumably Cruise can fix this issue. Can we fix human drivers?
And over the course of a year their fleet has collectively driven somewhere around a million miles. Human drivers on US roads complete over 3 trillion miles per year.

So, one Cruise vehicle driving into concrete is about equivalent to 3 million human drivers driving into concrete on an equal rate basis.

Discrete events and very small numbers make it hard to draw good conclusions, and you shouldn’t extrapolate like that. With the exact same logic, you could have argued yesterday that Cruise vehicles are less likely to drive into concrete than humans with an extrapolated rate of zero! This claim is just as suspect as the other — n=1 just isn’t giving you enough data.
I was simply entertaining the 'statistic' posed by the parent at face value. But you're right, we don't know whether or not this is an outlier event.
You can set an upper limit with zero events.
1)Absolute counts are meaningless given the wildly disproportionate population sizes. We're talking many orders of magnitude difference here. Cruise operates 100 vehicles during the day, 300 at night.

2)Absolute counts worldwide are meaningless when comparing against crashes in SF.

3)You picked an arbitrary period

4)Whether it makes the news is not reliable for statistical comparison. Millions of crashes go unmentioned. Many of them don't even result in a report to any officials.

"car stuck in concrete" on google image search shows a lot of human-driven carnage.