[aithrowaway1987]

Waymo's numbers aren't dishonest and their accomplishment is real, but this data should be taken in its proper context.

1) The comparison lumps in a lot of humans which cynically and selfishly break the law. Currently Waymos attempt to obey the laws of the road, but Tesla FSD shows that self-driving companies can and will market towards people who want to speed, run red lights, etc. So I am deeply concerned that a formal comparison of law-abiding self-driving cars will be used to encourage development of autotaxis which compete with human Ubers on travel time by speeding or rolling through stop signs like a human would. It would ultimately be a correlation/causation error: Waymo's training and development correlates with better safety records when the causative variable is ultimately risk-adversity, with better engineering being a secondary factor. In particular, I suspect Waymos will eventually be safer than humans at legal driving but dramatically more dangerous at illegal driving, and Waymo executives using motivated reasoning to dispel the concerns. Again, FSD literally offered different options for how much you wanted to speed or roll stop signs. This isn't hypothetical.

2) This is less concerning than reckless driving, but these stats include a lot of human accidents due to mechanical failure. This is something I expect self-driving to handle very poorly without human intervention. The most cognitively demanding moment of my entire life was having a rear tire blowout while driving a heavily-loaded truck with little experience - as the end started to fishtail I quickly realized what happened and carefully applied the brakes, hit the emergency lights, closely paying attention to the tactile feedback in my feet and hands, then pulled over as soon as I possibly could. If I were an AI and this was an edge case the engineers forgot to train on, Robo-Me would have easily flipped the truck. Mechanical failures aren't occurring in Waymos now because the cars are still new. Eventually it might be a real problem.