[perlgeek]

If you follow Utilitarian ethics, just ask yourself: how much (negative) utility do you assign to...

* a crash with a fatality

* a crash with an injury

* any crash at all

* a driverless car going around a roundabout constantly

for me, the answer is pretty clear: crashes per distance traveled remains the most important metric.

[danaris]

This is utterly missing the point of the parent.

Just because this car doesn't crash, that doesn't mean it doesn't cause crashes (with fatalities, injuries, or just property damage), and that's inherently much harder to measure.

You can only develop an effective heuristic function if you are actually taking into account all the meaningful inputs.

[vpribish]

Of course you are the best kind of correct but to instead advance the whole discussion I think we can agree that there is no trail of carnage in the wake of waymos leaving only them unscathed.

I live in sf. Waymos are far more predictable and less reckless than the meatwagons. They do not cause accidents with their occasionally odd behavior.

And to add another perspective - as a cyclist and pedestrian I put waymos even further ahead. I have had crashes due to misbehavior of cars - specifically poor lane keeping around curves - but waymos just don’t cause those sorts of problems

[hmmm-i-wonder]

This is exactly the question I was asking, thanks for your input. I know the highlighted examples of 'bad behaviour' in waymo's are somewhat sensationalized, but its hard to quantify how that translates to impacting other users of the environment. I agree humans are very prone to this sort of bad driving, which was what made me ask the question about waymo to begin with. Specifically things like lane keeping, impacts on cyclists pedestrians etc... things you mention.

Although my brain can't help but see waymo's more as "Meatwagons" than human driven cars, I get your point :)

It would be curious to see relative levels of driver assist and its impacts on things like that outside of crash and injury statistics from crashes, but it would be very hard to measure and quantify.