[terminalshort]

Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.

[repsilat]

"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.

[andy99]

Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.

[jordanb]

There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.

[xnx]

Do Waymos phantom brake? Given the number of trips hey do I would imagine there would be a ton of videos if that was happening.

[razingeden]

they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed:

construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around.

the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.

it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver.

it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but-

i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire.

it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do

i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”

[jordanb]

> sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.

Probably what you're witnessing is the car sitting in exception state until a human remote driver gets assigned

[bluGill]

Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading).

Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.

[potato3732842]

This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident.

The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.

[QuadmasterXLII]

It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.

Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”

And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit

[terminalshort]

It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.

[bluGill]

The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)

[CPLX]

I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.