The data coming out from an independent study of Waymo autonomous vehicles is, frankly, amazing. Swiss Re, one of the largest global insurance firms based out of Zürich, reports that 25.3 million fully autonomous miles drive by Waymo vehicles resulted in a 92% reduction in car crash injuries.
In plain English, Waymo self-driving tech is 12.5x safer than human drivers.
Let’s dig into what that means!
In the end, insurers will be the harbingers of autonomous vehicles.
In 2050, the insurance will be twice as high if you insist on having a steering wheel, and it will have a major impact on buying decisions.
This comment section is surprising me with both thoughtful and dark observations about the article. Well, that’s rad! I was expecting a more “good news” crowd on the Uplifting News board, but if y’all want Dark Futurism, I can hang.
You’re 100% correct. Non ADAS vehicles will be a luxury good. There will probably be social pressures, similar to seatbelt adoption, pressuring folks to not drive themselves. 2050 feels like a reasonable time horizon for that to start.
Never trust an automated vehicle you have to buy insurance for. If it’s truly autonomous, then the actual person in the driver seat is irrelevant. There is no need to price risk individually. Any true self driving car should have a lifetime insurance policy included in the purchase price. The manufacturer is the one determining if crashes will occur. The liability should be entirely on them. Any company selling you a “self driving” card that still requires you to buy insurance is selling snake oil.
I work in vehicle testing, specifically on ADAS and autonomous driving features. One thing that gets overlooked with Waymo is the fact that that fucker has a 6-figure price tag on the sensing equipment on it. You’ll never see that on a production level vehicle
The real point of self driving cars is not to have to buy one. They should be ubiquitous fleets of taxis that never sleep, not personal possessions that sit in the driveway 90% of the time.
From where I’m sitting that’s very far from reality for a whole lot of reasons. I’d be happy to be wrong (because cars are unacceptably unsafe as-is) but there’s a long way to go
Okay, feel free to tell me all the reasons.
I’m not going to write you an essay
There are good video essays on the subject by Benn Jordan, Not Just Bikes, and Adam Something that (mostly) are a good overview of the problem and their videos explain things better than I’m ever going to write
Also the eternal taxi idea just seems like a shit excuse for not building other transit options. Like why not build trains and bike lanes instead of that
Well I wasn’t asking for an essay. Benjamin Faraday’s well known video about the effectiveness of automated taxi trials in St. Germaine and the Transportation Policy Institute numerous published case studies, which you can go Google, show how self driving taxis take net cars OFF the roads AND free up parking spaces for OH I DONT KNOW bike lanes and bus stops so perhaps these ideas aren’t so mutually exclusive as you suggest.
“Never” is a long time. Technology is always getting cheaper, I see no reason why that sensing equipment won’t end up on a production vehicle at some point.
