Raw LLM Responses

The claim that self-driving cars are safer than human drivers cannot be legitimately made yet. The data which Waymo uses to claim this is heavily skewed in their favor by virtue of the fact that they do not operate their vehicles yet under the more challenging traffic infrastructure and driving conditions. The human driver accident data includes all of the latter, so that dataset would need to be carefully pruned to even start to make a fair comparison. Waymo only has robotaxi data for 4 cities so far, and 50% of that data is from just one city. The cities in which they operate now do not have many of the more challenging traffic infrastructure conditions that exist in many other cities. For example, in New England most of the streets are much narrower than in any of the cities Waymo is currently in. This impacts operational safety margins for both human drivers and driverless cars when trying to avoid accidents. Then there are weather conditions: current self-driving cars perform poorly in what little testing has been done on roads with snow or ice (I'm not even sure that Waymo has tested these conditions; European self-driving car companies have had more motivation thus far to tackle these problems.) There are a lot of sensor problems under snowy conditions that impact lidar and computer vision systems, and I believe this also holds for icy conditions. There is also not nearly enough data yet to accurately determine what Waymo's accident fatality rate is. Waymo has caused one fatality with over 71 million driverless operation miles with no safety driver. However, the human driver accident rate is 1 fatality per 110 million driven miles in the U.S., and that is backed by a very large set of data. Sadly, Waymo will have to kill more people and drive a *LOT* more miles under more varied and challenging conditions before we can really start to estimate its level of safety. (There are statistical sampling problems that result from only having a few recorded deaths, especially just one. It would take a pretty large number of driven miles to overcome this, and I'm not even sure that would be enough.)