I agree and I wouldn't hold them against Waymo, but I think when you are developing a self driving car, you should stop analysing it like a crash between two humans with fault and blame, and start looking at it like a system.
If Waymos were having a seriously increased rate of non-fault crashes, that would still be a safety issue, even if every crash was ultimately a human's fault.
Agreed. I think their current performance is super impressive. I think it's possible to get even better and beat humans by lowering the number of not-at-fault incidents too (although there are only so many variables in Waymo's control).
As another commenter mentioned, the fact that the Waymo detected that a vehicle was approaching it from behind at high speed and tried to accelerate to get out of the way is super impressive, and I'm not sure even most good human drivers would have been able to do that.
Yeah. We had an autonomous bus here--involved in an accident the very first day that wouldn't have happened with a human driver. The bus just sat there and let a truck back into it.
I also wonder how it fares in a Kobayashi Maru scenario. I chose to cream a construction cone because the guy in the left turn lane went straight. (Admittedly, I think he didn't realize he was in the left turn lane.) I could see the cone wasn't actually protecting anything, could a car do so?
If Waymos were having a seriously increased rate of non-fault crashes, that would still be a safety issue, even if every crash was ultimately a human's fault.