If only they would deploy faster. I really doubt their crash rate would spike up to human levels if they expanded 2x or 10x faster.
Living in Silicon Valley I've been passing those cars for a decade without the opportunity to ride. Now they even have regulatory approval for this area, but still no service and no timeline for service.
> I really doubt their crash rate would spike up to human levels if they expanded 2x or 10x faster.
If you look at some of the skepticism around self-driving cars in the US, it makes sense that they're going slow and careful.
Even if a spike in accidents was still lower than the equivalent for humans, that would bring a lot of political scrutiny to Waymo that would then slow their deployment.
It would be even more tragic if they went too quickly, there was some high-profile incident, and the backlash slowed rollout even more, resulting in even more lives lost in the long run.
They weren't forced to dissolve the project. They gave up. Uber had already lost their founder at that point. The new management wasn't serious about self driving and they were likely already looking for an excuse to get rid of it. If Waymo had a single fatality today after years of safe operation and with determination to continue it would be a completely different story.
> It’s tragic that many lives will be lost due to the fear-driven slow rollout.
Sam Peltzman showed with statistics that the FDA's mandate of "safe and effective" slowed down the development of new pharmaceuticals past the point that there were more deaths.
He took it to Congress, who simply latched on to "safe and effective" as an obviously good idea, statistics be damned.
Living in Silicon Valley I've been passing those cars for a decade without the opportunity to ride. Now they even have regulatory approval for this area, but still no service and no timeline for service.