Doesn't sound too safe
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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So, just the right amount of safe then?
Imagine you're the guy who invented SawStop, the table saw that can detect fingers touching the saw blade and immediately bury the blade in an aluminum block to avoid cutting off someone's finger. Your system took a lot of R&D, it's expensive, requires a custom table saw with specialized internal parts so it's much more expensive than a normal table saw, but it works, and it works well. You've now got it down that someone can go full-speed into the blade and most likely not even get the smallest cut. Every time the device activates, it's a finger saved. Yeah, it's a bit expensive to own. And, because of the safety mechanism, every time it activates you need to buy a few new parts which aren't cheap. But, an activation means you avoided having a finger cut off, so good deal! You start selling these devices and while it's not replacing every table saw sold, it's slowly being something that people consider when buying.
Meanwhile, some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives) and a pinball flipper attached to a rubber brake that slows the blade to a stop within a second when the AI model sees a finger in danger.
This new device, the, "Finger Saver" doesn't work very well at all. In demos with a hotdog, sometimes the hotdog is sawed in half. Sometimes the saw blade goes flying out of the machine into the audience. After a while, the company has the demo down so that when they do it in extremely controlled conditions, it does stop the hotdog from being sawed in half, but it does take a good few chunks out of it before the blade fully stops. It doesn't work at all with black fingers, but the Finger Saver company will sell you some cream-coloured paint that you can paint your finger with before using it if your finger isn't the right shade.
Now, imagine if the media just referred to these two devices interchangeably as "finger saving devices". Imagine if the Finger Saver company heavily promoted their things and got them installed in workshops in high schools, telling the shop teachers that students are now 100% safe from injuries while using the table saw, so they can just throw out all safety equipment. When, inevitably, someone gets a serious wound while using a "Finger Saver" the media goes on a rant about whether you can really trust "finger saving devices" at all.
Anyhow, this is a rant about Waymo vs. Tesla.
some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives)
Hotdog / not hotdog
Waymo is also a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work. It's another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights. At least it kind of works isn't exactly helping my opinion of it. Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA and robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work
Silicon valley doesn't have objectives like "putting transit workers out of work". They only care about growth and profit.
In this case, the potential for growth is replacing every driver, not merely targeting transit workers. If they can do that, it would mean millions fewer cars on the road, and millions fewer cars being produced. Great for the environment, but yeah, some people might lose their jobs. But, other new jobs might be created.
The original car boom also destroyed all kinds of jobs. Farriers, stable hands, grooms, riding instructors, equine veterinarians, horse trainers, etc. But, should we have held back technology so those jobs were all around today? We'd still have streets absolutely covered in horse poop, and horses regularly dying in the street, along with all the resulting disease. Would that be a better world? I don't think so.
It's another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights.
Waymo obviously uses a form of AI, but they've been around a lot longer than the current AI / LLM boom. It's 16 years old as a Google project, 21 years old if you consider the original Stanford team. As for destroying labour rights, sure, every capitalist company wants weaker labour rights. But, that includes the car companies making normal human-driven cars, it includes the companies manufacturing city buses and trains. There's nothing special about Waymo / Google in that regard.
Sure, strengthening labour rights would be a good idea, but I don't think it really has anything to do with Waymo. But, sure, we should organize and unionize Google if that's at all possible.
Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA
Sure. That has nothing to do with Waymo though.
robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
Misinvestment by whom? Google? What should Google be investing in instead?
I mean Waymo is way better at their job than Tesla and are more responsible, but this rant makes them out to seem perfectly safe. Whilst they are miles safer than Tesla, they still struggle with edge cases and aren't perfect.
Human drivers struggle with edge cases also. I've seen a lot you drive, and as an old medic who has done his share of MV accidents, I can tell you y'all ain't that good at it.
While I have no dog in this hunt, all any self driving vehicle needs to be is just a bit better than a human one to be an improvement and a net win, (never let perfect be the enemy of good enough). And historically, as soon as any new technology becomes affordable, humans adopt it and use the snot out of it. The problem is, humans aren't very good at projecting future harm that any new tech tends to drag along with it.
All other things being equal, it would save a lot of lives to replace every human driver with a Waymo car right now. They're already significantly better than the average driver.
But, there are a few caveats. One is that so far they've only ever driven under relatively easy conditions. They don't do any highway driving, and they've never driven in snow. Another one is that because they all share one "mind", we don't know if there are failure modes that would affect every car. Every human driver is different, but every human is more or less the same. If a human sees a 100 km/h or 60 mph speed limit on a narrow, twisty, suburban street with poor visibility, most of them are probably going to assume it was a mistake and won't actually try to drive 100 km/h. We don't know if a robo-vehicle will do that. AFAIK they haven't found any way to emulate "common sense". They might also freak out during an eclipse because they've never been trained for that kind of lighting. Or they might try to drive at normal speeds when visibility is obscured by forest fire smoke.
There's also the side effects of replacing millions of drivers with robo-cars. What will it do to people who drive for a living? Should Google/Waymo be paying most of the cost of retraining them? Paying their bills until they can find a new job? What will it do to cities? Will it mean that we no longer need parking lots because cars come and drop people off and then head off to take care of someone else? Or will it mean empty cars roaming the city causing gridlock and making it hell for pedestrians and bikers? Will people now want to live in the city because they don't need to pay for parking and can get a car easily whenever they need one? Or will people now want to live even farther out into the suburbs / rural areas because they don't need to drive and can work in the car on the way into the city?
Personally, I'm hopeful. I think they could make cities better. But, who knows. We should move slowly until we figure things out.
AFAIK they're as safe as SawStop table saws. There has only ever been one collision involving a Waymo car that resulted in a serious injury. It was when a driver in another car, who was fleeing from police, sideswiped two cars, went onto the sidewalk and hit 2 pedestrians. One of the cars that was hit was a Waymo car, and the passenger was injured. Obviously, this wasn't the fault of Waymo, but it was included in their list of 25 crashes with injuries, and was the only one involving a serious injury.
Of the rest, 17 involved the Waymo car being rear-ended. 3 involved another car running a red light and hitting the Waymo car. 2 were sideswipes caused by the other driver. 2 were vehicles turning left across the path of the Waymo car, one a bike, one a car. One was a Waymo car turning left and being hit on the passenger side. It's possible that a few of these cases involving a collision between a vehicle turning and a vehicle going straight could be at least partially blamed on the Waymo car. But, based on the descriptions of the crashes it certainly wasn't making an obvious error.
IMO it would be hard to argue that the cars aren't already significantly safer than the average driver. There are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out, but for the most part they don't seem to be safety-related bugs.
If the math were simple and every Waymo car on the road meant one human driver off the road with no other consequences or costs, it would be a no-brainer to start replacing human drivers with Waymo's tech. But, of course, nothing is ever that simple.
Source: https://www.understandingai.org/p/human-drivers-are-to-blame-for-most
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That was great, the first comparison that came to mind after reading it was they are both a game of russian roulette...
Waymo - you get one chamber loaded with a blank, might kill you if you get it.
Tesla - you get one empty chamber... And the gun is loaded by your worst enemy
Excellent work
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Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.
/s
So it emulates a standard BMW driver. Well done.
Tesla driver are the new BMW drivers. And since Tesla uses their customers driving data to train their AI it’s not a surprise that the AI drives like an asshole.
Still work to be done, it uses the blinkers.
At least they were used incorrectly to be just as unpredictable.
Haaa, finally !! An AI taxi that behaves like a normal taxi driver. It must feel so refreshing.
But Musk told me it's ready for primetime, why would he lie?
Remember guys, Tesla wants to have a living person sitting behind the wheel for "safety." Don't YOU want to get paid minimum wage to sit in a car all day, paying attention but doing nothing unless it's about to crash, at which point you'll be made the scapegoat for not preventing the crash?
Welcome to the future, you're gonna hate it here.
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Navigation issue / hesitation
The video really understates the level of fuck up that the car did there...
And the guy sitting there just casually being ok with the car ignoring the forced left going straight into oncoming lanes and flipping the steering wheel all over the place because it has no idea what the hell just happened... I would not be just chilling there..
Of course, I wouldn't have gotten in this car in the first place, and I know they cherry picked some hard core Tesla fans to be allowed to ride at all...
I've come to the realization, at least where I live, that a hell of a lot of accidents are prevented because of drivers who are actually aware and safe. This goes a bit beyond defensive driving IMO. I'm talking flat out accident avoidable. There is an entire class of drivers who are not even aware of the accidents they have almost caused because someone else managed to avoid their stupid driving.
The majority of accidents that are likely to happen with these robocoffins will be single car or robocoffin meets robocoffin. The numbers on safety after a year will be acceptable because non accident causing error prone driving is not reported in any official capacity.
I still maintain that the only safe way to have autonomous vehicles on the road is if they do not share the road with human drivers and have an open standard for communicating with other autonomous cars.
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Parking in a fire lane to drop off a passenger just makes it seem more human.
Yea, this one isn't an issue. If you are dropping off passengers, you are allowed to stop in a fire lane because that is not parking.
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And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.
I thought that was to economize for expenses?!
So naturally they started with 5 employees in the smallest office of one of the smallest divisions of the NHTSA. Nooooo ulterior motive, nosiree
this would get a normal person's car impounded and drivers license revoked. why can a company get away with it?
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So, Tesla Robitaxis drive like a slightly drunk and confused tourist with asshole driving etiquette.
Those right turns on red were like, "oh you get to go? That's permission for me to go too!"
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The rent seeking is so hard with this automate-the-profits bullshit.
The moment we perfect auto-taxis the service should be a public benefit and run by a nonprofit.
NYC Mayoral candidate Mamdani is talking about making busses free, and that makes a radical shitload of sense.
Free autotaxis would be a boon for productivity and personal freedom, like AI promises to be but democratized for everybody rather than just the richest fraction of a percent.
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Wow it's almost like having an AI with a 2D view to go off of is a bad idea? Hmmm who'd have thunk it?
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Cruise cars were already doing this and performed far better. GM is fucking braindead and pulled the plug like usual though.
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You can tell it’s a Tesla because of the way it is.
A man who can’t launch a rocket to save his life is also incompetent at making self driving cars? His mediocrity knows no bounds.
To be fair Musk only has money and doesnt Do shit at either Company
He meddles. That much is apparent. The cybertruck is obviously a top down design as evidenced by the numerous atrocious design compromised the engineers had to make just to make it real. From the glued on "exoskeleton" to the hollowed ALUMINUM frame to the complete lack of physical controls to the default failure state turning it into a coffin to the lack of waterproofing etc.
Every time I see it it just looks like the earth ran out of memory and set resolution too low
It's hilarious to me that Musk claims to work 100 hours a week but he's the CEO of five companies. Even if the claim were true (and of course it isn't) it means being the CEO of one of his companies is a 20-hour-a-week job at best.
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It is probably being remotely driven from India and they just lost wifi for a minute.
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