Neurosurgeon for Waymo self-driving cars

[WendyBG]

At some point in the future, when all cars are self-driving, people will say, “What were they thinking – allowing humans to drive cars!”

Not there yet but moving in the right direction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/opinion/self-driving-cars.html

Don’t Fear Self-Driving Cars. They Save Lives.

By Jonathan Slotkin, The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2025

…[big snip]…

So far, other autonomous vehicle companies don’t report or report incomplete data. Waymo, by contrast, published everything I needed to analyze the data: crash statistics with miles driven that allow accurate comparison to human drivers in the same locations.

There’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles. More than 39,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes last year, more than homicide, plane crashes and natural disasters combined. Crashes are the No. 2 cause of death for children and young adults. But death is only part of the story. These crashes are also the leading cause of spinal cord injury. We surgeons see the aftermath of the 10,000 crash victims that come to emergency rooms every day. The combined economic and quality-of-life toll exceeds $1 trillion annually, more than the entire U.S. military or Medicare budget.

This is not a call to replace every vehicle tomorrow. For one thing, self-driving technology is still expensive. Each car’s equipment costs $100,000 beyond the base price, and Waymo doesn’t yet sell cars for personal use….

Not all autonomous vehicles are created equal….A study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found “no convincing evidence” that partial automation reduces crash rates.

Waymo operates cars with no human driver. Their vehicles use cameras, radar and specialized sensors, known as LiDAR, that create detailed 3-D maps. They operate only in cities where they’ve studied every intersection….

[end quote]

I like the thoughtfulness of this author and his careful analysis. The conclusion – that autonomous vehicles can save lives and prevent injury – only applies to the specific suite of Waymo conditions. But it’s clear that progress has been made and that localities would benefit by encouraging deployment as long as the data is as clear as it is for Waymo.

Wendy

[Leap1]

@WendyBG

So

But I like going fast!

[flyerboys]

@Leap1

But I like going fast!

I know personally (one can see) and professionally (I have studied all manner of urban transport) that vehicles driven at speed by humans are inherently dangerous. I also know that being astride a powerful motorcycle with my hand torqueing the throttle grip, more, then more, then more more more…. brings a rarified joy that defeats all logic. My bestie motorcycle friend and my husband banded together to make me quit, and their arguments were not founded on reason but on brutal emotional force majeure.

They still allow me to ski, but only when aggressively chaperoned by nephews.

We humans have evolved environments to live in that momma nature never imagined when she evolved us, and so we lack internal safety switches in crucial places.

[Leap1]

Monkeys and apes swing from branches. Those few feet at at time are at high speeds.

Oddly enough, cruising at 84 mph on the highway next to trucks and cars is not much different.

I face older age soon. Time to slow it down…again.

[tjscott0]

Small push back from the author. Waymo data looks good. But more data is needed.

Why Autonomous Vehicles Need Billions of Miles Before We Can Trust the Trend...

I agree with Slotkin on the core point. Autonomous systems do not need to be perfect. They need to be measurably better than human drivers.

Where I diverge from Slotkin is in the level of confidence we can draw from the current dataset. The data is early. The operational design domain is limited to certain cities and certain conditions. The traffic mix is not uniform. Weather variation is limited in some deployment areas. Human driver benchmarks also vary by geography and time of day. Some types of crashes, such as interactions with pedestrians or cyclists, require large exposure sets because they depend on dense environments and complex behaviors. To claim that the clinical trial is already complete is to skip several steps in the process. The findings are promising. They point in the right direction. They do not yet represent the depth and breadth of evidence required for a technology that might one day replace human drivers across most conditions.

Fatalities occur roughly once every hundred million miles. Waymo’s dataset is only 96 million miles with passengers, so for the same amount of driving, we should expect zero, one, or many fatalities — because it’s far too small a sample size to get a statistically valid result.

The scaling problem becomes obvious when we look at the raw numbers. If fatalities occur at roughly one per hundred million miles, then strong confidence in a fatality rate that is lower than human drivers requires far more than one hundred million autonomous miles. It will require billions. That volume needs to be spread across cities, climates, day and night conditions, and road types. It also needs to include interactions with different kinds of road users. Without that diversity, the data risks overstating performance in one environment and understating risks in another. This is the normal path for any safety-critical system. Aviation, nuclear power, and medical devices all reached maturity through high exposure and detailed reporting. Autonomy will too.

[WendyBG]

I think there needs to be an open discussion about where autonomous vehicles make most sense. For example, I think that autonomous trucks could be safely used on the very long trips across country on interstates because there is almost no danger of unpredictable incidents (such as a child running across the road). Waymo taxis can be used in restricted areas where the street grid can be programmed, especially in areas with reasonably predictable weather.

The adoption of self-driving technology should be step-wise.

Wendy