As a disclaimer, this is neither an anti-Waymo comment or a pro-Tesla comment, I just find in interesting how these small sample size incidents are both covered and perceived in the absence of actual verifiable safety statistics.

That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.

Also a common thing I see happening with the Tesla Autopilot for an accident is that it's often not the fault of the autopilot. It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second. Naturally the driver will lie or not even realize they were the problem as they may have had auto pilot active 1 second before the crash. I think it's that natural human instinct when you see something happening to crap the wheel or hit the pedal in that "oh shit" kind of reflex. And that sometimes causes the driver to make a mistake.

I actually was in a crash with a person driving a Tesla vehicle where I think this was the cause. 3 lane highway, they were in the center lane, I was in the left lane, transport truck in the right lane. The transport truck slightly drift towards the edge of their lane and the Tesla driver freaked out and over corrected their steering wheel to the left and came swerving into my lane and was losing control of their car between both lanes until they suddenly slammed on their brakes in front of me. I gotta say, the Tesla brakes combined with the regenerative braking have some impressive stopping power. Unfortunately that also meant they stopped way faster and so suddenly that I hit their rear a bit. I got very lucky that insurance ruled in my favour and had them 100% at fault.

Apologies for the tangent, just trying to illustrate a point via a personal story of how even when the system is working well and keeping the driver safe, they can still make a human-like overreaction which overrides the autopilot and leads to a crash.

I get pretty annoyed when I see news articles with the headlines "Tesla crashed while auto pilot activated", but then there has yet to be an investigation and we actually don't know whether autopilot was in fact active or not yet. It's a clickbait style headline that I think makes people more hesitant about the progress of Waymo and Robotaxi vehicles.

Per The Guardian:

  “Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility. […]”

  “The real surprise came after [Mark Rober’s] experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.”

It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.

I think overall though as self-driving becomes more mainstream the system will only get safer. Not only will the computer systems themselves have better software and hardware to make them smarter, but there will be less and less human drivers doing stupid things that they have to account for. The roadways will have more predictable and sane self-driving vehicles on it.

I think the problem we have right now is that you almost do need these half-assed systems that still rely on human interventions to get over the initial hurdles of having people accept this technology. People want to feel like they still are in control while using something they may not fully trust. And regulators in many areas often also have this same desire. While I don't think we currently are at the ideal situation for self-driving, I think we are definitely getting there. I think Tesla's self-driving features really opened up the minds of people that human-less self-driving is a viable option that we can explore and that it can also be done safely.

I'm sure a time will come where we can switch to selling fully automated cars that people can buy for themselves with no human intervention needed, but I think we still aren't at that phase yet. People are starting to accept things like Waymo, but I still think many people would not accept having no control of their own personal vehicle when navigating around, even though I think it would be safer that way.

"As the Waymo approached the double-parked SUV, a child ran out from behind the SUV and into the roadway, directly in front of the Waymo."

Waymo cannae change the laws of physics. Braking distances exist for AI-driven vehicles just as much as human-driven ones.

"The child reported minor injuries and did not require transportation to a hospital. ... Waymo said at the time that the child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV and that the vehicle braked hard before contact, reducing speed significantly before impact."

Edit: Waymo's blog[2] says it "reduc[ed] speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made", and that "our peer-reviewed model[3] shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph".

[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/new-details-released-in-way...

[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...

[3] https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/

Reaction times differ, though, and abilities to blend deceleration and turning and awareness of what else is around.

(Waymo's tendency to be a good defensive driver and bleed a few miles per hour at anything odd help too... though it is worth noting that if Waymo was 1MPH slower, that 6MPH collision wouldn't have happened at all).

I love when HN mentions my state or city, but that's the road and neighborhood one block down from me. I feel seen.

To add something more substantive to this thread, apparently Google's deal with Uber for distribution has become incredibly adversarial in our state. Uber won't explicitly let you book a Waymo or let you know if you're in the Waymo range.

Okay two, Avenue and the shopping center.