Waymo’s Power Outage Problem: When Self-Driving Cars Go Dark

It's happened again. Waymo in the news. Autonomous vehicles are great at generating publicity. If they ever don't make it as a form of transportation, they should go into the PR business because they are great at attracting media attention. Now, according to the Times and a lot of other media sources over the weekend, a power outage in San Francisco caused dozens of Waymo Robo taxis to just stall, just completely stall out in the middle of intersections. And it raised questions like what's going to happen if there's an earthquake out there? What happens if the power outage is a lot longer? City officials are now calling for hearings, warning the frozen robot cars could block evacuations and emergency responders during disasters. The incident reignited a broader debate about Robo taxis, whether they should be allowed approved, how safe they are. Here's some hard facts about situation. Waymo operates currently about 1,000 vehicles in San Francisco. And when there's a power outage, the traffic signals don't work anymore. You've been there, and that's when it really comes down to you've seen it. Everyone's kind of looking around. You're looking at the facial expressions. Can that driver see you? Can you see them? Who's going to go first? There's a tremendous amount of human communication that takes place there that isn't normally needed when power is out. Now, it should be noted that no injuries were reported. The entire fleet temporarily shut down during the outage. Now, here are some facts that I've mentioned before and nobody gets. Nobody really digests them properly, in my view. I have a hard time digesting it. But here are the absolute facts. In the United States, human drivers die at a rate of 1.2 people per hundred thousand, excuse me, per 100 million miles driven, waymo, serious injury crashes, 90% less than human driving cars. Any injuries at all. The Waymos are 80% less. Now, the state of California currently regulates autonomous vehicles. There are going to be more hearings in San Francisco. Here's what the San Francisco supervisor told the New York Times. This is Bilal Mohammed. We haven't seen a situation before where these Waymos have stalled people en masse across the city. Janine Nicholson, former San Francisco fire chief, says they're still building the plane while they're flying it. It's irresponsible. And Waymo Wansley of the Cardoza School of Law told the Times, safety is about more than avoiding collisions. Okay, so why is this sort of a pet peeve of mine? Those of you who are regulars to the show here at Filtered Know that I am fascinated by autonomous vehicles. I have, I don't own one. I have been in a Waymo and it's because I don't really like 1.2 million people a year dying in car crashes around the world. You may be like, that can't be right. That's too many. No, it's a lot. It's more than have died in the, in all US wars combined. And that's including the Civil War, which killed about half a million people. It's a tremendous amount of carnage worldwide and yet nobody hears about it. It's not a plane flying into a building. Killing 2000 at once doesn't get attention, but more than 2000 die every single day. When you aggregate the deaths across the entire world, Waymo cars, autonomous driving vehicles, Teslas, if they get them, are simply safer, even if they never get better, if they still have kinks in the software, if they still screw up, and yes, if they occasionally run over a dog or cat. Guess what? Real, real cars driven by humans run over dogs and cats every single day. But it doesn't get media attention because it's not unusual. The definition of news is what's unusual. Going to war is unusual. Having peaceful relations with your allies and not much different today than yesterday is not news. That's why that doesn't get coverage. So when someone dies in your community today, and I hope it doesn't happen, but Statistically speaking, within 100 miles of you today, someone's going to die in a car crash, I hate to say it, when that happens, doesn't get any media coverage. Ho hum. But if one autonomous vehicle kills somebody anywhere in the world, boom. It's often front page news. And it is how human beings are wired. It doesn't mean you and I are bad people, it is just how we are wired to sort of glom on to the unusual. The question though is from a public policy standpoint, what do we do with that? How do we extrapolate from that incident? Unfortunately, too many people say, oop, too dangerous. I'm never going to take an autonomous vehicle. I wouldn't feel safe. Well, I hate to tell you, but the statistics of 1.2 million people a year dying in car crashes don't care about your feelings, they're still going to result in death. I hope not for you, hope not for your family, hope not for me. But getting in a car is the single most dangerous thing most of us ever do. It's not handling snakes, certainly not public speaking. It's not getting in an airplane Although an airplane feels more dangerous, it's not. You're frankly never safer than when you're in a commercial jet that's highly, highly regulated. I realize regulation is supposed to be a naughty word and you're not supposed to ever act like that's a good thing here in social media, but it's true. You're never safer than when you're in an airplane by a commercial pilot. So what are we going to do as a society about these waymos? Because again, the perception is, wow, too dangerous, too scary. Wow. I saw one crash. I saw one kill a cat. No. If you cannot claim to be a human being, who cares about human human life and want to slow this thing down because it's already so much safer than humans? Is it perfect? No. You cannot make the good the enemy of the perfect or the perfect the enemy of the good. Sorry about that. Let's look at some more of the facts of what we see. Global road deaths per year. I said 1.2 million. The latest statistics are 1.19 million million per year. Now, if autonomous driving reduces deaths by 50%. Now, some of the estimates are that it's 80, even 90% on a PER mile basis, less dangerous. But let's say it's only 50% better than human drivers. That's saving 600,000 lives per year. When you think of the genocide in a place like Cambodia, a couple of years of autonomous driving, it's the same number of people. When you think of how many Americans were killed in the Vietnam War. About 58,000. You're saying you can have a Vietnam war? The total amount of deaths over 10 years, 58,000 every year for a decade. It wouldn't kill as many people as simply having human driving cars versus switching to autonomous driving. So that's what's drawing me to this. It's not some blind faith in, well, the tech gods are always wonderful. No. Oh, the tech gods are always looking out for what's best for us. No, the tech gods are looking out for money. They can figure out a way to get you from point A to point B, not have to pay a driver. And they make money, more money than they're going to do it. So I'm not counting on them to do necessarily the right thing. But this is one case where the market does create some efficiency. Right? Now, look, if you say, I don't like big business, fine. That means you don't get to buy a Ford, a byd, a Toyota or any car. It means you're walking somewhere. If you want to walk everywhere, fine. That's probably safer, except in a few big cities. But if you're going to use the product of a big company, I'd much rather use a technology product that involves autonomous driving than a Ford, a General Motors or a Toyota. And I'm not vehemently against those companies, but they are death machines, let's not kid ourselves. And when cars started killing a lot more people than horses, and they did, society had a choice to do all sorts of regulation. It was kind of slow at once, but eventually stop signs came in, stop lights came in, seat belts eventually came. So they've gotten safer, but still 1.2 million people a year are dying. That's why I am saying whatever you can do, if you're public official and you have an opportunity to vote. Green lighting autonomous vehicles, whether it's Waymo, Tesla or anyone else in your community, I think it's irresponsible not to give these autonomous cars the green light.