Self Driving Cars vs.
the World
Jan 2024
What Barak Gila's roughly 15-minute
commute through San Francisco's Castro
and Mission Districts lacks in length, it
makes up for in excitement. Gila, a software
engineer, knows that on any given day his
route will be dense with traffic—some
pedestrians and bicycles, but mostly motor
vehicles. Those come in every size and
permutation possible, including the
self-driving cars (also called autonomous
vehicles, or AVs) that developers like
Google's sister company Waymo and the
General Motors-owned Cruise are testing in
the city.
Gila commutes by bike, and doesn't mind
riding around AVs. While vehicles from
both Waymo and Cruise have been
documented exhibiting alarming behavior in
the city—swarming, blocking traffic, even
rolling through an active firefighting
scene—Gila says he's "never had a
self-driving car behave unsafely" around
him. And it wasn't an autonomous vehicle
that right-hooked him in May 2021; it was a
human-driven Porsche, whose driver told
him the car's blind-spot detector hadn't
alerted him to Gila's presence. Gila had been
vigilant and was able to avoid injury, but the
episode was a troubling harbinger.
An article of faith among proponents of
autonomous vehicles is that most (94
percent is often cited) traffic crashes are
caused by human error. Pedestrians and
people on bikes made up a minority of the
42,939 road deaths in the United States in
2021 (the most recent year for which we
have data), but they're killed at higher rates
than vehicle occupants. Aside from a slight
dip in 2020 when we drove less early in the
pandemic, pedestrian and cyclist fatalities
have risen for over a decade. In 2021 the
annual total of cyclists killed jumped 5
percent to an all-time high of nearly 1,000,
according to preliminary data from the
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA). Pedestrian
fatalities were up 12.5 percent to 7,388, the
highest since 1981.
But an autonomous vehicle will never be
distracted by a text message; nor will it
drink and drive or road-rage, says Anne
Dorsey, a software engineer in Waymo's
behavior division. Removing humans from
the driving task, or dramatically reducing
their role, could save thousands of lives and
countless injuries every year, especially
among vulnerable road users.
That's the promise, anyway. But autonomy's
safety benefits aren't yet proven, and even if
they do pan out, a decade of halting
development progress suggests that rolling
out true self-driving vehicles on a scale that
could achieve those gains will likely take far
longer than what the AV industry has
promised. In the meantime, car
manufacturers are pushing forward with
advanced driver assistance (ADAS)
technology, offering "autonomy lite"
features like the ones in that Porsche. But
that approach comes with its own issues:
Studies suggest that the misleading
marketing and tech terminology is often so
confusing that a frightening number of
drivers treat their cars as self-driving when
they're not.
As Gila found out, that technology—which
ranges from blind-spot detection to systems
that can handle all driving tasks in limited
conditions—is far from foolproof. "The
[driver] was relying on it, but it doesn't work
100 percent of the time," Gila says. "That
false promise of safety can be almost worse
than nothing."
In terms of perception abilities, the Level 4
autonomous vehicles that Waymo and others
are testing are already vastly more capable
than human drivers. (According to the
Society of Automotive Engineers, Level 4,
or "high automation," means the vehicle
drives itself while the occupants are
hands-off passengers. But it can operate
only in limited service areas; full-on,
go-anywhere autonomy would be Level 5,
which is almost a sci-fi dream.) Level 4
vehicles use a sophisticated array of sensors,
including high-definition cameras,
microphones, radar, and a kind of powerful
laser scanner called LiDAR (light detection
and ranging) that can create
three-dimensional maps of the driving
environment.
Another area where autonomous vehicles
have an edge over humans is consistent
behavior. "If the Driver responds the same
way every time, that can increase safety for
cyclists because they know what to expect,"
says Dorsey. Consider a four-way stop with
human drivers and someone on a bicycle:
Cyclists often don't know if someone will
wave them through even when they have the
right of way, or ignore them and cut them
off. In the same scenario with a self-driving
vehicle, the car should react the same way
every time—and not only that car, but every
car in the fleet. The cars share the same
software, so it's essentially as if they all have
the same driver. This fact makes safety
scalable, says Clay Kunz, a robotics
software engineer in Waymo's perception
division. Say a car responds unsafely to a
pedestrian during testing. A software update
can change the behavior of every vehicle
with that operating system. "Once you solve
the problem," he says, "the behavior is
distributed across the fleet."
But proper behavior—which involves
judging what other road users are doing and
then responding appropriately—is
exceptionally difficult because of the
massive variety of possible driving
scenarios. "Cyclists and pedestrians are
challenging because they can be anywhere
in the driving space," says Stephanie
Villegas, Waymo's former lead of structured
testing. They can be following traffic rules
or going against traffic. They can be in a
lane or between lanes, and the difference
matters a lot insofar as predicting what
they'll do next. "It's hard to list all the ways
they interact with drivers," she says.
That's a challenge even for human drivers,
but we have a built-in advantage. "Humans
are really good at predicting the intent of
other humans based on things like posture
and explicit gestures," says Justin Owens,
PhD, a research scientist with the Virginia
Tech Transportation Institute. "We're
hardwired to do that, with capabilities we've
evolved over millions of years." As Sam
Anthony, founder and former CTO of the
autonomous vehicle software company
Perceptive Automata, wrote in a 2022
Substack post, it takes a fraction of a second
for a human driver to see a pedestrian and
process a massive amount of contextual
information on the person's age, attention
level, and even emotional state, all of which
influences how the driver responds.

Even if autonomy proves its safety

argument, the obstacles of scale render its
benefits unattainable in the near term. Right
now, Level 4 autonomous driving exists
only in small fleets; Waymo operates 300 to
400 vehicles in Phoenix, for instance, and
just 700 total. Even if companies like
Waymo and Cruise succeed with their
autonomous taxi business, they may not
account for a large enough slice of
traffic—at least 20 percent by one recent
study—to create noticeable safety
improvements. If, tomorrow, every new car
sold were fully autonomous, it would be
almost four years before even 20 percent of
the 276 million registered vehicles in the
U.S. were self-driving. Of course, that's a
totally unrealistic scenario; the reality is, any
safety benefits from autonomy are almost
certainly a decade or more away.