Paper Review | Comparative Safety Performance of Autonomous- and Human Drivers
A Real-World Case Study of the Waymo One Service
Initially, I wanted to cover Role-Play in Large Language Models (05/23) as it matches the theme of our Langchain project for this week’s paper review.
But then John Krafcik made me aware of the SwissRe Paper covering the safety of Waymo cars in real-life situations so due to the relative importance of this, I decided to cover this first.
In addition, everybody and their grandma are writing about LLMs right now. What would the fun be in that? Isn’t it?
Let me know in the chat which content you want to read more about. Paid subs only.
Project Goal: In this paper, SwissRe examines if Waymo’s self-driving vehicle can be a safe and reliable transportation option.
Problem: Self-driving car’s participation in real-life traffic will only increase. Ill-defined liability laws are slowing down adoption. How can we ensure that self-driving cars can operate on public roads without significantly contributing to the number of traffic accidents and injuries? How safe are self-driving cars in reality?
Proposed Solution: The project team conducted a research study on over 58 million miles of driving, including 3.9 million miles in a self-driving mode of Waymo One self-driving vehicles in San Francisco, CA and Phoenix, AZ, and compared them to a human driver performance of Swiss Re data within the same zip codes.
Links: Paper, Website, Video (9/10)
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So let’s dive in
The setup
The study, conducted by Swiss Re, compares Waymo’s accident data as measured through third-party liability insurance claims.
The Waymo dataset consists of 53 million miles and was collected through their own fleet of vehicles in San Francisco and Phoenix and includes manual operations (human driver 27%), testing operations (Waymo driver+human 66%), and fully autonomous (Waymo Driver 7%)
The comparison baseline dataset (Swiss Re) was sampled for relevant zip codes from a Swiss Re dataset collected between 2016 and 2021 and includes more than 600,000 claims and 125 billion miles driven.
The paper compares bodily injury between human drivers (Swiss Re baseline dataset) and the Waymo dataset and also property damage between human drivers (Swiss Re baseline dataset) and the Waymo dataset.
Swiss Re
Swiss Re is a reinsurance company based in Zürich, Switzerland. The company is one of the world's largest reinsurers, as measured by net premiums written.