I’m personally skeptical, probably won’t enjoy for myself (at least not til I’m REAL old), but hey, I love this for folks who can’t or don’t like to drive!

Fewer car accidents is good for everybody.

That sensor array is fuckin sweet. If I’m going to trust a car to drive me, I want it to have laser beam eyes that see through pitch blackness and blizzard conditions.

You’re the engineer, I’m just a pickup truck driving comedian, so I’m assuming that I’ve just accurately described a commercial-grade LiDAR array.

The LiDAR arrays are dropping very quickly in price - they’re now low six figures. I anticipate they’ll eventually make production, probably with fewer sensors, but sensors of equal quality. Probably sooner than most folks realize.

This comment section is surprising me with both thoughtful and dark observations about the article. Well, that’s rad! I was expecting a more “good news” crowd on the Uplifting News board, but if y’all want Dark Futurism, I can hang.

You’re 100% correct. Non ADAS vehicles will be a luxury good. There will probably be social pressures, similar to seatbelt adoption, pressuring folks to not drive themselves. 2050 feels like a reasonable time horizon for that to start.

The article covers an academic-style research paper. You might find that section of the full research paper interesting! You spotted something important, but I think you think that city driving is safer, when the opposite is true:

https://waymo.com/research/do-autonomous-vehicles-outperform-latest-generation-human-driven-vehicles-25-million-miles/

Here’s the part you might find interesting, the “12x safer than human” claim likely greatly understates the safety advantage, just due to the methodology of the study:

“The garaging zip code of the insured vehicle was used as a proxy for the city (Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin) in which the vehicle drives. Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk. For example, commuters from the city would likely experience a reduced crash risk as they travel to less densely populated areas (Chen et al., 2024). Previous studies have shown that most injury collisions occur within a small radius from residency, and that American drivers rarely travel far from their place of residence, with approximately 80% of one-way household trips being less than 10 miles (DOE, 2022). Third, the benchmark drivers garaged in the Waymo deployment area are not operating with the same distribution of mileage within the geographical limits as the Waymo ADS. Chen et al. (2024) explored the effect of Waymo’s driving distribution on benchmark crash risk and found that - should the benchmark driving distribution match Waymo’s in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles - the benchmark police-reported crash rates would have been between 14% and 38% higher. Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative. Surely, there is an opportunity in future work to leverage new data, such as insurance telematics, to more precisely define and leverage the benchmark driving exposure data to better account for this potential confounder.”

To quote the lady in the video, “God I love New Orleans”

That was a great read, thanks for posting that!

Today I larnt!

I hear you! That’s very interesting to know about RFP, that term is 100% new to me. Makes a lot of sense.

Point taken. Article amended with a thank you for your more specific terminology.

Have a good one.

Edit: I should have lead with… thanks! I appreciate a second set of eyes on it, I want everything in my articles to be factually correct. If ever I’m way off in content I share, please do tell me, and I’ll correct it.

Tell you what, to avoid confusion, I’ll simplify the language in that paragraph, it seems to be distracting a few folks.

I should mention, my experience is very old, I haven’t held a valid cert in decades - so, if there is a flaw in my knowledge, that wouldn’t be my old LT’s fault (as our training was broadly excellent), that is almost certainly foggy memory.

In this case, I’m still pretty sure I’ve described the behavior correctly. I’m removing the reference to avoid distraction, but I’m pretty sure it is correct as-is. See bolded text if you only want to read a single sentence about it.

The definitions you’ve linked above do not contradict what I’ve posted below or how I’ve described the behavior in the article. You’re running a narrow definition, I’m running a broad definition, the distinction is really fine and neither is wrong.

From the linked Wikipedia article I linked above:

This definition [of flashover] embraces several different scenarios and includes backdrafts, but there is considerable disagreement about categorizing backdrafts as flashovers.[5]

A retired firefighter mentioned that her department was using something very interesting - these are flood control barricades, think plastic sandbags.

You put up the barricades, and then use that to make a sort of moat, fill it with water, and you basically build the water tank around the burning EV.

This page shows the concept, site’s in India, but this is being done in the western hemisphere some places, too: https://www.floodbarriers.in/ev_fire_fighting.php

Ya know, we actually don’t use fire blankets where I’m at! The training videogame also made no mention of them, and it is very recent, released last year.

Interesting, right? There’s a huge amount of variation for firefighting techniques nationwide for EVs. I’ve seen them used, but only out West.

As for confusing backdraft and flashover, no, I got that correct. To the best of my admittedly very spotty memory :)

See this article, it means different things different places, how I learned it is that every backdraft is a flashover, but not every flashover is a backdraft. If that’s wrong, take it up with the lieutenant who trained me, who was incidentally stellar at his job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdraft

Me looking at Mozilla like: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHShUPtagAANgks.jpg

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