The gauntlet is down. If Cruise, Zoox, Argo, Tesla and others want to say they are in the game, they need to show the same data. If they won’t show it, we should presume they are afraid of releasing it for a reason. No proprietary secrets are disclosed. A few useful lessons are revealed but everybody should be sharing those lessons anyway, for the good of the industry.

Will Waymo be as bold in deploying as suggested above? Probably not. It’s a quirk of humanity that “people don’t like being killed by robots.” We would rather be killed by drunks. We expect perfection from machines that they can’t deliver, and which we don’t expect from other human drivers. The risk to the public of Waymo deploying today are not just low, they are much lower than the risk which will be created by the people who drive themselves rather than taking a ride in a Waymo. And I don’t just mean the people today. If we assume that Waymo grows in a similar way depending on when they launch, and that if they launch a month later they get big a month later, then the math tells us the risk they prevent is actually all the people who didn’t ride with Waymo in that whole period before they got big, and it’s equal to all the people who ride in a month when they do get big. If Waymo can grow in the distant future to be 10% of trips in the USA, that means delaying a month causes 80000 accidents and over 250 deaths due to people who drove themselves rather than rode in a Waymo. For each and every month of delay.

• Uncategorized