I've ridden in Waymos. They don't exactly slap on the blinker and move at the limit of traction like someone about to miss their exit. If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.
Essentially, a meat driver was waiting at a stop sign to make a turn onto the main road. I was in a Waymo driving on the main road and did not have a stop sign.
When we were 10 meters away from the intersection, the meat driver suddenly started to enter the intersection. I have no idea why.
Full brake would've hit the other car in the driver's side door at 40 km/h.
> under-playing how decent the average human is.
I got to SMFC in CSGO which means I'm in the top 3% of players in clicking on heads within 500 ms of them appearing on my screen. I have never reacted as fast as that Waymo did.
My experience is that for a human driver to react quickly in city driving conditions, style and prep are more important than reaction time: in the case you describe (entering an intersection with another car waiting on a stop sign perpendicular to your path), I'd have my foot hanging over the brake and off the gas pedal — this has helped me avoid hitting many other cars with inattentive/distracted/bad drivers, and even pedestrians running over the road or a red light on a crosswalk. When you are prepared and looking, you slam the brakes much faster!
This is literally impossible without slowing to single digit speeds for every intersections. At some point you just have to rely on the other traffic honoring signaling and signage or having some desire for self preservation.
My reading of all the human crash stats has been that majority of them happen when human drivers are impaired (drunk, drugged or too tired): as this is something we could (in theory, at least) control, I'd like to see and compare with stats for non-impaired human drivers too.
Then, I'd like to see it compared to attentive, non-distracted drivers too (but we won't have crash data for this, as they would avoid most potential crashes).
Note that I am only talking things under every human driver's control, and not things like skill, reaction time, etc.
Also, modern cars (like Waymos) will have a much lower braking distance compared to "average": eg. my Volvo has 35m braking distance from 100km/h or 62mph compared to 50m (45% more) listed as average (excluding reaction distance) — so from 50km/h, it should be around 8m!
The median one might be better, but does it even matter? The average driver is still wreaking havoc.
