They may not be strictly better today. But the hope is that the engineers will keep iterating and make it better and better. The goal is not to be better than every human driver, the goal is to be better than the average human driver.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow Google’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise to begin charging customers for driverless taxi rides across the city.

Metz argued that in recent weeks, it has become “more and more clear to the people riding the cars, and to other citizens in the city, that they are flawed, that they do make mistakes, that they can gum up traffic, that they can cause accidents.”

This was particularly true for Waymo, whose biggest driving errors included side-swiping an abandoned shopping cart and clipping a parked car’s bumper while pulling over to the curb.

I wouldn’t put too much stock into that difference, since Cruise was operating mainly in San Francisco, a more chaotic driving environment than the Phoenix suburbs where Waymo started out.

A couple of years ago, Waymo published research exploring the potential for self-driving cars to prevent crashes by anticipating the reckless behavior of other drivers.

For example, a Reddit user posted a video from August 22 showing a Cruise vehicle crossing an intersection several seconds after the opposing traffic got a green light.

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Betteridge’s law of headlines