Waymo has always operated 24/7 since the beginning and had 99.4% fleet uptime [1] during the past winter season (SF had record rains). They used to shut down during inclement weather in Phoenix years ago, but their SF rain operations have scaled up with the mileage. Waymo vehicles use its own set of sensors and don’t rely on the vehicle’s safety features, so I’m not sure how types of vehicles is relevant for the comparison.
This is pretty good as far as “apples-to-apples” comparisons go.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/08/the-waymo-drivers-rapid-learn...
EDIT: On further research, it looks like for Waymo this change only applied to when they could charge fares, so OP is correct that they were authorized to operate 24/7 [1].
[0] Article from August 10 of this year: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/10/23827790/waymo-cruise-cpu...
[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/news-and-updates/all-news/cpuc-appro...
Surely "car with ABS and good tires" vs "car without ABS and with bald tires" makes a difference. And presumably waymo operates exclusively the former while some people drive the latter.
The average US vehicle's age is more than 12 years.
>and was very common long before that (my base model truck from 1999 has it)
My non-base-model car from 1995 didn't.
>we can consider cars without abs statistical noise by now.
I'm not so sure that's true. But even if it is, that doesn't mean that there are no meaningful differences in safety between an exclusively new (or at least very recent) and maintained vehicle fleet and the general population.
The study you linked only discusses one uncontrolled variable (which is a bad sign given how many others there are that they don't talk about) but it's one I hadn't thought of:
> A limitation of the selected human baseline is that the location of crashes that generate claims is not known, which limits the ability to filter claims based on Waymo's Operational Design Domain (ODD). As a result, whereas the Waymo ODD largely does not include freeway driving, the human database includes miles driven and claims which occur on freeways. Due to variations in collision frequency per million miles between freeways and non-freeways, this may have led to a baseline which may be more conservative than a roadway- matched baseline.