A driverless robotaxi from Waymo hit and slightly injured a child in California. The Google-Sister company defends itself and estimates that the software slowed the car more than a human would have been able to.
According to Waymo, the child was obscured by a tall SUV before running onto the road in front of the self-driving car. The car reduced the speed from around 17 miles per hour (approx. 27 kilometers per hour) to less than 6 miles per hour (approx. 10 kilometers per hour) in an emergency stop.
According to calculations by a computer model from Waymo, an attentive human driver would have collided with the child – but at a speed of around 14 miles per hour (around 22.5 kilometers per hour). The company argued that this shows the advantages of the system for traffic safety.
Start investigation
The traffic safety authority NHTSA opened an investigation after a report from Waymo. The company reported that the accident occurred near a primary school and that the child suffered minor injuries. The authorities now want to check, among other things, whether the vehicle was driven with appropriate caution given the proximity to a school and children.
Waymo had already had to adapt the software after a vehicle was filmed illegally driving around a parked school bus. The company always emphasizes that data shows that the company’s robotaxis are safer than people on the road.
The NHTSA documents show that Waymo now has an estimated 3,000 vehicles. They have already driven millions of kilometers on public roads.
Competition with Tesla
Waymo is considered number one in autonomous driving, but Elon Musk (54) wants the electric car manufacturer he runs Tesla establish itself as the market leader in robotaxis. His approach is controversial:
Musk only wants to get by with cameras, without the laser radars used by Waymo, among others, that scan the surroundings of the vehicles. Most experts and rivals insist that cameras are not reliable enough. But Tesla wants self-driving cars in around half a dozen US cities this year put on the street.
Accidents at rivals
So far, two serious accidents involving self-driving cars have been reported. In San Francisco in the fall, a woman was hit by a car with a person behind the wheel thrown in front of a robotaxi belonging to the General Motors subsidiary Cruise. The self-driving car was no longer able to avoid a collision and the woman got stuck under the cruise car. The car then tried to pull over to the side of the road and dragged the woman around six meters. After allegations of a cover-up, the cruise management was replaced. In the end, GM closed the company.
In the only fatal accident to date involving an autonomous car, a car owned by the ride-hailing company Uber ran over a woman who was crossing a multi-lane road during an evening test drive in the state of Arizona. The woman was pushing a bicycle with shopping bags on the steering wheel next to her – investigations showed that the software did not react quickly enough because it was initially unable to classify the objects. Uber eventually gave up on developing its own technology for self-driving cars.