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Robotaxi: Waymo reports an accident involving a child – software is said to have prevented a more severe impact.
An autonomous Waymo robotaxi in California struck a child and lightly injured them - but the Google sister company estimates that the software braked the car more strongly than a human would have been capable.
According to Waymo, the child was obscured by a tall SUV before it ran onto the road in front of the self-driving car. The vehicle had slowed in an emergency braking from around 17 miles per hour to less than 6 miles per hour — i.e., from just over 27 km/h to under 10 km/h. According to calculations from a Waymo computer model, even an attentive human driver would have collided with the child — albeit at a speed of about 14 miles per hour (roughly 22.5 km/h). That demonstrates the system's advantages for traffic safety, the company argued.
Investigations have been initiated
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) initiated an investigation following a report by Waymo. The company stated that the accident occurred near an elementary school and that the child sustained minor injuries. The agency will now examine, among other things, whether the vehicle was traveling with appropriate caution given the proximity to a school and children. Waymo had already had to adjust the software after a vehicle was filmed as it illegally overtook a parked school bus.
Waymo consistently emphasizes that data show that the company's robotaxis are safer on public roads than humans in traffic. The NHTSA documents show that Waymo now has approximately 3,000 vehicles. They had already driven millions of kilometers on public roads.
Competition against Tesla
Waymo is regarded as the number one in autonomous driving, but Elon Musk wants the electric car maker Tesla, led by him, to establish itself as the market leader in robotaxis. His approach is controversial: Musk wants to get by with cameras only, without the LiDAR sensors, which are used by Waymo among others, that scan the surroundings of the vehicles. Most experts and rivals insist that cameras are not reliably enough. Tesla wants to bring self-driving cars onto the road this year in around half a dozen US cities.
Accidents involving rivals
Two serious accidents involving self-driving cars have been reported so far. In San Francisco, a woman in the autumn was struck by a car with a human driver at the wheel and was hurled in front of a robotaxi from General Motors' subsidiary Cruise. The self-driving car could not prevent a collision, and the woman ended up trapped under the Cruise vehicle. The car then tried to drive to the roadside and dragged the woman for about six meters. After allegations of cover-ups, Cruise's management was replaced. In the end, GM shut down the company.
During the only fatal accident involving a self-driving car to date, a ride-hailing Uber car during an evening test drive in the state of Arizona ran over a woman who was crossing a multi-lane street. The woman was pushing a bicycle with shopping bags on the handlebars beside her — and investigations showed that the software did not react quickly enough because it could not initially classify the objects. Uber ultimately abandoned the development of its own self-driving car technology.
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