I can't find anything saying waymo has a thermal camera. They aren't expensive- certainly not compared to the LIDAR- and provide extremely discriminated input on "am I about to kill something?" They're not perfect as foul weather and fog are likely to blind thermal- but they shouldn't be driving in suboptimal conditions until they have a track record of safety in optimal ones.

The greater good is not served by allowing profit-making machines to use public infrastructure to test lethal machines in.

You imply all human driving is like that one example which is the worse one can come up with, which is not true.

You imply Waymos on the street will take the 20 year old irrational driver out of the road, which is also not true.

And "I did bad but others do worse" is a terrible premise to live by.

In the U.S., billions of dollars that could be spent on proven ways of solving the problem are instead spend on speculative robotic car development.

Robotic cars are not the only solution. They may eventually be as effective as proven solutions that are offensive to U.S. car supremacists, but as of today, robotic cars have proven only to be better than untrained, inattentive U.S. drivers and the life-threatening domestic policies that enable them. Robotic cars aren’t trying to solve the problem; they’re trying to capture spending on the problem. If transportation policy magically changed overnight to force immediate, funded implementation of proven safety processes from other countries, the excuses given for Waymo and others to beta-test their “these fatalities are a necessary accident in service of zero deaths” robotic vehicles would no longer hold water.

(It then proceeded to drop me off in a weird back corner spot in Santana Row by a loading dock. Can't have everything.)

I assume once you're close enough or actually under it there's a blind spot. It doesn't seem very good at evading potholes either.

Doesn't matter if shouting at the driver only works some of the time, that's still an infinite improvement over working 0% of the time when there's no driver.

The difference between actual zero and close-to-zero is infinity.

How good is the detection of humans? 99%? 99.99%? 99.9999%? My recommendation is to stay away from the path of any car when possible.

Surely an undercarriage sensor array can be done on the cheap (engineering and retrofits aside) due to the required sensing distance being quite short.

Off the top of my head, it sounds like an area where ultrasonics and cameras would actually excel at (as opposed to replacing LIDAR for core functionality, which doesn't work very well as we've found out).

End of the day it's way cheaper than lawsuits.