From the Waymo blog...

> the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made.

> Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene.

> Following the event, we voluntarily contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that same day.

I honestly cannot imagine a better outcome or handling of the situation.

> The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road

How do you remain stopped but also move to the side of the road? Thats a contradiction. Just like Cruise.

A human driver would most likely have killed this child. That's what should be on the ledger.

And before the argument "Self driving is acceptable so long as the accident/risk is lower than with human drivers" can I please get that out of the way: No it's not. Self driving needs to be orders of magnitude safer for us to acknowledge it. If they're merely as safe or slightly safer than humans we will never accept it. Becase humans have a "skin in the game". If you drive drunk, at least you're likely to be in the accident, or have personal liability. We accept the risks with humans because those humans accept risk. Self driving abstracts the legal risk, and removes the physical risk.

I'm willing to accept robotaxis, and accidents in robotaxis, but there needs to be some solid figures showing they are way _way_ safer than human drivers.

I'm curious as to what kind of control stack Waymo uses for their vehicles. Obviously their perception stack has to be based off of trained models, but I'm curious if their controllers have any formal guarantees under certain conditions, and if the child walking out was within that formal set of parameters (e.g. velocity, distance to obstacle) or if it violated that, making their control stack switch to some other "panic" controller.

This will continue to be the debate—whether human performance would have exceeded that of the autonomous system.