Waymo Runs Over Beloved Neighborhood Cat in Mission District

I remember vividly a childhood experience when a car I was in ran over a dog -- it ran towards the side of the car and went under the rear wheels of the car. I'm not sure there's any reaction time (human or otherwise) that would have prevented that from happening.

Yep, I think it’s blatantly obvious that autonomous cars of some flavor will eclipse human ability sometime this century.

The interesting point will be when insurance companies reduce your rate if your car doesn’t have a steering wheel (or, equivalently, charge a “driving manually” fee). It might be obscured if car companies take on the risk themselves, but at some point people will start to notice that driving manually costs more.

Decades ago a kitty bolted in the middle of the street.

I was less than 18, using one of those little cars that reaches at most 50 Km/h. I slammed the break and manage to stop maybe 2 cm from the kitty, which managed to continue out of the street alive.

The scooter behind me came close to me and complained that I almost killed them by slamming the breaks. To this day, I still don't know if that was the right call. That guy could have been a dad and I could have killed a father. Still I couldn't think of killing a cat either.

I had a dog bolt in front of my car once on a slow residential street. He survived. It was terrifying.

Still, this cat was on a busy stretch of 16th Street for nearly a decade and was unharmed by human drivers. I think Waymo failed pretty badly here. Some of the dismissive comments I've seen on this topic seem to me like they're making excuses.

As a Mission local, I loved routinely seeing KitKat while strolling down 16th. He was friendly and made everyone’s day a little brighter. Perhaps other SF residents on HN feel the same.

Yes, it's pretty well understood at this point that news reports often greatly overstate the impact of an event compared to base rates. By playing to the "local neighborhood" and "cute kitty" angle while pointing at the "obvious cause" (self-driving car) that has many SF detractors, they can get a higher rate of readers, which increases their impact (and maybe ad revenue?).

At least the number of articles suggesting that trolley problems are highly relevant to self-driving car implementations have gone down.

Looks like it’s been verified as true now.

So it’s safe to ago ahead and short it.

Remember it trades under GOOG

This was a cat, not a child.

Hitting a pet / animal should be treated the same as hitting a child? No.

If we're going to fully enclose and automate them anyway, we can probably have the cars going much faster and closer together, and save energy (and make it easier and safer to keep them that close together) by having cars going the same direction attach together. And the automation would be easier if we just had like different sets of cars on fixed tracks, with splits for when people need to go different ways. And at that point why do you even own your own car, they should probably be owned and operated by the government or a large public corporation. And...

> it's undisputable that self-driving technologies that have been deployed commercially are dramatically safer than human driving

This is really only true for Waymo, who appear to be the only folks operating at scale who did the work properly. Robotaxi, Cruise and all the others are in a separate bucket and should be statistically separated.

Undisputable? Let's see what happens with the average "accidents per km" these firms keep touting once we let a bunch of self-driving cars drive on the ring around Paris or Antwerp.

So you're ok with getting run over by a machine? You must be seeing this: https://x.com/goodpotatoes/status/1984284314734043453 as absolute barbarity, no?

Very bleak and very tech-bro-coded, no wonder that regular people have started seeing us like pariah, we deserve it.

The only option is the owner of the vehicle, who would hopefully have insurance like any other vehicle owner.

In California, at least, Waymo is required to have $5 million in liability insurance. And the state has a law holding the manufacturer responsible in lieu of a driver. Though this setup has barely been tested since there have been so few incidents and the only "major" one (in CA) is still in court.

> Legally, who is liable for a self-driving car which makes a mistake?

Waymo? How is this ambiguous. Waymo makes the car, writes the software and operates the vehicle.

Why do you think cats would be safer? That's a confusing leap of logic. I think engineers tend to extrapolate from data, even in messy real world scenarios where the extrapolation doesn't make intuitive sense. It's an enormous social flaw that leads to bitterness between them and normal humans (autopilot vehicles are in fact the perfect storm that best exemplifies this problem).

Also note that there is an enormous issue of trust and dignity.

By "trust" I mean: We have seen how data and statistics are created. They are useful on average, but trusting them on very important, controversial topics, when they come from the private entity that stands to benefit from them, is an unrealistic ask for many normal humans.

By "dignity" I mean: Normal humans will not stand the indignity of their beloved community members, family, or pets being murdered by a robot designed by a bunch of techies chasing profit in silicon valley or wherever. Note that nowhere in that sentence did I say that the techies were negligent - they may have created the most responsible, reliable system possible under current technology. Too bad normal humans have no way of knowing if that's the case. Especially humans who are at all familiar with how all other software works and feels. It's a similar kind of hateful indignity and disgust to when the culpable party is a drunk driver, though qualitatively different. The nature of the cause of death matters a lot to people. If the robot is statistically safer, but when it kills my family it's because of a bug, people generally won't stand for that. But of course we don't know why exactly, as observers of an individual accident - maybe the situation was truly unavoidable and a human wouldn't have improved the outcome. The statistics don't matter to us in the moment when the death actually happens. Statistics don't tell us whether specifically our dead loved one would have died at the hands of a human driver - only that the chances are better on average.

Human nature is the hardest thing for engineers to relate to and account for.