Waymo's CEO Says Its Cars Would Have Avoided Uber's Fatal Crash
The CEO of Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, has said that its own autonomous cars would have avoided last week’s fatal collision caused by an Uber-operated autonomous car failing to ‘see’ a pedestrian crossing the road.
John Krafcik told an audience at the National Automobile Dealers’ Association, hosted in Las Vegas, that Waymo’s self-driving safety systems were “robust.”
While he spoke of the impact that the fatal collision had had on him and his team, he said:
“All that we can say is based on our knowledge of what we’ve seen so far… and our own knowledge of the robustness that we’ve designed into our systems… in situations like that one — in this case a pedestrian or a pedestrian with a bicycle — we have a lot of confidence that our technology would be robust and would be able to handle situations like that one.”
Uber is still investigating what went wrong, aided by police and US federal regulators. The company that made the LIDAR sensors used in Uber’s Volvo XC90, Velodyne, stated clearly that its tech would have seen Elaine Herzberg before she was struck, and implied that Uber’s software would be to blame.
Comments
Of course Waymo is better, no doubt.
Also, if the backup driver was actually doing his job instead of texting, it could have been avoided as well.
Don’t see why they had a backup driver in the first place. The whole point of this is not to have a driver. Could YOU focus on the road 100% in an autonomous car? Surely, yeah, first few weeks would be amazing, learning how it handles situations, but once you settle into it, get used to it, do you think you would still pay attention to what it was doing? I know most drivers of regular cars hardly pay attention to what they are doing or their surroundings. Let’s be real, and treat that driver person, as a person - under 1 minute attention span.
While Google cars haven’t killed anyone yet, they have also been involved in more accidents than most learner drivers. Stop using a tragedy to try and promote your also-faulty autonomous tech.
Waymo may say but waymo didn’t do
Hind sight is always 20/20 ….
What the f*cks waymo?
It is Google’s self-driving car company.
Why the curse?
Guess yall could say they have waymo confidence…..
It truly is sad that someone died in an accident
Making promotion of off someone’s death is the most despicable practice I can imagine. Shame on them
Is the world that messed up that even in this time of tragedy, companies will still use this as an ‘I’m better than you are’ moment? I don’t want to live in that sort of world.
So what?The accident had already happened…..
So I sent a tweet to the CEO of Waymo about this. I mentioned how he said their technology would have avoided this. I then said something about setting up a test with the same conditions, and I asked if he would be willing to walk across in front of the car in the test. I didn’t get a reply. You won’t be able to find the tweet, because they got it deleted. First they use someones death for marketing, and then when someone asks if they could prove it they silence them? Waymo seems really sketchy to me.
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