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
Instead of realizing the shortcomings of current tech and working on improving upon existing tech and making it safer, we have a game of corporate showboating…
s m h
They found you m8,have an upvote.
It’s just annoying
Still makes no sense how this lady appeared out of thin air
She didn’t, in the video you can see a silhouette in the other lane a few seconds before the accident.
What a time to shine in a growing market !! Nicely played Google
Great, a conpany using someone’s death to brag. No respect at all
It seems that companies will use anything then can to advertise, sadly
And if this incident had happened to a different company’s car, Uber would have said that they would have avoided it. They can’t prove it, and we’re not going to get a load of people to walk out in front of their cars to find out.
You know what would have prevented the crash? AN ATTENTIVE DRIVER.
or companies not rushing things
So we can safely assume that around 30% of drivers could have, maybe avoided the crash, going by your criteria.
Didn’t she jaywalk tho?
I still find it hard to believe that Uber, a company that was opened so that it allows people to make some money on the side of their regular job is trying to phase out the driver from their cars. All of the logic
It’s pretty dumb but I guess they realized they can make more money without having to pay drivers. Greedy people
Why don’t we test it out?
Let’s set up the same conditions and test it on their CEO if he’s so confident.
Yeah, of course a company owned by Google would say something like that… No respect for the poor person who was killed either.
But at the end of the day, even if a pedestrian was killed, which is awful of course, is the technology behind the accident. That needs to be the focus, and looking forward to prevent incidents like this one.
Yeah, not really the time to use bragging rights
What does Google have to do with that?
Oh really