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Comment by direwolf20

21 hours ago

As every company should, when they have a success. Are they also as transparent about their failures?

How is hitting a child not a failure? And actually, how can you call this a success? Do you think this was a GTA side mission?

  • Immediately hitting the brakes when a child suddenly appears in front of you, instead of waiting 500ms like a human, and thereby hitting the child at a speed of 6 instead of 14 is a success.

    What else to you expect them to do, only run on grade–separated areas where children can't access? Blare sirens so children get scared away from roads? Shouldn't human–driven cars do the same thing then?

    • I don't know the implementation details, but success would be not hitting pedestrians. You have some interesting ideas on how to achieve that but there might be other ways, I don't know.

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    • "and thereby hitting the child ... is a success."

      > What else to you expect them to do, only run on grade–separated areas where children can't access?

      no, i expect them to slow down when children may be present

      4 replies →

    • This isn't Apollo 13 with a successful failure. A driverless car hit a human that just happened to be a kid. Doesn't matter if a human would have as well, the super safe driverless car hit a kid. Nothing else matters. Driverless car failed.

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Well, as a comparison, we know that Tesla has failed to report to NHTSA any collisions that didn't deploy the airbag.

  • Tesla report ids from SGO-2021-01_Incident_Reports_ADAS.csv with no or unknown airbag deployment status: 13781-13330, 13781-13319, 13781-13299, 13781-13208, 13781-8843, 13781-13149, 13781-13103, 13781-13070, 13781-13052... and more

Is this a success? There was still an incident. I'd argue this was them being transparent about a failure

  • Being transparent about such incidents is also what stops them from potentially becoming a business/industry-killing failures. They're doing the right thing here, but they also surely realize how much worse it would be if they tried to deny or downplay it.

  • They handled an unpredictable emergency situation better than any human driver.

    • Was it unpredictable? They drove past a blind corner (parked SUV) in a school zone. I'm constantly slowing down in these situations as I expect someone might run out at any second. Waymo seemed to default to the view that if it can't see anyone then nobody is there.