Comment by usefulposter
18 hours ago
Precisely. Environmental context is not considered in Waymo's "peer-reviewed model" (I encourage reflexive commenters to first read it: https://waymo.com/safety/collision-avoidance-benchmarking), only basic driver behavior and traffic signal timings.
Note the weaselly "immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge" in the puff piece from Waymo Comms. No indication that they intend to account for environmental context going forward.
If they already do this, why isn't it factored in the model?
How is "immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge" worded weaselly?
Not OP but I interpret that as they are focusing exclusively on what happened after the car saw the kid.
And I completely agree that from that instant forward, the car did everything correctly.
But if I was the accident investigator for this, I would be far more interested in what happened in the 30 seconds before the car saw the kid.
Was the kid visible earlier and then disappear behind an obstruction? Or did the kid arrive from the side and was never earlier visible? These are the more important questions.