Waymo is regarded as number one in autonomous driving, but Elon Musk wants to establish Tesla as the market leader in robotaxis. — AFP
LOS ANGELES: A driverless Waymo robotaxi hit and slightly injured a child in California, the Google sister company said, arguing that its software braked the car faster than a human would have been able to.
In a blog post that has reignited debate over whether human- or software-driven cars are safer, Waymo said on Wednesday that the child was hidden by a tall SUV before stepping into the road in front of the self-driving car.
The vehicle, it said, cut its speed in an emergency stop from around 17 miles per hour to less than 6 miles per hour (from just over 27 km/h to under 10 km/h).
Based on peer-reviewed calculations by a Waymo computer model, even an attentive human driver would also have collided with the child, but would have done so at around 14 miles per hour, roughly 22.5 km/h, the company said.
This, Waymo argues, demonstrates its software’s advantages for road safety.
Proponents of self-driving cars have long argued that this technology will ultimately be safer and help rule out human error at the wheel.
The company said the accident occurred on January 23 near a primary school and that the child suffered minor injuries.
The US traffic safety authority NHTSA opened an investigation after being contacted by Waymo. The authority will now examine, among other things, whether the vehicle was being driven with appropriate caution given the proximity to a school and children.
Waymo had already had to adjust its software after a vehicle was filmed improperly passing a parked school bus.
Waymo consistently stresses that its robotaxis operate more safely than humans on the road, saying the data shows this.
NHTSA documents indicate that Waymo now has an estimated 3,000 or so vehicles, which have already driven millions of kilometres on public roads.
Waymo is regarded as number one in autonomous driving, but Elon Musk wants to establish Tesla as the market leader in robotaxis. His approach is controversial, however, since it relies only on cameras, without the laser radars used by Waymo and others to scan vehicle surroundings.
Most experts and rivals insist cameras alone are not yet reliable enough. Tesla, however, aims to put self-driving cars on the road in around half a dozen US cities this year.
Two serious accidents with self-driving cars in the US have become known to date. In San Francisco in the autumn, a woman was hit by a car with a human at the wheel and thrown in front of a robotaxi belonging to Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary.
The self-driving car could no longer avoid a collision and the woman was trapped under the Cruise vehicle. The car then tried to pull over to the side of the road and dragged the woman for about six metres.
Following accusations of a cover-up, Cruise’s management was replaced, and GM eventually shut the company down.
In the only fatal accident involving an autonomous car so far, a vehicle operated by ride-hailing company Uber ran over a woman during an evening test drive in the state of Arizona as she crossed a multi-lane road.
She was pushing a bicycle with shopping bags on the handlebars beside her, and investigations showed that the software did not react quickly enough because it initially could not classify the objects.
Uber eventually gave up developing its own self-driving technology. – dpa/Tribune News Service
