A Waymo autonomous vehicle hit a child near a Santa Monica elementary school last week, the company and federal regulators said Thursday.
The crash happened at the school’s drop-off time on Jan. 23. The child ran into the street from behind a double-parked SUV, officials said. The Waymo detected the child and braked, slowing itself to 6 mph before impact, the company said in a blog post outlining the incident.
The company, part of Google parent Alphabet, said the child walked to the sidewalk and Waymo called 911. The victim was not identified.
The safety of autonomous vehicles is under intense scrutiny as Waymo and its competitors deploy robotic taxis to cities across the country. Waymo has established itself as the industry leader, expanding into more cities last year and preparing to launchin others over the coming months. The company says it provided 15 million rides last year.
The company says its data shows that its systems reduce injury-causing crashes by 81 percent, although it has still driven relatively few miles compared with humans.
Autonomous vehicles have struggled in some instances to pick up on the kinds of visual cues that people rely on to navigate in their cars. But their arrays of sensors and computerized brains can also give them superhuman abilities. In the Santa Monica case, Waymo said a human driver would probably have hit the child at a higher speed. That difference, the company said, is “a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal vehicle safety regulator, said it would examine the California crash to determine whether the vehicle “exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours.” Waymo said it would cooperate with the investigation.
The crash happened the same day that the independent National Transportation Safety Board said it was opening an investigation into Waymo’s behavior around stopped school buses in Austin. School district officials said in November that they had documented 19 cases of Waymos “illegally and dangerously” passing buses.
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