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.
>I don't know the implementation details, but success would be not hitting pedestrians.
So by that logic, if we cured cancer but the treatment came with terrible side effects it wouldn't be considered a "success"? Does everything have to perfect to be a success?
The limit is 20 MPH in Washington state, in California the default is 25 MPH, but is going to 20 MPH soon and can be further lowered to 15 MPH with special considerations.
The real killer here is the crazy American on street parking, which limits visibility of both pedestrians and oncoming vehicles. Every school should be a no street parking zone. But parents are going to whine they can't load and unload their kids close to the school.
On street parking is so ingrained into the American lifestyle that any change to the status quo is impossible. Cars have more rights on public property than people. Every suburban neighborhood has conflicts over people's imagined "ownership" of the street parking in front of their house. People rarely use their garages to store their car since they can just leave it on the street. There are often laws that prevent people from other neighborhoods from using the public street to park. New roads are paved as wide as possible to allow both street parking and a double-parked car to not impede traffic. And we've started building homes without any kind of parking that force people to use the street.
If it had no parking, then the parents would be parked somewhere else and loading and unloading their kids there, and then that would need to be a no-parking zone too.
I guess you could keep doing that until kids just walk to and from school?
In the UK we have a great big yellow zig-zag road marking that extends 2/3rds the width of an average car across the road. It means "this is a school, take your car and fuck off". You find it around school gates, to a distance of a few car lengths either side of the gate, and sometimes all along the road beside a school.
It doesn't stop all on street parking beside the school, but it cuts it down a noticeable amount.
how about 10-15 mph if directly adjacent to a school, especially during the bands before and after school stars or ends. route away from schools whenever feasible.
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.
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
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.
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.