Robot vs. human: Who's the better driver?
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
It's every driver's nightmare: a kid dashes into the street from behind a parked car and there's little time to react.
Zoom in: A Waymo robotaxi incident outside a Santa Monica elementary school suggests an AI brain would react faster than a human — but it's not that simple.
Catch up quick: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating after a Waymo robotaxi last week struck a child who ran across the street from behind a double-parked SUV near an elementary school.
- Santa Monica Police said first responders evaluated the student, with her parent present, and did not report any injuries.
The intrigue: Waymo claims its driverless vehicle behaved as expected, slamming the brakes as soon as it detected the child, slowing from 17 mph to under 6 mph before making contact.
- A "fully attentive human driver" in the same situation would have hit the child at approximately 14 mph, according to Waymo's computer modeling.
- "This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver, " the company wrote in a Jan. 28 blog post.
The big picture: This incident fits into a much larger debate about whether autonomous vehicles can match — or exceed — the safety of human drivers.
- People fear self-driving cars, yet nearly 40,000 people are killed each year in traffic accidents involving human drivers.
- The answer to that question is crucial to winning the public's trust as robotaxis spread quickly across America.
Reality check: Reacting quickly isn't the only way to avoid crashes, safety experts tell Axios. Context, judgment and driving experience matter, too.
- Young drivers have quicker reflexes, for example — but old drivers have much better safety records, notes AV safety expert Philip Koopman, emeritus professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
- A careful, competent human driver would have avoided a panic stop in the first place by adjusting their driving behavior amid the chaos of school drop-off — or taking a different route altogether, he argued.
Waymo should share video of the incident to provide more context, including what the child was doing before she emerged from behind the car, adds Missy Cummings, former senior safety advisor at NHTSA and now head of the autonomy and robotics center at George Mason University.
- NHTSA says it plans to investigate whether the Waymo robotaxi exercised appropriate caution in a school zone.
What we're watching: This larger debate is already playing out in the insurance industry, where autonomous vehicles are testing how risk is priced.
- At least one online provider, Lemonade, examined Tesla's data and concluded its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software was so much safer than human driving that it warranted a 50% rate cut.
The bottom line: Are humans holding robots to a higher standard than themselves? So far, the answer is yes.
