What the discussion below is completely missing,
and the point of my link to the incident involving dragging the pedestrian,
is the incidence of harm to people not in a vehicle.
"The number of pedestrian deaths in the United States is skyrocketing. In 2022 traffic crashes killed 7,805 people on foot—that’s an 83 percent rise from 2009, and a 40-year high. The vast majority of those deaths involved a car colliding into a human"[1]
"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars, according to Martin."[2]
The issue with the safety claims of self-driving is focusing on vehicle-to-vehicle interactions and failing to handle the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the environment.
There are numerous stories of pathological behavior of self-driving vehicles when encountering simple environmental features that a human driver would handle without a second's hesitation[3].
Pedestrians, cyclists, people using mobility devices, and numerous other non-vehicle road users represent an unaddressed challenge to the safety claims made by Waymo and others.
"The number of pedestrian deaths in the United States is skyrocketing. In 2022 traffic crashes killed 7,805 people on foot—that’s an 83 percent rise from 2009, and a 40-year high. The vast majority of those deaths involved a car colliding into a human"[1]
"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars, according to Martin."[2]
The issue with the safety claims of self-driving is focusing on vehicle-to-vehicle interactions and failing to handle the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the environment. There are numerous stories of pathological behavior of self-driving vehicles when encountering simple environmental features that a human driver would handle without a second's hesitation[3]. Pedestrians, cyclists, people using mobility devices, and numerous other non-vehicle road users represent an unaddressed challenge to the safety claims made by Waymo and others.
1 https://slate.com/business/2024/10/cars-suvs-pedestrian-deat...
2 https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...
3 https://www.npr.org/2023/08/26/1195695051/driverless-cars-sa...