By now many have probably heard of the fatal accident that Uber’s self-driving car was involved in. While the crash is still being investigated an, it seems that Waymo believes that if it had been their car on the road, their self-driving tech would have avoided the accident that Uber made.This is according to John Krafcik, Waymo’s CEO in which during a panel at the National Automobile Dealers Association convention in Las Vegas, Krafcik was quoted as saying, “I can say with some confidence that in situations like that one with pedestrians – in this case a pedestrian with a bicycle – we have a lot of confidence that our technology would be robust and would be able to handle situations like that.”
Krafcik’s statement was made in response to a direct question in which he was asked whether or not a Waymo self-driving car would have reacted differently compared to Uber’s self-driving car. He also notes that this is “based on our knowledge of what we’ve seen so far with that accident and our own knowledge of the robustness that we’ve designed into our systems.”
When asked what allowed him to make such claims, Krafcik points to Waymo’s rigorous hardware testing routine. This includes closed-course testing at night and also relies on data pulled from public roads, allowing them to create simulations of cities thousands of times. However all of this is hypothetical right now, but it’s safe to say that Uber’s accident has cast more doubt on the tech behind self-driving cars.
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