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Comment by tessierashpool | Hacker News Reader

very surprising that Waymo would describe the accident in terms that blame the other party

Why? If you don’t follow the rules of the road the cyclist is to blame. Now what Waymo needs to do to avoid this in the future is a whole other discussion…

Waymo needs to do nothing to avoid this in the future if their vehicle was following the rules of the road and the cyclist did not.

You don't think that they should try to avoid avoidable collisions?

Every collision is avoidable if you drive the car at 5mph at all times. But that wouldn't be reasonable. If the Waymo description of the incident is accurate, there would be no way to really avoid this accident without significantly nerfing the normal and expected driving behavior of this vehicle. e.g., you would need to not allow a Waymo vehicle to enter the intersection when there is any other vehicle in it as well, which (in my opinion) would not be reasonable at all.

If it drives better than a human (in this case it sounds like it probably did), that's good enough for me.

You may want to look into the concept of the "Failure to Avoid" or "Failure to Reduce Speed" citation. These encapsulate scenarios where it there was reasonable opportunity to avoid or stop before causing a collision.

You don't just get to careen into a collision because someone else is not following the rules of the road, hoping for a payday.

Ok, but neither of those things apply in this case.

Obviously Waymo vehicles should be slowing down to try to avoid a collision / reduce the severity. But in this case it sounds like the "fix" would be fundamentally changing the cars behavior to be far too conservative.

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