Feds add nine more incidents to Waymo robotaxi investigation

techcrunch.com

23 points·alanzhuly··6 comments

Interestingly, these additional incidents are all from public sources (social media mostly) which makes me wonder how many incidents happen that aren't reported.

My guess would be approximately zero. Cal DMV requires incident reports and they are public. Waymo is a good actor. If they are fudging these reports I would be shocked.

The California DMV only requires it for cars that are being operated by Waymo under the testing permit. Any car carrying a paid passenger does not require those same reports.

As an example, a Waymo ran a red light and caused a moped to crash in January ("due to remote ops"), and there is no DMV report for it but there is a completely redacted NHTSA report for it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/03/26/waymo-...

For the new cases they are investigating, all but one of these went unreported to the NHTSA, otherwise they would provide the incident number in the letter they sent (as they do for the pole collision they mention).

Interesting. I did not realize that revenue rides do not fall under the reporting requirement.

Yeah, those incidents only have to be reported to the CPUC and they don't make the data public.

The incident where a Waymo vehicle ran into a pole (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s) is one of the most head scratching to me, but overall amazingly safe for operating 50,000 paid rides per week.

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