This puts a spin on the article (which, admittedly, could have its own spin), that smells disingenuous.

She wasn't saying "yeah, those bozos will be fine in our shoddy bots run down grannies on the crosswalk", in a mask-off moment. The article was saying Waymo expects someone will be fatally struck by one of their vehicles eventually, but society will have accepted (Waymo's) driverless cars enough by then that it won't break the company. "They'll see Waymo is so much safer than normal drivers even if it still does cause some accidents." type shit.

It's still wishful corpo-speak but there's no reason to mislead.

Edit: I understand that it is the headline of the article itself but we should do better than regurgitating and echoing clickbait titles.

Are they volunteering?

Society wasn't even ready for a waymo to kill a cat

Amazing how far the US will go to not use rail and maintain dependency on cars.... just wow.

not it

Bold to say that openly. Will be used in court later.

CEOs are generally heartless asshats.

fucking what?

We are? Huh.

Hopefully one of the AI-touting CEOs first.

On Reddit they were celebrating Waymo coming to London

tesla already beats them there, in the testing department.

Sounds like she's volunteering.

one passed a stopped school bus that was unloading kids in Atlanta. That’s a violation that normally garners $1,000 fine and a court hearing, but nothing was issued to the company.

“These cars don’t have a driver, so we’re really going to have to rethink who’s responsible,” said Georgia state Representative Clint Crowe to Atlanta news station, KGW8.

No? The company has a mail address. Send them the notice and summons to court, just like you would for the owner of a regular vehicle.

Not that odd. Death by car is easily accepted by society. They are "accidents" and a "necessary evil" for society to function.

There's around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and "accidents" are just that.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.35 million deaths worldwide in 2016. That is, one person is killed every 26 seconds on average.

Nobody cares about cars killing people and animals. So she's probably right.

It probably happened already and they're trying to get ahead of the news.

At some point we have to accept vehicular deaths given how car-centric our society is and how distracted and unsafe a lot of drivers have become.

Normal taxi drivers kill people.

Normal truck drivers kill people.

Normal home to work drivers kill people.

If a robotic taxi can lower the taxi category of accidents by 91% across the board, including death rates, then that's a positive improvement to society any way you slice it. Not saying it isn't a horrifying dystopian world we're potentially building, but at the moment, given the numbers, it would be 91% safer in that category.

The ultimate solution is to shift towards more public transit options in general, and away from individual vehicular transport. Not only is it a massive burden to the environment, but it's a massive cost burden to the individuals and society as a whole.

Instead of running a red light or hitting a pole self-driving cars drive full speed under a trailer and decapitate everybody, or someone falls against the car and it detects an accident and decides to pull over and slooowly runs over the person and drags them down the street ignoring all the screaming. The kind of accidents society is desensitized to are the ones they taught the car how to avoid, the fucked up shit where somebody gets hydraulically pressed to death in slow motion while 15 people film it on their phones is what Waymo is going to do.

I think society is ready and eager for CEOs to be hunted like animals, as the United Healthcare case showed.

I feel like most of the comments in here didn't even bother reading the article before grabbing the pitchforks.

Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.

And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.

In context, without the clickbait headline, that's a really reasonable take. They accept that statistically, they're safer but due to large numbers and randomness a fatality will eventually happen. And logically, it's preferable to the alternative of many fatalities happening.

Public transit is safer than your insanely expensive individualized transit solution.