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From the Waymo blog...
> the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made.
> Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene.
> Following the event, we voluntarily contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that same day.
I honestly cannot imagine a better outcome or handling of the situation.
Yup. And to add
> Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.”
It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.
It depends on the situation, and we need more data/video. But if there are a bunch of children milling about an elementary school in a chaotic situation with lots of double parking, 17 mph is too fast, and the Waymo should have been driving more conservatively.
An honest account of this situation would place at least some blame on there being a tall SUV blocking visibility.
These giant SUVs really are the worst when it comes to child safety
AV’s with enough sensing are generally quite good at stopping quickly. It is usually the behavior prior to the critical encounter that has room for improvement.
The question will be whether 17 mph was a reasonably cautious speed for this specific scenario. Many school zones have 15 mph limits and when there are kids about people may go even slower. At the same time, the general rule in CA for school zone is 25 mph. Clearly the car had some level of caution which is good.
It does sound like a good outcome for automation. Though I suppose an investigation into the matter would arguably have to look at whether a competent human driver would be driving at 17mph (27km/h) under those circumstances to begin with, rather than just comparing the relative reaction speeds, taking the hazardous situation for granted.
What I would like to see is a full-scale vehicle simulator where humans are tested against virtual scenarios that faithfully recreate autonomous driving accidents to see how "most people" would have acted in the minutes leading up to the event as well as the accident itself
For me it would be interesting to know if 17 mi/h was a reasonable speed to be driving in this environment under these conditions to begin with. In my school zones that's already close to the maximum speed allowed. What was the weather, were there cars parked which would make a defensive driver slow down even more?
The autonomous vehicle should know what it can't know, like children coming out from behind obstructions. Humans have this intuitive sense. Apparently autonomous systems do not, and do not drive carefully, or slower, or give more space, in those situations. Does it know that it's in a school zone? (Hopefully.) Does it know that school is starting or getting out? (Probably not.) Should it? (Absolutely yes.)
This is the fault of the software and company implementing it.
They they are being very transparent about it.
So the TechCrunch headline should be "Waymo hits child better than a human driver would"? Not sure if the details reflect how the general public actually interprets this story (see the actual TC headline for exhibit A).
This is the classic Suddenly Revealed Pedestrian test case, which afaik, most NCAP (like EuroNCAP, Japan NCAP) have as part of their standard testing protocols.
Having performed this exact test on 3 dozen vehicles (L2/L3/L4) for several AV companies in the Bay Area [1], I would say that Waymo's response, per their blog post [2] has been textbook compliance. (I'm not defending their performance... just their response to the collision). This test / protocol is hard for any driver (including human driven vehicles), let alone ADAS/L3/L4 vehicles, for various reasons, including: pedestrian occlusion, late ped detection, late braking, slick roads, not enough braking, etc. etc.
Having said all that, full collision avoidance would have been best outcome, which, in this case, it wasn't. Wherever the legal fault may lie -- and there will be big debate here -- Waymo will still have to accept some responsibility, given how aggressively they are rolling out their commercial services.
This only puts more onus on their team to demonstrate a far higher standard of driving than human drivers. Sorry, that's just the way societal acceptance is. We expect more from our robots than from our fellow humans.
[1] Yes, I'm an AV safety expert
[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...
(edit: verbiage)
Meanwhile the news does not report the other ~7,000 children per year injured as pedestrians in traffic crashes in the US.
I think the overall picture is a pretty fantastic outcome -- even a single event is a newsworthy moment _because it's so rare_ .
> The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation is investigating “whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”
Meanwhile in my area of the world parents are busy, stressed, and on their phones, and pressing the accelerator hard because they're time pressured and feel like that will make up for the 5 minutes late they are on a 15 minute drive... The truth is this technology is, as far as i can tell, superior to humans in a high number of situations if only for a lack of emotionality (and inability to text and drive / drink and drive)... but for some reason the world wants to keep nit picking it.
A story, my grandpa drove for longer than he should have. Yes him losing his license would have been the optimal case. But, pragmatically that didn't happen... him being in and using a Waymo (or Cruise, RIP) car would have been a marginal improvement on the situation.
We should all think twice before taking a company PR statement completely at face value and praising them for slowing down faster than their own internal "model" says a human driver would. Companies are heavily interested in protecting their bottom line and in a situation like this probably had 5-10 people carefully craft every single word of the statement for maximum damage control.
Surprised at how many comments here seem eager to praise Waymo based off their PR statement. Sure it sounds great if you read that the Waymo slowed down faster than a human. But would a human truly have hit the child here? Two blocks from a school with tons of kids, crossing guards, double parked cars, etc? The same Waymo that is under investigation for passing school busses illegally? It may have been entirely avoidable for the average human in this situation, but the robotaxi had a blind spot that it couldn't reason around and drove negligently.
Maybe the robotaxi did prevent some harm by braking with superhuman speed. But I am personally unconvinced it was a completely unavoidable freak accident type of situation without seeing more evidence than a blog post by a company with a heavily vested interest in the situation. I have anecdotally seen Waymo in my area drive poorly in various situations, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
There's the classic "humans are bad drivers" but I don't think that is an excuse to not look critically into robotaxi accidents. A human driver who hit a child next to a school would have a personal responsibility and might face real jail time or at the least be put on trial and investigated. Who at Waymo will face similar consequences or risk for the same outcome?
The a human would do it better people are hilarious. Given how many times I have been hit by human drives on my bike and watched others get creamed by a cars. One time in Boulder at a flashing cross walk a person ran right through it and the biker they creamed got stuck in the roof rack.
I was just dropping my kids off at their elementary school in Santa Monica, but not at Grant Elementary where this happened.
While it's third-hand, word on the local parent chat is that the parent dropped their kid off on the opposite side of the street from Grant. Even though there was a crossing guard, the kid ran behind a car an ran right out in to the street.
If those rumors are correct, I'll say the kid's/family's fault. That said, I think autonomous vehicles should probably go extra-slowly near schools, especially during pickup and dropoff.
A human driver travelling at the same speed would have hit that child at exactly 17 mph, before their brain even registered that child was there. If that driver would also have been driving a large SUV that child would have been pushed on the ground and ran over, so probably a fatality. And also functionally nobody would have given a shit apart from some lame finger pointing at (probably) the kid’s parents.
And it is not the child’s or their parents’ fault either:
Once you accept elementary school aged children exist, you have to accept they will sometimes run out like this. Children just don’t have the same impulse control as adults. And honestly even for adults stepping out a bit from behind an obstacle in the path of a car is an easy mistake to make. Don’t forget that for children an SUV is well above head height so it isn’t even possible for them to totally avoid stepping out a bit before looking. (And I don’t think stepping out vs. running out changes the outcome a lot)
This is why low speed limits around schools exist.
So I would say the Waymo did pretty well here, it travelled at a speed where it was still able to avoid not only a fatality but also major injury.
Vehicle design also plays a role: passenger cars have to meet pedestrian collision standards. Trucks don't. The silly butch grilles on SUVs and pickups are deadly. This is more of an argument for not seeing transportation as a fashion or lifestyle statement. Those truck designs are about vanity and gender affirming care. It's easier to make rational choices when it's a business that's worried about liability making those choices.
The school speed limit there is 15 mph, and that wasn't enough to prevent an accident.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/child-struck-waymo-near-...
Cheers to cities pedestrianizing school streets even in busy capitals (e.g. Paris). Cars have no place near school entrances. Fix your urbanism and public transportation.
Yes, kids in developed countries have the autonomy to go to school by themselves from a very young age, provided the correct mindset and a safe environment. That's a combination of:
* high-trust society: commuting alone or in a small group is the norm, soccer moms a rare exception,
* safe, separated lanes for biking/walking when that's an option.
For reference, here's a link to Waymo's blog post: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/01/a-commitment-to-transparency-...
Personally in LA I had a Waymo try to take a right as I was driving straight down the street. It almost T-boned me and then honked at me. I don’t know if there has been a change to the algorithm lately to make them more aggressive but it was pretty jarring to see it mess up that badly
I'm curious as to what kind of control stack Waymo uses for their vehicles. Obviously their perception stack has to be based off of trained models, but I'm curious if their controllers have any formal guarantees under certain conditions, and if the child walking out was within that formal set of parameters (e.g. velocity, distance to obstacle) or if it violated that, making their control stack switch to some other "panic" controller.
This will continue to be the debate—whether human performance would have exceeded that of the autonomous system.
That sucks, and I love to hate on "self driving" cars. But it wasn't speeding to start with (assuming speed limit in the school zone was 20 or 25), braked as much as possible, and the company took over all the things a human driver would have been expected to do in the same situation. Could have been a lot worse, probably wouldn't have been any better with a human driver (just going to ignore as no-signal Waymo's models that say an attentive human driver would have been worse). It's "fine". In this situation, cars period are the problem, not "self driving" cars.
Basically Waymo just prevented a kids potential death.
Bad any other car been there, probably including Tesla, the poor kid would have been hit with 4-10x more force.
Absent more precise information, this is a statistical negative mark for Waymo putting their child pedestrian injury rate at ~2-4x higher than the US human average.
US human drivers average ~3.3 trillion miles per year [1]. US human drivers cause ~7,000 child pedestrian injurys per year [2]. That amounts to a average of 1 child pedestrian injury per ~470 million miles. Waymo has done ~100-200 million fully autonomous miles [3][4]. That means they average 1 child pedestrian injury per ~100-200 million miles. That is a injury rate ~2-4x higher than the human average.
However, the child pedestrian injury rate is only a official estimate (possible undercounting relative to highly scrutinized Waymo miles) and is a whole US average (operational domain might not be comparable, though this could easily swing either way), but absent more precise and better information, we should default to the calculated 2-4x higher injury rate; it is up to Waymo to robustly demonstrate otherwise.
Furthermore, Waymo has published reasonably robust claims arguing they achieve ~90% crash reduction [5] in total. The most likely new hypotheses in light of this crash are:
A. Their systems are not actually robustly 10x better than human drivers. Waymos claims are incorrect or non-comparable.
B. There are child-specific risk factors that humans account for that Waymo does not that cause a 20-40x differential risk around children relative to normal Waymo driving.
C. This is a fluke child pedestrian injury. Time will tell. Given their relatively robustly claimed 90% crash reduction, it is likely prudent to allow further operation in general, though possibly not in certain contexts.
[1] https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315
[2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8137...
[3] https://www.therobotreport.com/waymo-reaches-100m-fully-auto...
[4] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto...
The Waymo driver tech is impressive. That said an experienced driver might have recognized the pattern where a stopped big vehicle occludes a part of the road leading to such situation, and might have stopped or slowed down almost to a halt before passing. The Waymo driver reacts faster but is not able to predict such scenarios by filling the gaps, simulating the world to inform decisions. Chapeau to Waymo anyways
Oddly I cannot decide if this is cause for damnation or celebration
Waymo hits a kid? Ban the tech immediately, obviously it needs more work.
Waymo hits a kid? Well if it was a human driver the kid might well have been dead rather than bruised.
I'm a big fan of Waymo and have enjoyed my Waymo rides. And I don't think Waymno did anything "bad" here.
> The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle’s path,” the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle “immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle.”
BUT! As a human driver, I avoid driving near the schools when school's letting out. There's a high school on my way home and kids saunter and jaywalk across the street, and they're all 'too cool' to press the button that turns on the blinking crosswalk. So I go a block out of my way to bypass the whole school area when I'm heading home that way.
Waymos should use the same rationale. If you can avoid going past a school zone when kids are likely to be there, do it!
> The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle’s path,” the company said in its blog post.
The issue is that I don’t trust a private company word. You can’t even trust the president of the USA government nowadays… release the video footage or get lost.
I don't like even the very idea o self-driving cars, but based on the description of the accident, I think the machine passed this with flying colors.
It's hard to imagine how any driver could have reacted better in this situation.
The argument that questions "would a human be driving 17mph in a school zone" feels absurd to the point of being potentially disingenuous. I've walked and driven through many school zones before, and human drivers routinely drive above 17mph (in some cases, over the typical 20mph or 25mph legal limit). It feels like in deconstructing some of these incidences, critics imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they are driving a car and its their only job to avoid a specific accident that they know will happen in advance, rather than facing the reality of what human drivers are actually like on the road.
The only question I have is whether the speed it was going was situationally appropriate and whether we’d expect a human to be considered reckless under the same circumstances. 17mph sounds pretty slow but it really depends on context.
Who is legally responsible in case a Waymo hits a pedestrian? If I hit somebody, it's me in front of a judge. In the case of Waymo?
Who is liable when FSD is used? In Waymo's case, they own and operate the vehicle so obviously they are fully liable.
But in a human driver with FSD on, are they liable if FSD fails? My understanding is yes, they are. Tesla doesn't want that liability. And to me this helps explain why FSD adoption is difficult. I don't want to hand control over to a probabilistic system that might fail but I would be at fault. In other words, I trust my own driving more than the FSD (I could be right or wrong, but I think most people will feel the same way).
OK
Its like this!, If I hit a child in a school district, I loose my licence for many years, and if I dont or cant show remourse, it could be longer, I pay fines, etc
Therefor waymo, must have it's algorythm terminated, ie: totaly destroyed, all the hardware smashed, and they never get to try again with any derivitive of this technology, as there is no reasonable, understandable path towards repentence and rehabilitation, it is litteraly a monster running over children.
or was it carrying an ICE team, then nevermind.
The statistically relevant question is: How many human drivers have hit children near elementary schools, since Waymo's last accident?
If Waymo has fewer accidents where a pedestrian is hit than humans do, Waymo is safer. Period.
A lot of people are conjecturing how safe a human is in certain complicated scenarios (pedestrian emerging from behind a bus, driver holds cup of coffee, the sun is in their eyes, blah blah blah). These scenarios are distractions from the actual facts.
Is Waymo statistically safer? (spoiler: yes)
This is sad but unfortunately probably happens more frequently with human drivers and people walking out into traffic and you never hear about it.
>To put this in perspective, our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph. This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver.
Our car hits better is a win, I guess?
Glad the child is okay.
It's interesting how polarized this comments section is. Lots of people claiming a human driver would definitely have been driving slower. Lots of people claiming statistics show that human drivers do worse in this scenario aggregate. Of course neither side presenting convincing evidence.
A human driver would most likely have killed this child. That's what should be on the ledger.
Amazing response to this situation.
Great job, Waymo, for maybe hitting a little kid less than your study assumes a human would have! Is that study legit? Who cares, we trust you!
If this had been Tesla, HN would have crashed from all the dunking.
If what Waymo wrote is true, this sounds more like kids fault or guardian’s.
My read is the Waymo was operating normally in a situation a human would operate with heightened awareness and caution. This is not the win they think it is.
Waymo failed to stop and hit a child. Normal person would drive carefully around blind spots. I wonder what would comments be if Tesla hit a child.
> Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at six miles per hour, after braking “hard” from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle’s path,” the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle “immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle.”
As this is based on detection of the child, what happens on Halloween when kids are all over the place and do not necessarily look like kids?
The car could have stopped by turning the steering wheel to the side and collided with another car, not the child.
When is enough, enough? Software devs working on autonomous driving: look in your soul and update your resume.
Couldn’t be anymore callous and clinical. This press release alone makes me want not to use their service.
* “Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene,” Waymo wrote in the post.*