Waymo confident in its autonomous vehicles after Uber’s one involved in fatality

What happened in a fatal collision between an autonomous Uber vehicle with a human safety driver on board and a pedestrian crossing a road in Tempe, Arizona, hasn’t yet been fully determined.

But Waymo chief executive officer John Krafcik is confident his company’s autonomous vehicles (AVs) would have stopped in time.

“What happened in Arizona obviously was a tragedy. It was terrible. You couldn’t watch that video and not be impacted by it,” he told Forbes at the National Automobile Dealers Association conference in Las Vegas. “We’re very confident that our car could have handled that situation.”

“We know that for a lot of different reasons. It’s what we have designed this system to do in situations just like that,” he says, prior to sharing that view before hundreds of dealers at the conference.

The accident was a bombshell for companies racing to perfect autonomous technology, including General Motors, Ford, Lyft, Aptiv, Tesla, China’s Baidu, Toyota, Nissan, Volvo – and Uber.

But Forbes says no company has as much riding on such vehicles as Alphabet’s Waymo, the company formed in 2016 to commercialise Google’s self-driving research and development. Waymo is about to start a robotic ride service in Phoenix, Arizona, this year.

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators are studying the Uber test vehicle involved in the March 18 fatal collision.

It was loaded with sensors, including Lidar and radar that can see pedestrians and objects in dark or in light. In this case, the pedestrian was pushing a metal bicycle while crossing.

The fatality prompted Uber to suspend all road-testing of its AVs in Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

Investigations into the fatality are continuing.