I would like it if, in all incidents, the self driving car companies were required to release to the public all of the video feeds for 30s before, during and 30s after.
That would prevent situations like with Cruise, where they released the first part of the video, and neglected to talk about running the pedestrian over after hitting them.
Then, we can judge for ourselves whether we think the car behaved correctly or not. In most cases, it should be obvious if there was any more it could have done.
We don’t have any need to view that footage. The NHTSA does, and they already have reporting rules in place. (You can also find all of these reports online.) Their rules and enforcement worked in the case of Cruise; their investigation uncovered the truth, and Cruise was unable to survive the consequences.
Waymo is already apparently being transparent about this incident, and the NHTSA is actively investigating. From the initial report, it seems like the collision was overall unavoidable, but the superhuman response time of the AV cut its velocity from a predicted 14 mph to 6 mph, reducing the force of the impact by over a factor of five. The child suffered minor injuries; it seems like it could have been significantly worse had the driver been a human.
Of course, we should follow this investigation and see what really shakes out.
Can’t wait for the future when vehicles will have the situational awareness of a human… Oh wait! We have buses!
