That's pretty hyperbolic. At less than 20 mph, car vs pedestrial is unlikely to result in death. IIHS says [1] in an article about other things:

> As far as fatalities were concerned, pedestrians struck at 20 mph had only a 1% chance of dying from their injuries

Certainly, being struck at 6 mph rather than 17 mph is likely to result in a much better outcome for the pedestrian. And that should not be minimized; although it is valuable to consider the situation (when we have sufficient information) and validate Waymo's suggestion that the average human driver would also have struck the pedestrian and at greater speed. That may or may not be accurate, given the context of a busy school dropoff situation... many human drivers are extra cautious in that context and may not have reached that speed; depending on the end to end route, some human drivers would have avoided the street with the school all together based on the time, etc. It's certainly seems like a good result for the premise, child unexpectedly appears from between large parked vehicles, but maybe there should have been an expectation.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicle-height-compounds-da...

There's a 50/50 chance that a distracted driver wouldn't have slowed at all and run the child over.

> To estimate injury risk at different impact speeds, IIHS researchers examined 202 crashes involving pedestrians ages 16 or older

A child is probably more likely to die in a collision of the same speed as an adult.

How many human drivers do under 20mph, like ever?