Just about absolute. Fall off bridge onto car, I guess not. Olympic sprinter dashes out from car intentionally trying to be hit? Guess not either. Clothed mostly in black on a rainy night on a freeway? Not either.

But you hit a kid in daytime? It's your fault. Period.

> You seem to be implying that there are no circumstances in which a vehicle can hit a pedestrian and the driver not be at fault... which is absurd.

It is absurd, but that doesn't mean that the attitude can't be useful!

In teaching my teenager to drive, I drilled into him the fact that, in every accident, regardless of who is "at fault", there is almost always something that the other party could have done to mitigate it. I gave him plenty of situations as examples...

You're going down a street that has kids on the sidewalk? You better be prepared to have one of those kids come out in front of the car while rough-housing, playing, whatever.

You had right of way? Maybe you did, but did you even look at the opposing traffic to see if it was safe to proceed or did you just look at the traffic light?

I've driven, thus far in my life, roughly 600000km (maybe more) with 2x non-trivial accidents, both ruled not my fault. In hindsight, I could have avoided both of them (I was young and not so self-aware).

I'm paranoid when driving, and my stats are much much better than Waymo's (have never injured anyone - even my 2x accidents only had me injured), even though I drive in all sorts of conditions, and on all sorts of roads (many rural, some without markings).

Most people don't drive like this though (although their accident rate is still better than Waymo's).

No it's not. The same principle applies to rules of right of way on the water. Technically the 32 foot sailboat has right of way over a triple-E because the triple-E uses mechanical propulsion.

You have a responsibility to be cautious in heavy equipment no matter what the signage on the road says, and that includes keeping a speed at which you can stop safely if a person suddenly steps onto the road in situations where people are around. If you are driving past a busy bar in downtown, a drunk person might step out and you have a responsibility to assume that might happen. If you have to go slower sometimes, tough.

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They could have driven with more care and attention if they're passing large vehicles that block their view of any children.

In normal (traditional?) European city cars, yes, I look for feet or shadows or other signs that there is a person in the other side. In SUVs this is largely impossible but then sometimes you can see heads or backpacks.

Or you look for reflections in the cars parked around it. This is what I was taught as “defensive“ driving.

I think you're missing something though, which I've observed from reading these comments - HN commenters aren't ordinary humans, they're super-humans with cosmic powers of awareness, visibility, reactions and judgement.

That's why the speed limit is 25 (lower when children are present in some areas) and not 35 or 40 etc. It's not reasonable to expect people to drive at 40% of the posted speed limit the entire way. We're also not talking about zero visibility (e.g. heavy fog). We're talking about blind spots behind parked cars, which in dense areas of a city is a large part of the city. If we think as a society in those situations the safe speed is 10 mph, then the speed limit should be 10mph.

Agreed.

Car culture in the US is toxic, and a lot of accidents and fatalities are a result of how poorly designed our infrastructure is. We design for cars, not for people (just one more lane bro, will totally fix traffic. Nevermind that a train can move double the capacity of that entire line of traffic).

Cars are the wrong solution, particularly in urban areas. A self driving car is still a car, and comes along with all the same problems that cars cause.

> a machine that would claim to be as good as the best human driver.

Does Waymo claim that? If so I haven't seen it. That should of course be the goal, but "better than the average human driver" should be the bar.

Evidence of this? I own a Tesla (HW4, latest FSD) as well as have taken many Waymo rides, and have found both to react well to unpredictable situations (i.e. a car unexpectedly turning in front of you), far more quickly than I would expect most human drivers to react.

This certainly may have been true of older Teslas with HW3 and older FSD builds (I had one, and yes you couldn't trust it).

So... the thing is it's really not. They're behind on schedule, having just launched in public. But FSD has been showing capabilities in regular use (highway navigation, unprotected left turns in traffic, non-geofenced operation areas based solely on road markings) that Waymo hasn't even tried to deploy yet.

It's much more of a competition than I suspect a lot of people realize.