Cat
“While our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away,” a company spokesperson said.
I’m not super keen on robo-cars, because they’re being rushed out by corporations that want to start raking in the money while using the public to beta test their platform. but let’s be honest here, if the car was driven by a human, they almost certainly would have run over that cat too.
Rest in peace kitkat
People who keep their kids inside but let their pets play in traffic are psychopaths.
I know what I said.
Who told you that cat was someone’s pet?
I’m against robotaxis but in this particular case the taxi was stopped and the cat darted under it as it started to move. A human driver would have likely hit it too.
Aged like milk
Before anyone starts to think there’s a good guy in this story:
some have taken upon themselves to honor KitKat in distinctly Silicon Valley-style ways. Zeidan (part of cats family) has released a memecoin honoring KitKat’s legacy, and also said that he was disappointed to see others launch their own imitation tokens in an attempt to profit off KitKat’s death.
He says he’s going to use the money to support local vets, but why don’t you just share some links to spca to donate directly, you’re providing nothing but a way for you to grift by taking the money through meme coins.
Yes, this is the extra cherry on top that makes San Francisco look like a parody of itself here lol
Human drivers have probably killed dozens of cats since this singular incident and not a peep. People are so fuckin stupid
So glad I live far away from the tech bros. Must be so annoying living in the bay area.
Used to go to SF for work events.
It felt like a town that once had culture that still wants to peek out, but it almost entirely covered with silicon valley monotony and misanthropic policies. It feels like a city where the people living there are the after thought, and the tablet where you order your coffee while you sit around a room where nobody makes eye contact or speaks to you is the product.
I’m sure there’s a part of the city where humanity still thrives, but it should be a cultural warning to those who are adopting silicon valley cures as anything other than snake oil.
You were probably downtown for a work event. The culture is in the neighborhoods
There is probably an elevated risk of killing cats in any electric vehicle because there are fewer signs that the car is “on” and about to drive.
Idk, I find that at low speeds electric cars are louder than modern internal combustion. They have that SciFi drone sound.
not all of them. there’s a couple in my city that make no noise when driving slowly. they’re so quiet, you can hear their tires popping as they run over small pebbles on the road.
At that speed, the risk of running over anyone is pretty low.
Depending on the year model of the car, it might not make that sound. It wasn’t required on some of the earlier EVs, which could be eerily quiet. I believe it’s required by law on newer models. Pre-2016 Volts has a “pedestrian horn button”; 2016 and newer Volts play a noise continuously as lower speeds. (My Uncle says it sounds like the warp drive hum on the original Star Trek Enterprise.)
Regicide.
A feline queen reigns over my apartment complex. It’s a fair regime.
“But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” – Exodus 21:23-24
A cat for a cat, but it’s an EV, so there is no catalytic converter to take
There might be some CAT6 cable inside somewhere
Whoever takes an animal’s life shall make it good, life for life. - Leviticus 24:18
I’m cool with the CEO’s head or we crush him with a big rock.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a supper for a dead cat”.
I’m not sure I trust the kind of person who was perfectly fine with robotaxi’s until an animal was killed. Seems they don’t’ really have a good grasp on the problems of a car-centric society of which road-kill is a very minor one.
Hey whatever it takes to convince people.
Let cats use them as litter boxes. Cats’ revenge.
“While our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away”
I mean, it sucks, but it could’ve happened with a human driver as well… and likely has happened.
I have rode in a Waymo and it shows you all the things it detects on a screen… which includes humans and small animals. It’s not a perfect machine, but it probably is a better driver than a lot of people already and it’s learning every day.
I suppose this incident could get Waymo to put cameras/sensors beneath the car… something that regular car makers won’t think about.
But yeah, it should’ve detected the cat beforehand and waited for it to leave before driving off. Then again, the human passengers didn’t see it either.
Then again, the human passengers didn’t see it either.
The human passengers weren’t responsible for driving the vehicle, their lack of awareness is a feature of getting a taxi ride?
I meant that the Waymo didn’t see it, neither did the passengers, so the cat could’ve been difficult to detect.
Not an excuse.
A small animal not being visible to a human or robotic driver is absolutely a viable excuse. It’s sad that the cat died, but it’s first an foremost the fault of the owners for letting their cat out.
I don’t like the tech bro world and I’m not a fan of driverless vehicles, but this didn’t happen because it was driverless and the outcome would be the same if their were a person behind the wheel.
You can definitely argue against cars being on the road in general, but I was on a bike ride with a buddy the other day, and he hit a squirrel that ran between us and then under his bike. Sometimes bad things happen especially when dealing with animals, and blaming a computer blindly is dumb AF.
Seriously? Get bent. No vehicle is going to have under car cameras or sensors to avoid such a situation.
Here’s an idea. Keep your damn killing machines in the house and let the birds, mice, etc… live without fear.
Hard to keep cars indoors
I mean ok we can keep cats indoor, what about making techbros indoor only too though? They kill a lot of innocent people with the tools they make.
and let the birds, mice, etc… live without fear.
LOL, that’s not really how mice and small birds work.
Oh? Exactly how do you know? Are you Dr.Doolittle?
I’d say, we cannot determine definitively.
Doesn’t take a lot of observation to see that small rodents are in fear of just about every encounter, largely because that’s what keeps them alive.
I lost a beloved cat a few months ago that ran into the road. My security camera caught the whole thing.
“What if?” Is its own torment for us, but analytically, she simply wasn’t visible and there was nothing the driver could/should have done to prevent the horrible outcome.
There are in life no-win situations. It hurts, but it’s an adult realization. Cats go under cars to hide - to avoid being seen - and can’t grasp danger the same as humans.
I feel for the cat but this would happen with a human driver too. No one is going to check under their car after picking up passengers. It’d add minutes to each stop and these people are paid by the mile and stop. Adding minutes or hours each day is money lost. So no one will do this.
Removed by mod
I mean, it sucks for the cat and the neighborhood, I’m glad that where I live there are a few very friendly outdoor cats and I’ve always seen people nail the brakes to avoid them the few times they cross the road.
I also understand that autonomous cars kind of need more work, but real drivers also really suck at driving. I wonder if the ire here is more at “who do we blame if no driver”
Also also, I wonder if electric cars are going to cause a lot more issues for outdoor animals who to some extend get trained to listen for a Hrududu which the electric motors don’t make.
Under- car sensors is a great idea and the kind of innovation required for this tech to reach universal adoption. Waymo is already safer than human drivers IMO but let’s keep going until it’s significantly safer with verifiable data and capabilities humans cannot have. And we have to address its connection to big tech for “safety under fascism” purposes.
Yeah this is the kind of thing where you really need statistics. This sticks out because it’s a prominent example of something new, an autonomous vehicle, doing something notable - killing an animal for the first time (or at least one of the very first well-publicized times on record).
For people’s reaction to this to be that this is because it’s an autonomous vehicle is the same sort of cognitive bias that causes things like, " The first person to get a math problem wrong in class was a girl so it seems like girls are bad at math". When of course it could be that the probability of boys and girls getting problems wrong is equal, and that the girl was simply the first one to get a unlucky roll on the dice of the universe. It could even be that boys are more likely to get problems wrong, and the girl was especially unlucky. It could in fact be that girls are more likely to get problems wrong, too, but this single instance doesn’t give us enough evidence for that. It could be that boys actually have gotten more problems wrong, but we only hear about the girl getting the problem wrong due to sociological biases, or vice versa. Etc.
I get that we shouldn’t trust corporations, and it’s not fun to defend a corporation, but it is important to defend rational thinking. And the rational way to approach this is to employ statistical methods to judge whether a vehicle being autonomous truly makes it a bigger risk to animals in the road or not. Any other line of reasoning is not right for this kind of problem.
