Featured Waymo kills beloved neighborhood cat

In this days and age the animals are less likely to be caught in the car's working parts. I drove my 2017 Prius Prime all the way across town with a possum all curled up and happy on the exhaust (???) manifold. The engine did not start during the entire trip. The animal was first detected by the grease monkey in the pit at the quick oil change joint, and we took everything we had to chase him out of the car.

On the other hand, we've had various rodents expire in the dash boards of our cars. I hate digging them out of the car's ventilation system.

 

I recovered quickly enough. I trapped the gas tank between my thighs, breaking the tank mount off the tank. I locked my arms straight ahead so that the handlebars could not twist and throw me over the top of the VW.

I wanted to kill the kids who piled out of the car and laughed as I rolled in pain on the ground next to their car. I could not stand up for the first hour or two.

 

The weakness of LIDAR is it is obvious to the mob making them easy targets.

Bob Wilson

 

I'm not saying automated driving is better than human driving (yet anyhow).

But if a human driver drove over the cat, it wouldn't be on the news. People drive over pets and other animals all the time. I bet there's a daily number someone, and that would be just a guess.

But if one autonomous car drives over one cat, then it's a top story in headline news and people all over the country start shouting "ban them!" even if statistically this is a rare occasion for autonomous cars.

It's kind of like saying EV's catch on fire. One EV catches on fire and it's headline news. A thousand ICEVs catch on fire and nobody notices.

 

After three weeks ‘testing and self taught’ Autopilot 6 years ago, it drives better than this 75 year old. Only now I know it takes ~2 hours to properly train someone else.

Bob Wilson

 

Who is using just LIDAR? Are there proponents calling for just using it?

Waymo cars have it backed up with RADAR and cameras.
Meet the 6th-generation Waymo Driver: Optimized for costs, designed to handle more weather, and coming to riders faster than before

Exactly.
Robot cars have better 'vision' coverage than a human driver, but that doesn't mean all blind spots are eliminated, nor that the software can make a misjudgement.

 

Maybe the point was that using LIDAR at all, whether or not in conjunction with other technologies, makes a car an easy target thanks to LIDAR stuff visibly sticking out.

 

Whoops, I misread that. My bad.

That isn't a LIDAR issue. LEXUS, Mercedes, and others have LIDAR, and I doubt the sensors are sticking out. The issue is that Waymo doesn't make cars. They buy an existing model, and install their sensor pods on them. The Zeekr MIX is the latest one. The pods aren't just LIDAR, but also RADAR, some of the cameras, and even speakers.