PJ Vogt

The motorcycle driver was then struck by a second car.

That's everything.

When Timothy Beeley looks at the entire safety picture, the results we have so far from this big experiment Waymo is conducting on American roads, what he sees is mainly promising.

which doesn't mean we shouldn't scrutinize this Waymo experiment as it continues.

I find myself paying a lot of attention to Waymo crashes, which isn't hard.

They make headlines.

The most harrowing one recently was this January.

A child near an elementary school in Santa Monica is struck by a Waymo.

The company issued a statement.

Waymo said its driver had braked hard, reducing speed from 17 to under six miles per hour, a faster reaction, they claimed, than a human driver would have been capable of.

What happened next at the accident scene actually answers a question I'd had.

What does a Waymo do after a car crash, since there's no human driver to help?

Waymo employs what they call human fleet response agents, human beings who can't remotely drive the cars, but who the car can ask questions to if it gets confused.

In Santa Monica, the Waymo called one of those humans.

The human called 911, and this is the strangest part of Waymo's statement.

Apparently, the car then waited at the scene of the accident until the police dismissed it.

That's what we know so far, but there's two federal agencies investigating this crash, and so we'll have a full report in the future.

One problem that's not really captured in the safety data that I've seen is what I'd call troubling edge cases.

You see them in videos on social media.

A Waymo gets stuck at a dead stoplight or blocks an emergency vehicle.