Unfortunately, ever since the “Uber incident” (which also happened in AZ), the autonomous vehicle industry has been operating under a sort of “Sword of Damocles.”

You have one incident where you seriously injure or kill someone, and you’re done. To date, the only fatality has been with the Uber (which was supervised at the time) and the Cruise incident was the result of a hit and run driver pushing the victim in front of their vehicle…an “edge case” if there ever was one.

I’d hazard a guess and say that Waymo is probably very worried about this. It’s inevitable that one of their vehicles will be involved in an incident where there’s a serious injury or fatality. If/when that happens, they’re at the risk of being shut down.

Which is an absurdly high bar. How many legacy auto manufacturers are still in business despite their faulty product causing dozens or even hundreds of casualties?