A test vehicle of the self-driving taxi company Waymo crashed into multiple cars on a narrow street in Los Angeles on January 25, and almost hit a family standing nearby. Surveillance video shows the incident occurred around 11 a.m. in the 1200 block of Lilac Plaza near Dodger Stadium.
The Waymo car first rushed onto the slope next to the road.Then it drove down the slope and hit multiple vehicles parked on the roadside.
Homeowner Jorge Donantonio said his mother's car and a neighbor's car were hit, and his mother and brother, who were standing nearby, were also nearly hit. “My brother pushed my mother away before the car accident, luckily they were okay”.
This incident aroused heated discussions among netizens. Some netizens said: "It looks like a drunk driver" and "first took the wrong road and rushed up the slope, and then hit multiple cars one after another. It does not look like the style of autonomous driving."
In fact, this accident was not a car accident caused by a serious failure of the autonomous driving system as netizens imagined.
Waymo responded to the media saying,The vehicle was a Waymo test engineer and was manually driven by an autonomous driving expert. There were no passengers in the vehicle when the accident occurred. The driver got out of the car on his own and no one was injured.
However, homeowner Donantonio revealed that because the street is near Dodger Stadium, the street is narrow and busy during events, and Waymo self-driving vehicles have had accidents on the street.
