Waymo hits child in Los Angeles, says regular car would've been worse

A Waymo ran into a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica last Friday, and the autonomous vehicle company is using the crash as proof of its cars’ safety.

According to Waymo’s account, the child entered the road from behind a stopped SUV and went straight into the vehicle’s path. The Waymo “braked hard,” the Mountain View company wrote in a Wednesday blog post, “reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made.” The company wrote, “to put this in perspective,” its research estimates an attentive human driver in the same spot would likely have hit the child at 14 mph, a far more dangerous speed.

“This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver,” the blog post said, later adding, “This event demonstrates the critical value of our safety systems.”

The child was not injured, Santa Monica police spokesperson Lewis Gilmour told SFGATE, while also confirming other elements of Waymo’s account. Citing preliminary information, he wrote that the child hadn’t been in a crosswalk or near the on-duty crossing guard, and that the child’s parent was nearby. The collision took place around 7:40 a.m., drop-off time for Santa Monica’s Grant Elementary School. 

Waymo called 911, its blog post said, and kept the car on scene until law enforcement cleared the vehicle. The company also alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has opened an investigation. Along with looking into the company’s post-impact response, the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation will see “whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”

“ODI expects that its investigation will examine the [automated driving system’s] intended behavior in school zones and neighboring areas, especially during normal school pick up/drop off times, including but not limited to its adherence to posted speed limits,” the office’s notice said.

Waymo has been running its commercial fleet in Santa Monica and greater Los Angeles since 2024, part of a gradual rollout that’s seen few high-profile crashes amid millions of completed rides. The company’s pitch to riders and regulators is not that its technology needs to be perfect, but that it’s already safer than having a human behind the wheel. Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in October that society would eventually accept a death caused by a robot. 

Alongside news of the collision this week, on Thursday, the company announced that its Bay Area service range is expanding to San Francisco International Airport’s Rental Car Center.

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