Andrew J. Hawkins

Well that’s a terrible headline! An autonomous Waymo vehicle struck and killed a small dog in San Francisco last month, according to an incident report spotted by TechCrunch. Waymo says the accident was unavoidable, and of course over a million pets are mowed down by human drivers every year. Still, this incident will be an interesting test of my theory about AVs, which is that while we have an extremely high tolerance for death caused by human drivers, we have an extremely low tolerance for robot-caused deaths. My guess is that extends to furry friends too.

This was probably inevitable after Kitty Hawk, the ambitious “flying car” startup funded by Google co-founder Larry Page, shut down last year. Wisk was formed in 2019 as a joint venture with Kitty Hawk and aerospace giant Boeing, so without Kitty Hawk, Boeing had the choice to either cut off funding for Wisk completely or acquire the startup. It went with option B.