I'm not pro-autonomous vehicles. Under the hypothesis that they worked well enough that they proliferated widely and people came to rely on them, they would be the most enshittifiable service ever.

Also I ride a bicycle everywhere, I don't own a car. I've had many crashes while cycling, a handful of which involved another moving vehicle.

Speed is a good predictor of how much harm a moving vehicle can cause to a cyclist or pedestrian, and given that the Waymo was turning left off a 4-way stop, it couldn't have been going that fast, and even if it was, the waymo stopped soon enough to avoid doing serious damage. Maybe the cyclist veered into the Waymo, we don't know. Maybe we'll get video and then we can really pick it apart.

There is a battle going on right now between the Governor of California and SF city council over the city's inability to regulate the existence of autonomous vehicles on their streets after the fast proliferation of Cruise's AVs led to all kinds of traffic snarls and general irritation amongst the public.

Cruise has been operating in SF since 2019 and has had many incidents more severe than the one we're discussing now, but they got little attention because it wasn't so political then. Nowdays SF is looking for any excuse they can find to get AVs out of their city.

In legal terms I doubt the city will find what they need with this incident. With regards to public sentiment, the headline "Waymo hits cyclist in SF" is about as much as most people will read, and the details of the crash don't matter.

>I'm not pro-autonomous vehicles.

Maybe not, but you are clearly coming from an anti-anti-autonomous vehicle stance. That likely plays into why you are downplaying this collision despite admitting "we don't know" basic details about what happened here. You are able to recognize that this issue is politicized, but like everyone you are considering your own political bias as the neutral position when in actuality the neutral position here is to wait until we have more details on what actually happened.

I think at the very least we can interpret the situation as car hits cyclist in a blind spot and the cyclist was not seriously injured. Sources say there were 49,000 vehicle-cyclist injuries and 846 fatalities [1] and there were 3.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled [2] in 2019. So my math comes to around .015 injuries and .00003 fatalities per 1 million vehicle miles traveled. Waymo’s traveled 20 millions miles by 2020, so more by now but Im not finding a more recent number. This is the first time I’ve heard of a Waymo-cyclist injury (maybe it’s not; I’m not able to google around this new headline) and would put their injury rate at .05 per million miles significantly higher than the other statistic but to get away with minor scratches is nonnegligible since it’s easy for injuries to be worse. At 20 million miles Waymos this rate doesn’t make them look good. I want to be optimistic about their injury rate getting better as they program around blind spots safer.

[1]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[2]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

This is the same type of math that Tesla uses to suggest that their Autopilot is safer than humans, but the problem with this approach is that not all miles driven are equal. I guarantee that the injury rate per mile is much higher on the road in which this collision took place than the 0.015 national average. There are obviously roads in which collisions with cyclists are incredibly rare like interstate highways in which a cyclist even using the road is rare. That means there needs to be roads which greatly exceed the national average and those are often city streets with heavy cyclist traffic like this one where the collision occurred.