I’d planned on taking a break and easing up on posts after the glut of cat-related news the past few days, but this story is disturbing, timely, and sadly we’ll almost certainly hear about more of these incidents in the near future.
KitKat, a nine-year-old tabby who called Randa’s Liquor Store in San Francisco’s Mission District home, was killed late Monday night by a vehicle owned by Waymo, an autonomous ride-hailing service.
Witnesses said they saw the Waymo hit the cat and pulled him out from under the self-driving car. They say KitKat was sitting on the sidewalk at the time. It’s not clear if the Waymo vehicle drove up onto the sidewalk or if its bumper was the impact point.
A witness who filed a report with 311 via smartphone said the Waymo vehicle “did not even try to stop.” The car continued on to its next pickup.
Several people rushed the injured tabby to a 24-hour emergency veterinary clinic, but his injuries were too severe and he died five minutes before his human arrived.
KitKat was extremely popular with people in the neighborhood, patrons of the neighboring bar and sandwich shop, and passersby. They described him as a feline who liked to patrol the sidewalk and pop into the bar and sandwich shop to “supervise,” making sure all was well in his little realm.
“Everyone’s heartbroken,” Jessica Chapdelaine, who tends bar next door and lives in an apartment above the liquor store, told Mission Local. “He’s the baby. He was everyone’s best friend and he was just the sweetest boy.”
Waymo didn’t respond to requests for comment by Mission Local, TheSFist and other media. The Google-owned company had not addressed the incident on its website’s press page, nor on its X account despite several users bringing it up, as of Thursday morning.
“You can’t even drive in the dark in normal weather without killing a cat,” one user wrote, while others weren’t nearly as diplomatic.
The San Francisco Standard provides a bit of context on the autonomous vehicle issue in California:
“The state had logged 884 autonomous vehicle collision reports as of Friday, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles (opens in new tab). A dog was struck and killed by a Waymo in Bernal Heights in 2023. A week later, a Labrador survived getting hit by a Cruise self-driving car; the company no longer tests its cars in San Francisco.”
On the other hand, there have been several dramatic incidents involving autonomous vehicles that have successfully avoided collisions with other cars, people and animals, even when given a fraction of a second to respond. In an incident in LA from earlier this year, a home security camera caught footage of a Waymo stopping instantly to avoid a dog that ran out into the street directly in the car’s path:
A human driver almost certainly could not make a safe decision in that time interval, but a machine can confirm there is no car immediately behind it and execute the stop within a few milliseconds.
Still, as more ride hailing services roll out autonomous fleets and expand into more cities — as the major players in the still-developing industry are already doing — this will become more of an issue. Waymo operates fleets in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin (TX) and Atlanta, and plans to roll out its service in Miami and Washington, D.C., in the near future.
The obvious question is whether AI-driven vehicles are safer than cars with people behind the wheel, for drivers and pedestrians. The answer seems to be yes, especially as the technology improves. Machines don’t text while driving, don’t get distracted fiddling with radios and don’t get behind the wheel after drinking. Sensors and software have improved dramatically in just a few years.
But that won’t be enough. There’s a psychological hurdle in giving up control. It’s the same reason why so many people are terrified of flying even though we’re statistically much more likely to die in car collisions. When you’re behind the wheel, you have control over your fate — or the illusion of control, anyway.
Parallel to the questions about safety are concerns about whether any corporation should be permitted to put driverless cars on the road, especially when the companies with the resources to commit to a major venture like this are the familiar Big Tech conglomerates run by the same handful of tech oligarchs.
Should they be allowed to wipe out yet another industry, taking away work from people who drive taxis or for rideshare companies? Do we need the government to step in and place some guiderails on tech that has developed at an unprecedented pace and threatens to upend huge swaths of society? Should we demand a much more robust regulatory process and risk falling behind other countries in the AI race?
These are questions we’ll all have to grapple with, and there are no easy answers.
RIP KitKat.
All images of KitKat credit: Randa’s Market/Instagram
via Pain In The Bud