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If autonomous vehicles are to go mainstream, they need to go as far as they can to ensure the safety of everyone on the road. And no one is in more need of protection than so-called vulnerable road users like pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, thousands of whom are killed every year.
Waymo, the robotaxi company owned by Alphabet, recently published a new study examining hundreds of these types of crashes involving vulnerable road users, which it is calling “the largest dataset of its kind in the US.”
Roughly 40,000 people in the US are killed each year in vehicle crashes. But while automakers have become very good at protecting people inside of vehicles, they have essentially neglected the safety of people outside of them.
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