What happened when Waymo reenacted real fatal car crashes with its autonomous vehicle

Waymo's autonomous vehicles were put through the gnarly paces of 72 simulations of fatal crashes for safety research. The Google spinoff company, which operates its self-driving car service in the area just outside Phoenix, released a study Monday showing how its autonomous vehicles would respond during unsafe driving situations. The company collected crash information from 72 real fatal crashes with human drivers at the wheel that took place in the Chandler, Arizona, area between 2008 and 2017. Researchers reconstructed them in a virtual simulation, with the Waymo vehicle replacing both the car that initiated the crash (called "the initiator" in the study) and the car responding ("the responder"). With Waymo replaced virtually in both positions of the crash, the company ran enough simulations (91 of them, to be exact, since some of the crashes involved just one car) to understand how its autonomous platform would respond in the situation.