Waymo is the first company to give a detailed self-driving safety report to federal officials

To help keep tabs on the safety of driverless cars rolling around U.S. cities, the federal government last year, and again last month, suggested that tech firms and car companies submit safety checklists. None of the companies have done it. Waymo, a self-driving car project spun off from Google, submitted a 43-page safety report to the U.S. Department of Transportation on Thursday, offering the most detailed description yet of how it -- or any other company -- equips and trains vehicles to avoid the range of mundane and outrageous problems that are part of U.S. driving. "We've staged people jumping out of canvas bags or porta-potties on the side of the road, skateboarders lying on their boards, and thrown stacks of paper in front of our sensors," says the report, which describes how company engineers use a 91-acre California Central Valley test facility mocked up like a city, as well as computer simulations covering hundreds of thousands of variations of possible road scenarios. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has suggested a set of 28 "behavioral competencies," or basic things an autonomous vehicle should be able to do.