Blog•Feb 14, 2026
A Suddenly Unavoidable Podcast
The episode examines recent Waymo incidents, including a school‑child collision and repeated passes of stopped school buses, to illustrate how “unavoidable” crashes are often a product of flawed risk models rather than true inevitability. It reviews The Autonomous’s safety‑architecture report on hardware redundancy for autonomous‑vehicle computing, and critiques the U.S. push to weaken automotive safety regulations while China tightens theirs. Host Phil Koopman discusses his book on Embodied AI Safety, emphasizing that transparency—not opacity or deflection—is essential for rebuilding public trust in robotaxi services.
By Phil Koopman — Autonomous System Safety (Substack)
