Amazon’s driverless cars hit Seattle streets: Listen to Seattle Times business reporter Katherine Anne Long on KUOW

from

Seattle Times economic reporter

Road safety advocates turned against Amazon this week after the tech giant announced that its driverless auto division Zoox will begin testing prototypes of its autonomous vehicles in downtown Seattle in the coming months.

With Patricia Murphy of KUOW for Thursday’s episode of Seattle Now, I discussed why some pedestrian activists are skeptical of automakers’ claims that their vehicles are making the streets safer and less congested.

“You are using pedestrians as guinea pigs in an experiment that can be fatal,” the author of a book about pedestrian death told me earlier this week. “We would never allow experimental drugs to be tested in this way on people who haven’t specifically given their consent, but for some reason we just haven’t applied the same ethical parameters to cars.”

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