Waymo confirmed on Thursday night that one of its autonomous vehicles killed KitKat, a beloved liquor store cat in the Mission District known by many as “the 16th Street ambassador.”
“We reviewed this, and while our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away,” read a statement by Waymo. “We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him, and we will be making a donation to a local animal rights organization in his honor.”
Waymo did not reply to a request to review the video, and did not say how much it would donate or what group would receive the gift.
KitKat was killed around 11:40 p.m. on Monday, according to witnesses, outside the 16th Street liquor store she called home, Randa’s Market.
Friends, neighbors and KitKat’s owner, Mike Zeidan, said a Waymo was responsible for the cat’s death, but the company did not acknowledge the incident until Thursday.
Mission Local interviewed two people on Friday morning who said they witnessed the incident.
The two people, who asked to remain anonymous, said they left the bar Dalva on Monday night and saw KitKat sitting in front of the Waymo for about seven seconds. The cat then walked under the Waymo and proceeded to head toward the sidewalk as the car pulled away.
It was here that the right rear tire ran over the back part of KitKat’s body, they said.
“We all started shouting in disbelief. It was an awful sight. The cat was able to crawl about 10 to 12 feet off the road and back onto the sidewalk, where my friends immediately approached it to try and help,” said the witness. “I ran back into Dalva to tell them what had happened but it started vomiting blood, and it was clear it wasn’t going to make it.”
One of the witnesses said that missing in Waymo’s statement was the fact that KitKat was “positioned for a while directly in front of the vehicle” before the autonomous vehicle pulled out.
Jeff Klein, who was driving east on 16th Street around at 11:40 p.m. on Monday, said he saw a Waymo swerve in front of him after making a “whip maneuver from the curb through the bus lane and into the lane I was in.”
“This Waymo basically just swerves. It goes really fast for a self-driving car, in my opinion, like it was faster than I would expect a human who was navigating a busy block like this,” said Klein.
Almost immediately, Klein and his friend started to hear people yelling, and realized something had been hit.
Mission residents have come to pay their respects for KitKat at an altar outside of Randa’s Market, his home for the last six years.
On Thursday night, the altar had almost doubled in size. About a dozen sharpies sat in a cup for passers-by to jot down messages on a large cardboard sign. Smaller cut outs of the cat were placed alongside flowers, small Fernet Branca bottles, canned cat food and more than a dozen candles.
“Rest in power,” a young woman wrote. Another wrote: “We love KitKat. Fuck Waymo.”
I am really heartbroken by this story. I always loved seeing KitKat on an evening walk or when heading to the movies. But hearing the description of the accident it really doesn’t sound like Waymo’s involvement was all that relevant: I don’t think many human drivers check for animals in front of their rear tires before pulling out of a spot.
False equivalence, and whataboutism. Someone else being a poor driver doesn’t justify Waymo being a bad driver (especially given their behavior is multiplied by the size of their fleet).
What is the false equivalence? Waymo is literally an alternative to human drivers. They drive on the same streets under the same traffic laws, and this isn’t a case where Waymo’s systematic blind spot is causing issues that are new or unusual.
Waymo is NOT an alternative to human drivers. Waymo is a robotaxi surveillance unit that thrives on zero regulation where drivers are highly regulated and personally responsible for actions taken. Waymo is not responsible, accountable, nor regulated.
It’s a false equivalence.
Waymo has fewer accidents than human drivers relative to miles traveled. If cats get in the street, they will get hit. Thats from somebody who has rescued and had more cats and dogs than you will in three lifetimes.
Waymo cannot see animals.
Your dithering about other topics in defense of surveillance parasites is duly noted, Mr. Tool.
I’m sorry that my comment appeared insufficiently logically rigorous for you. Let me be more clear: if Waymo doesn’t seem like it behaved worse than the average human driver then it’s involvement in the story is incidental: it could just as easily have been a taxi or Uber or someone dropping off a friend. We could get rid of all Waymos and it wouldn’t reduce the number of cats getting hit by cars.
It’s actually not a human : robot comparison.
Humans are regulated and accountable under the law.
Robots so far are not. Apologists roast in Hell please.
Except it wasn’t – and taxis and human drivers can see animals that Waymo simply can’t.
Dither on.
I question if you even care about pets at all.
WAYMO LITERALLY CANNOT SEE THEM.
Humans CAN.
Humans cannot see cats hiding behind the rear wheels of their car.
Yes, they can check. I always do. I’ve never hit an animal.
Apologists be damned.
Waymo has fewer accidents per mile than humans. Period.
Waymo doesn’t “drive” at all, it operates flawed software in the meatosphere using sensors that can’t see certain things, like pets or people crouched over in wheelchairs, or prone suffering from medical conditions, or firefighters telling it to go around and not block the street.
Waymo is a flawed, unregulated product being hyped by tech ninnies who will soon vape themselves out of existence, thankfully.
Even if you have the data, and I doubt you do, the modeling is probably faulty. If you are just comparing accidents vs gross mileage, you would be misleading with statistics, and committing categorical and sampling errors.
A huge percentage of Waymo’s total mileage is racked up in the middle of the night, often in mutually-spaced and paced “herds,” when there’s little or no vehicular or foot traffic to disturb the robots’ beautiful minds (and when there’s precious little meaningful data to collect…). The mystery why scores of empty robot cars circle at 4am begins to clear when you realize that they’re basically just racking up incident-free mileage.
Waymo wee-hour mileage as a percentage of its total mileage dwarfs human wee-hour mileage as a percentage of total human mileage. Rush hours, when the highest percentage per capita mileage is racked up, are also the most accident-prone times to be on the road. So, most accidents occur during the small time-frame that comprises the highest percentage of human milage. Rush hour mileage comprises a much smaller percentage of waymo’s total mileage.
Until the data sets are measured accurately and uniformly, with adjustments for the percentage of accidents occuring per different time periods and the ratio of that time period’s mileage to total mileage, you’re comparing apples and oranges. I suspect most of the Waymo defenders here are numerate, perhaps even in a professional capacity, and are well aware of this statistical deceit.
Literally so many people get hit at night “when no one else is around”. My friend got hit and run at 2 am. A young father was just hit and killed at 2am. Certainly fuck cars, but especially fuck cars driven by drunk people.
You’re missing the point intentionally.
They literally cannot see pets. I can and do.
“People” is an average of all, but Waymo has 1 controlling codebase. They could fix it, but they don’t – they don’t need to because parasites defend it no matter how stupid it is.
You honestly believe a human sitting in the drivers seat can see something UNDERNEATH their car?
If you care, you check. If you don’t, take a damn Waymo ya parasite.
Human drivers kill cats and dogs all the time.
I am not even sure there is a requirement to stop when that happens.
They are just animals.
WAYMO stans will say anything to defend their robosurveillance fetish.
Bad dystopian cheerleader, no doughnut.
I always check. Waymo literally CANNOT. Your defense is weak.
When you pick someone up or drop someone off you get out of your car and check if anything got under your idling car? I simply don’t believe you.
I don’t care what a robocar surveillance parasite thinks about my personal habits that they know nothing about. I’ve never hit an animal, and I check every time I get in to make sure there’s nothing under my vehicle. Maybe I’m special I don’t know, but you for sure don’t know.
I saw KitKat many times, and I worried about him because he walked around under cars parked in front the liquor store where he lived.
Every time I walked by that shop if she wasn’t out front I worried and looked in to ask his owner where he was.
Yet he somehow survived for a long time until Waymo came around.
But like everybody else you didn’t actually do anything to get him off the streets.
I’m very sad to see this story, my heart goes out to the cat’s owners and friends. I also had a beloved pet cat get run over by a car, one driven by a person. I was heartbroken. The thing that gives me hope in this case is that there is a team of engineers at Waymo who can actually work on improving it and fixing it so it sees and avoids killing small animals as well as us large animals. When a human driver kills someone or their pet, there’s no opportunity to improve the situation. We don’t even take away their license, it’s just “an accident”. Now for the first time people might actually work on improving the situation. So I’m very sorry about the cat dying, now let’s go fix the sensors and the driving code so it doesn’t happen again.
A human can improve when they make a mistake, yes they can. Humans also can see the animals that Waymo can’t, so please, continue dithering…
Sure one human can kill a pet and feel remorse and start driving slower, but then another 16-year-old gets their license and the cycle begins again. Compare that with Waymo. When one Waymo improves, they all do. New Waymo cars are just as skilled and experienced as the old ones.
So you’re saying Waymo COULD improve, but you’re not interested in forcing it to do so.
Great argument, apologist.
Waymos may have a better safety record than human drivers where they can drive now, but they do not (currently) go on the highway, which is where a lot of human driver accidents occur. We’ll see what happens when they start driving at higher speeds.
Agree that the state should have some mechanism for citing autonomous vehicles for poor driving. There was a Waymo pulled over recently in San Bruno for making an illegal U-turn, but there was no way for the cop to write a ticket, because our law is to cite the driver. No driver, no ticket.
I’m sorry about the cat, but hiding *under* a vehicle would make it very hard to see.
Waymo does not have a better safety record than me, that’s false.
During a TechCrunch Disrupt conference interview in late October 2025, Mawakana was asked whether the public would accept a death caused by a robotaxi if self-driving cars brought down the overall rate of traffic fatalities.
Her exact response was, “I think that society will,” adding, “I think the challenge for us is making sure that society has a high enough bar on safety that companies are held to”. She clarified that Waymo doesn’t say “whether” a fatal accident will happen, but “when,” and that they plan for such events by prioritizing transparency and high safety standards.
The sentiment behind her statement is that while no system is perfect, autonomous vehicles offer a path to significantly safer roads than human drivers, and the public will eventually accept that a small number of unavoidable accidents is a trade-off for a massive reduction in overall traffic fatalities. The quote was widely reported and sparked significant online debate about the societal acceptance of AV-related deaths.
I’ve never heard anyone on the mission call those markets bodegas
People who claim they liked the cat so much, but spebt years doing nothing to get it off the streets, trashing Waymo because, like literally millions of human drivers, it hit an animal is absurd.
Robots kill cats.
Techies, disrupting oligarchs*, real estate speculators, and other Waymo defenders would be better served reading Isaac Asimov than Ayn Rand.
*go long yet another round of billionaire bailouts when this multi-bubble implodes.
And you would be better served reading Killed by a Traffic Engineer.
Sure, I’ll read that right after I finish Killed by a Coder*
Killed by a mindless YIMBY yuppie is also a great read.
KitKat became roadkill, which happens a billion times around the world every day. It’s unfortunate, but no different from if a human would have been behind the wheel and not Waymo AI. Shit happens, life moves on.
Can Waymo vehicles see animals crossing the roads? If they are SO smart, why can’t they? I am so wary of autonomous vehicles because of that. Why can’t that be built in? Wtf?
RIP KitKat. These Automated electronic cars make very little sound. Animals depend on their senses to maneuver in their environment. Trust me when I say This KitKat would still be here if these nonhuman silent killers were not on streets. You can not gesture to these thing to stop or hold up say” hold up there’s a child getting a ball” . If your signal on your vehicle goes out you can’t even let them know with your hand out window.
Poor cat. They “loved” it so much but didn’t take proper care of it. Now Waymo is evil. lol! Maybe it is, but not in the “cat killer” kind of way. As soon as we get in it probably taps our phones and listens to everything we say. Oh, and only in SF does this make news. 1st world problems for sure.
Waymo is evil. This story nonwithstanding, it’s an unregulated robot surveillance parasite that sells personal identification data from a for-profit database that you or I can’t personally remove ourselves from. It’s a scourge.
Apologists be damned.
How about getting back to the coverage of the BART plazas and surrounding streets.
A cat allowed outside to run in traffic on Mission Street getting hit by traffic on Mission Street is a dog bites man story if I’ve ever seen one.
Except the cat wasn’t killed by “traffic” it was killed by a robot.
Are you saying that Waymo sucks isn’t news? Good point.
FUCK WAYMO. California MUST pass laws to allow counties to regulate autonomous vehicles on our roads. There are regularly a line of over 100 of these things driving down Mariposa and 17th St. It’s totally out of control. All because the small board at the state PUC has been captured by the industry.
WAYMO SUCKS YUPPIES. Hire a human being and stop enriching Google.
They are not your friends and neighbors, they are surveillance parasites.
I say fuck all cars. But if we’re going to have cars on the road though, I’d rather it be autonomous than the drunk driver that killed a young father on Cortland last month.