Video released today contradicted Waymo’s initial statement about the killing of KitKat, the beloved bodega cat at Randa’s Market, known by many as the “mayor of 16th Street.”
KitKat died after a driverless Waymo ran over the back half of his body on Oct. 27 shortly before midnight, right in front of his home of six years.
The Google-owned company confirmed late on Oct. 30 that one of its vehicles hit the cat, but said the cat “darted” under its car occurred as the autonomous vehicle “as it was pulling away.” Video shows the cat was under the car, near its front right tire, for about 25 seconds before it drove off, striking and killing KitKat.
“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 the company’s initial statement.
The next morning, Mission Local spoke to Benjamin Wallo and Elisa Massenzio, who had just left Dalva, a bar a few feet down, and witnessed the accident. They said that KitKat had been sitting in front of the Waymo for about five to eight seconds before he went under the vehicle and proceeded to head toward the sidewalk.
Jeff Klein, a third witness, was driving eastbound on 16th Street that night. He said he saw the Waymo that had just run over KitKat swerve right in front of him “driving faster than a human would on this busy street.”
Waymo has not replied to multiple inquiries about the witnesses’ accounts or Mission Local’s request to see the vehicle’s onboard video.
Footage from Randa’s Market cameras first published by the New York Times and later obtained by Mission Local corroborated the witness accounts. Mission Local had requested the footage from the business days after the incident but owner Mike Zeidan said in today’s story that he had decided not to share or speak about the footage until now.
“The reason I released the tape was I thought a picture is worth 1000 words. There were conflicting reports and I want everybody to see the truth,” said Zeidan on Friday afternoon.
In the video, a woman can be seen crouching near the front right tire trying to get KitKat away from the vehicle. The woman backs away a couple of feet and, within seconds, the Waymo drives away, running over KitKat’s rear half as the cat was moving back toward the sidewalk.
Professor Missy Cummings, the head of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center, said what Waymos don’t have compared to human drivers is “object permanence.” A driver, she added, would have likely seen the cat go under the car and understood that it had not disappeared.
“It’s out of sight, out of mind. Human or animal, anything that falls underneath the car cannot be seen,” said Cummings last month. “It’s forgotten about immediately, because [autonomous vehicles] don’t have a memory.”
In a statement, a Waymo spokesperson said the company did not mention the woman in the video because they did not want to create the impression that the individual could have done more.
“We did not want this pedestrian to feel badly or get the impression we were suggesting blame or fault for this unfortunate event, which we sincerely wish did not occur,” read the statement. “The outpouring of affection has been extraordinary and we know KitKat must have been very special.”
I feel so bad for KitKat and everyone who loved him. But I still don’t see this as a situation caused by it being a Waymo. A taxi, an Uber, someone who didn’t notice a kitty sidle up to the wheel – I might have killed a cat under similar circumstances, and I love cats and would never hurt one on purpose. It just seems like the robot car “wow” factor is making this a huge story when cats get killed by cars in SF every day.
Sorry, but the Kit Kat story is a massive wake up call. Big Tech is building a future without proper oversight, regulation and accountability. The death of poor Kit Kat and how it was handled (corporate cover-up) is a reminder of what awaits us if we don’t get a handle on this industry.
Waymo, does not racially profile and will give you and your-Therapy dog,aka Pit Bull a ride to Hunter’s Point.
Waymo will take you to hell, if you let it.
AND THEY LIED ABOUT IT. Sure, apologize for that.
“AI makes some mistakes,” can’t bring yourself to say it?
WHO PAYS FOR IT? WHO IS HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR LIES?
npr.org/2025/12/06/nx-s1-5635614/waymo-school-buses-recall
“Robots don’t make mistakes” say the apologist crowd who doesn’t read.
Which to loathe more, robot surveillance apologists or the willful illiterate?
Try reading the article. A human can see and care, a Waymo does not.
@NP Okay! We get it that you don’t like WAYMO-Just don’t use one, and by the way they did donate money to the SPCA.
I am amazed how much vitriol there is over this unfortunate accident.
No dispute that a Waymo ran over the cat. But what was the cat doing out in the street, AND, in the middle of the night, AND underneath an idling car? How is the blame for this on Waymo? I don’t get it. Doesn’t the owner of the pet have any responsibility at all?
For a lot of people, it’s not about the cat at all. It’s yet another self-righteous excuse to go after cars in the city. Heather Knight even wrote an article about it for the New York Times yesterday…. straying way off the point in order to quote statistics of how many people are annually killed by cars, her favorite topic. No other city in the world would spend this much time and effort calling attention to the death of a cat… it’s the usual situation of a few people in the city making the rest of us look like fools, and the media following right behind them.
The anti-car anti-driver ‘vibe’ is real. That’s the Waymo customer base feeling ‘good’ about using ‘perfect AI’ to ‘solve the world’s problems’ and no amount of factual rebuttal can enter their brains.
Waymo LIED. Try reading the article.
If it was a human driver, the result would have been the same.
The responsibility for the cat’s death lies squarely with the irresponsible behavior of the cat’s owner, i.e., allowing the cat to roam outside and under the vehicle.
If it were a human driver, the result would almost certainly have been very different.
A human driver observing a woman reaching under the car would have realized there was something of value beneath the car – another lifeform, a cell phone, a Van Gogh painting, perhaps a carne asada burrito – and would not have driven off until the ambiguity* was clarified.
OTOH, calculator cars perform logical operations on digitally-encoded data. They are inherently incapable of reason, conceptualization, understanding, or theory of mind (i.e. grasping intent in others, one of the key factors robot cars are inacapable of). Robots don’t ask “why”; they only compute data.
The intent of course was not to kill. KitKat was killed by Waymo’s negligence and hubris. Waymo committed manslaughter.
*computers don’t do ambiguity
@Karl – If you’re a human driver, and someone’s running up frantically telling you to stop, you’re going to run over a cat, would you really ignore that they way a robotaxi did?
I don’t know, in this city people are often yelling about this or that. If I see someone yelling at me (probably cannot hear them with the windows shut) then I might just think that they are a crazy person, or someone high, or even a threat too me, and rush to get away from them.
Will, if you drive you car and ignore someone telling you there’s imminent danger: you’re a threat to everyone around you. Stop driving your car TODAY before you kill someone.
I make no apology for leaving the scene if some crazy person approaches my vehicle yelling at me.
If it is a cop, that is different. But not some rando.
Will, you’re the rando here.
REAL people communicate about emergency circumstances, you may not.
Will, I suggest you stop driving if that’s your attitude.
Cynthia, I have never knowingly killed a person, dog or cat in my car. So ignoring crazy people on the sidewalk yelling at me has done no harm.
And you will be held accountable for running over someone despite being warned. Waymo will not.
How many human drivers are “held accountable” for accidentally running over a cat?
Just about none.
Humans have object permanence and care about animals.
Waymo has neither. Stop inventing BS like an apologist.
What if it was running over a person lying down in the street instead, would you care then “karl” or probably not even?
After watching the video, I’m even more convinced that an uber or taxi driver would have behaved the same way here.
I really don’t get why a cat being hit by a car is this newsworthy.
@Mike S – There are several underlying issues that make this news, but the main thing here is that we usually have to take Google’s word for it that they’re telling the truth about their proprietary data collected from the car. There’s no other accountability at all for these things.
This video shows that they did not tell the truth.
I watched the video. It’s not clear at all that Waymo lied. It shows the cat go out of view, presumably under the car, a woman kneels down by the front tire, presumably to see the cat, then the car pulls out and we see the cat again for the first time. I can’t tell whether the cat was in front of the tire the whole time, if it made any sudden movements, I don’t know what the car saw and if this was reasonable for it to avoid.
I can tell that this was an accident that a huge percent of human drivers, particularly Uber or taxi drivers would have failed to avoid. I suspect the vast majority of drivers would never have realized that a cat was under the car in the first place.
Yes, MikeS, my view also. A driver (human or not) cannot be held responsible if some uncontrolled animal does something dumb.
This was just an accident that could have happened to anyone.
Will the ‘uncontrolled animal doing something dumb’ with the comments forum, a human being chooses not to do something by virtue of having the choice. Waymo has no choice, it’s a mindless automaton. No wonder you support it, right?
Yeah, whenever I see a concerned woman reaching under the front of my car, I peel out the instant she moves out of the way.
AYFKM?
It’s newsworthy because CA PUC (whose appointed board is made up of corporate lobbyists) has allowed thousands of empty robot cars to drive around on our roads, all for private profit, under the false pretense that they’re vastly superior to human drivers. Yet these issues keep happening, there’s been almost no transparency from these companies on their safety operating data because its proprietary, they outright LIE every time there’s an incident, and they can’t be cited or held accountable for traffic issues or damages. Massive unaccountable corporate grifter filling public space with their robots with zero accountability. You couldn’t write a better sci fi dystopia scenario.
Waymo’s defenders always just say “well Waymo hasn’t killed a person … yet” well ya that’s why we’re ringing the alarm bells!!!!
It’s unclear to me whether Waymo’s account of this is dishonest. The Cruise incident from a while back was a case where the company clearly lied and was rightfully removed from our streets.
Every year human drivers in our city kill 30+ human beings. Every year they injure 800+ humans. To my knowledge Waymo has been involved in a single fatal crash ever (they were rear-ended by a car that was rammed by an out of control SUV). They’ve driven enough miles at this point that we would expect them to have been responsible for a death if they weren’t safer drivers than humans.
As long as they are better than humans at not murdering humans with cars, I simply don’t care about how they handle cats and dogs.
Waymo lied and framed the situation dishonestly.
Apologists be damned to robot hell.
The video is fuzzy and unclear. All we see is a car moving in front of a vehicle and then vanishing.
A human driver would have driven off a well.
You don’t care, so don’t comment.
Still on this story, but no mention of the 3 humans killed by cars (and who knows how many injured) between October and now?
No we need to keep hearing about the “Marquis of 16th street” or whatever idiotic name 5 people are pretending that everyone called him.
In other news, a 72-year-old human pedestrian was killed this week in Russian Hill when a human driver backed over them in reverse, the 15th pedestrian death this year.
Driver lied to the police about it and wasn’t held accountable, like Waymo?
What does that have to do with an autonomously-driven vehicle acting illegally after a human tried to rescue an animal trapped beneath it?
Which part of its actions were illegal?
Exactly, Alex, no law was broken here, the Waymo simply drove off as it was entitled to do.
“A driver, she added, would have likely seen the cat go under the car”
I doubt that, the stretch of sidewalk where KitKat was sliding under the car is not visible from a driver’s seat. However, without a driver, there’s nobody inside for the bystander to communicate with, similar to situations where police or firefighters cannot direct vehicles away or around an emergency response. Or how about that poor fellow who was freaking out when he got blocked in by a parade of Waymos. Let’s remember robotaxis also have no “open ended” sense of something-might-be-wrong like humans have.
Good grief. And your rationalization for the robot not seeing the distressed human being right in front of it reaching under the car?
An actual sentient being would realize there was something out of the ordinary under the car, and would not drive off without investigating. Robots can only do what they are programmed to do, They cannot respond to novel information or ambiguity. They cannot think on their feet (or wheels).
The more information we get on this story, the worse Google and its toady defenders look.
And then there’s the incident of a google car in L.A. last week running a red light and driving right through the middle an active crime. Why? Because computing is not thinking.
Part 1, the Waymo certainly picked up on the presence of the bystander. Evidently, the Waymo also accurately predicted that is was not going to hit the bystander. Part 2, the main point however, as said, is Waymo’s (or any robotaxi’s) missing capacity to recognize anything beyond that, most significantly any aspects that could negatively impact the safe operation of a robotaxi.
How can this stand? Well, the way it looks from far, it comes down to two things: What’s the level of accepting the residual risk of being inaccurate on part 1, and then being ignorant on part 2? Seems the way the cookie crumbles these days, that’s for Alphabet’s lawyers to figure out, and, cynically, also a consideration of Alphabet paying off regulators and lawmakers in Sacramento and D.C.
Reminds me of:
“Why are pedestrians always “darting” (i.e. at fault)?”
https://chi.streetsblog.org/2025/08/13/why-are-pedestrians-always-darting-i-e-at-fault
@E – Pedestrians “dart” and bicyclists “swerve” in media coverage.
Poor bicyclists, the words are too harsh!
Ugh, streetsblog victimstance offtopic word-choice stuff again.
There’s nothing in the article to talk about besides word choice?
It’s shocking to me to see how many of my neighbors think unsafe driving is ok. I cannot believe how many of you think it’s ok to kill cats and ignore people telling you there are unsafe conditions.
I am not anti-car. I own one. But I am against any of you having cars. Get off the road before you kill someone!
Who Cares?? The cat, committed suicide by running into the street, and the owner committed murder, when he allowed the cat to go outside. Take better care of your new kitty.
Had it been a dog, nobody would have blamed the driver as dogs have to be on-leash at all times, so clearly it would be an owner error.
Cats by their very nature are harder to control. But they generally have very good reflexes so the fact that this cat did not leap out of the way as soon as the car started moving is probably due to age and illness, meaning it was on the way out anyway.
Will —
I think you’re just on here to be a jackass and you can now go spend your time more productively.
Best,
JE
could’ve happened to anyone. even if a driver was in the vehicle, a person would not have noticed a cat randomly walking under the car with the ignition on
All those claiming any human driver would’ve done the same, the human would’ve seen the woman and she could’ve spoken to the driver.
“The woman backs away, and within seconds, the Waymo drives away…”
No. Within milliseconds. After watching the video, I don’t think even a second passed before the car rapidly accelerated from its parked position. It’s just unacceptable. And there was nothing any bystander could have done to prevent the accident, perhaps except standing in front of the car to prevent its movement. But if the lady had even wanted to do that, I think the Waymo didn’t stay long enough to even allow that. This is an accident that wouldn’t have happened to any human driver.
There are a lot of good characteristics of autonomous vehicles, but maybe we’ve allowed more autonomy than is prudent in a dense urban environment.
David, never ever stand in front of a vehicle, even if your motives are noble.
It can look like an attempted carjacking or robbery.
Will: how else would one communicate with a Waymo if that Waymo needed to not drive off?
Cynthia, if you yelled at 100 human drivers, how many do you think would stop?
Will, the best thing your neighbors could do is take your keys. You are a threat on the road. I mean it. Stop driving immediately. every single one of your comments describes unsafe and illegal behavior. You are a bad neighbor and a bad driver. Get off the road.
The concern trolls have arrived.
A scenario:
A drunk rolls over into the street under a parked car.
Bystanders wave their hands and scream at the car that there’s a person under the car.
Human drivers would understand that there was a probably a good reason why the bystanders didn’t want them to drive off, and wouldn’t do so until the ambiguity was cleared up.
Unless the bystanders were blocking the vehicle, robot cars would drive off, rolling over the drunk.
Google apologists blame the drunk. Decent people draw attention to the inherent inadequacy of the technology, and ask why the f*&k do we even need robot cars, other than to provide sinkholes for venture capitalist liquidity?
Two Beers, a few years ago a homeless person was killed because he chose to sleep under a vehicle and, not surprisingly, the car ran over him when it took off.
Nobody blamed the driver and there is no obligation for a driver to look under his vehicle before driving off.
So why would Waymo be held to a different standard?
Will, in the case you reference, if a person was RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CAR, waving their arms and screaming, alerting the driver that there was someone beneath the car, and frantically trying to get that person out from under it, and the driver then chose to drive off, that driver would be committing 3rd degree murder.
KitKat getting run over by a robot on wheels isn’t about whether or not the robots are safer drivers than humans in some circumstances (like driving around in herds in circles at 3am…), it’s about the robots not being capable of actual thought or understanding, of people not being able to communicate with them in an emergency, of the robots not being able to respond morally and intelligently to novel and/or ambiguous situations, of absolving one of the wealthiest companies on the planet of responsibility.
“B-b-but humans do it, too!” is not a defense.
And that’s before we even acknowledge the enormous waste of human and financial capital to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, while the massive waste of energy consumed by thousands of empty cars driving in circles at 3am is only moving us along even closer to climate catastrophe.
In the case I described, the person was fully underneath the vehicle, so invisible from the driver position.
And yet someone who saw them go under the car could remember that, whereas Waymo could not, automaton defender.
You truly are more robot than human.
Citation or you’re making it up.
You literally apologize for them being held to a different standard EVERY TIME.
Poor Kit Kat. RIP. What I wonder is what are we charging these companies to allow our lives (and our pets) to be placed at risk – as their test subjects?
Yellow Press !!
Bottom line here is are these Waymo things safe for people ?
Answer is a resounding, “Oh Yea !!!”
And, getting better.
My front windows open over 14th Street and we’re about 4 or 5 blocks west of the Waymo lot and hundreds of them go under my windows and pass by me as my dog and I clean 14th Street from Guerrero all the way to Mission and I’m out in the street a bunch chasing trash and these Robo rides give me way more respect than you do when you’re driving by.
This is Click Bait ?
I just sent a note to Lydia asking for a follow up on Gambit the dog who went from being abandoned in the BART subway to a beloved member of our 16th and Valencia gang diagonal to Manny’s.
It is from James, who is the group’s most vocal and political member that I learned today that Gambit’s guardian, Matthew took a bus back home a couple of days ago and Gambit is at SFPCA possibly on Death Row.
Now, there’s a story that’s both click bait and doesn’t threaten the reputation of what will quickly become a Monster International Industry birthed right here under my window.
If you’re gonna get hit by one of those things you pretty much gotta crawl under them as the woman who got hit and the cat both did.
go Niners !!
h.
This is so much worse than Waymo’s version of events, and really gives the lie to the refrain by Waymo and its boosters that it’s “safer than human drivers.” A human driver wouldn’t have killed KitKat in this situation. Bystanders would have been able to signal them not to go until they got the cat out of harm’s way.
Here’s a simple test you can do to show yourself Waymo is “safer” than human drivers (anecdotally, since statical rigor clearly isn’t front of mind here): use a crosswalk. I never have to worry that a Waymo will see me and stop. Human drivers are so routinely bad that the city has been replacing crosswalks with traffic lights all over. I’m forced to yell at drivers or threaten physical violence at least twice a week. I’ve never even come close with a Waymo. They are not perfect, and we absolutely need to keep up pressure on them, but they are so much safer than human drivers.
Waymo is another lying crap company and its mindless defenders are useful idiots.