Waymo's NHTSA documents are all redacted

Waymo has turned over documents to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's probe into its collision with a 12-year-old in Mountain View, but every single page is blacked out. The company cited "confidential business information" — the kind of catch-all claim that turns safety investigations into a game of whack-a-mole.

The probe is about a 2023 crash where a Waymo autonomous vehicle struck a child riding a bike. The kid survived, but the incident triggered a deeper look at how Waymo's sensor suite and decision logic handle vulnerable road users — kids on bikes, pedestrians stepping off curbs, the kinds of things that don't always show up in controlled tests. NHTSA can compel documents, but it can't force a company to hand over the parts it doesn't want read.

This is the pattern we keep seeing with self-driving safety questions: regulators ask for the raw material, companies hand back a blacked-out version, and the public is left guessing whether the underlying data tells a different story. Waymo's argument is that proprietary algorithms and sensor data are trade secrets. The counterargument is that when a child is hit, the public has a right to understand what the car saw and why it decided to keep rolling.

Why this matters for us: when autonomous vehicles share our streets, the community that lives near them deserves to know what happened — not just the sanitized version the company files.