In front of Randa’s Market on 16th Street in the heart of the Mission District, the spot where you would usually find an affectionate cat is now replaced by bouquets of marigolds, candles, and a card that reads, “Kill a Waymo, save a cat.”
KitKat, a well-fed, nine-year-old tabby cat with emerald eyes, belonged to Mike Zeidan, who owns the liquor store that’s sandwiched between a popular bar and the Roxie Theater. KitKat’s friendly demeanor made him a popular bodega cat, and he was given the title “Mayor of 16th Street” by residents in the neighborhood.
Tragedy struck on Monday. According to an anonymous 311 complaint filed with the city at 12:51 a.m., a Waymo hit KitKat, who was “sitting in the sidewalk next to the transit lane.”
“The Waymo did not slow down, swerve, or even try to avoid the cat in any way,” the complaint said. “Waymos should not be on the street if they can’t spot small animals in the dark.”
KitKat’s owner, who owns Randa’s Market, said that KitKat “brought everybody together.”
Katherine Li/Business Insider
Waymo confirmed to Business Insider that one of its vehicles encountered a cat at the location.
“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,” a Waymo spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. “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.”
Zeidan told Business Insider he wasn’t the individual who filed the 311 complaint and did not witness the event. He said a couple told him that KitKat had gone under a Waymo and that they attempted to rescue the cat and stop the vehicle. They were unsuccessful.
Zeidan said he was at home sleeping when he was woken up by a call that KitKat had been struck. An employee rushed the feline to an emergency room about a mile away, and Ziedan and his wife soon followed. Not long after the pair arrived, the vet informed them that KitKat had died.
“He really was the special, one-of-a-kind thing that brought everybody together,” said Zeidan. “People come a long way just to see him and give him treats and toys — he brought so much love.”
Waymo’s autonomous technology
Waymo did not address questions about what a bystander should do if they urgently need to stop a moving autonomous vehicle. Riders can stop the car using the emergency mechanisms in the app or click the “pull over” button.
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Waymo relies on radar, lidar, and at least 13 external visual cameras to detect objects and movement.
Business Insider’s Lloyd Lee described Waymo’s 5th-generation autonomous driver as “a safe but not an annoyingly cautious driver.”
Missy Cummings, director of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center, told Business Insider that Waymo cars “do not have a sensor that could detect something underneath the vehicle.”
Cummings said that another company, Cruise, once failed to detect a pedestrian caught under the car and dragged the woman for 20 feet. Cruise is no longer in operation.
“My name is Kitty Cat and I am resting in power,” read one handwritten sticker on the altar.
Katherine Li/Business Insider
Cats that are not kept entirely indoors run the risk of being hit by a car — autonomous or not — in an urban environment.
Throughout the week, KitKat’s memorial spot grew from just a few candles to a multitier altar, as residents turned out to grieve the feline and protest Waymo. “My name is Kitty Cat and I am resting in power,” read one handwritten sticker on the altar.
Similar sentiments spread online. A Reddit thread detailing KitKat’s passing received nearly 2,000 upvotes in a local tech forum, and a post on Randa’s Market’s Instagram account, which memorializes the cat, received thousands of likes, as well as comments directed at Waymo.
“BY A WAYMO?? This means war,” one Instagram user commented.
“Lyft and Uber drivers need our business,” wrote another on Instagram. “Killing KitKat is another strike against the billionaire techies.”
Questions of liability
Bryant Walker Smith, a professor in engineering and law at the University of South Carolina, told Business Insider that the most an owner could do in the event an autonomous vehicle hit their pet is to sue for property damages, but that could be a hurdle in this case, since KitKat mostly roamed freely.
“Law unfortunately treats pets as mere ‘chattel’ — that is, physical property,” said Smith. “The owners are generally entitled only to economic damages such as vet costs and the pet’s ‘fair market value.'”
“This is sad, because law might consider KitKat, a living creature with inherent value, to have a ‘fair market value’ of zero,” Smith added.
Autonomous vehicles have stuck pets before. In 2023, a Waymo vehicle fatally struck a dog in Bernal Heights, and in the same year, a Cruise vehicle hit a Labrador that survived. But the expansion of autonomous vehicles is not slowing down. As of July, Waymo has expanded its operation in the Bay Area to cover more of the San Francisco Peninsula, as well as parts of Palo Alto and Menlo Park in Silicon Valley.
At a recent TechCrunch event, journalist Kirsten Korosec asked Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana if she thinks society would accept a death potentially caused by a robot.
“I think that society will,” Mawakana responded.
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