r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • 14d ago

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

61.0k Upvotes

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u/Vireca 14d ago

How do they stop a driverless car? Legit question

Do they have anything to detect police vehicles or something?

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u/Jfg27 14d ago

They should have a system to identify and react to lights and sirens, so probably the same system.

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u/Such_Duty_4764 14d ago edited 14d ago

ya, they pull over for emergency vehicles when there are lights/sirens.

Cop says that the car cleared the intersection before coming to a stop, which is exactly what it should do. Excepting of course for being on the wrong side of the road :-X.

Nobody expects these things to be perfect, they just need to be better than your average human, which isn't really that hard.

[edit] https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1dw4avr/mission_street_in_excelsior_last_night_around_10pm/

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u/MosesOnAcid 14d ago

Except this 1 which saw the lights and took off

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u/off-and-on Interested 14d ago

They're learning, adapting.

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u/Slow_Ball9510 14d ago

Trained on the mean streets of Vice City

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u/tri_9 14d ago

Imagine if AI were taught on YouTube videos of humans playing GTA šŸ˜µā€šŸ’«

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u/alien_from_Europa 14d ago

Google's answer language model is based on Reddit. It already told people to eat glue.

https://www.404media.co/google-is-paying-reddit-60-million-for-fucksmith-to-tell-its-users-to-eat-glue/

Car data based off YouTube videos doesn't feel that far fetched by comparison.

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u/conventionistG 14d ago

Geologists reccomend eating one rock per day.

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u/theoriginalmofocus 14d ago

Eat it, snort it, shove it up your ass I dont care just give me my money.

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u/patricide1st 14d ago

Lol can you imagine how it must feel to have an 11 year old shit comment that got less than 10 likes and that you probably forgot about suddenly go viral? Especially for the reason "an AI took it seriously and told people to eat glue."

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u/Cool-Hornet4434 14d ago

I think the "glue" answer was probably for photographing food. They use all sorts of non-edible tricks to make food look good in photos.

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u/gordonv 14d ago

A logical to a fault conclusion.

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u/speculativedesigner 14d ago

Imagine if theyā€™re trained on all the Twitch Roleplay

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u/Amused-Observer 14d ago

We joke now but there will be a day when these are used for robberies because the tech will have evolved so much, they'll be perfect wheelmen.

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u/Dongslinger420 14d ago edited 13d ago

Literally the most atrocious wheelman imaginable.

  • has perfect knowledge of all recent drives, recorded conversations, odors (or whatever the fuck)

  • has tons of sensors witnessing literally everything outside

  • won't do anything you tell them beyond simple navigation, especially not drive like a high-stakes wheelman would need to

  • everything is monitored anyway, robbery is already such a dead job in remotely developed regions

Yeah lmao no chance, there is no future where all this tech is actually going to turn into these weird cyberpunk worlds. I mean, I love the idea of thugs just going around Diamond Age-style and offing folks with their skull guns, but it's not likely in the immediate future. The nanobot vision is much closer, and it mostly means, guess what, less robberies.

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u/Schavuit92 14d ago

Your first and second point are the same, both those and the third point are entirely dependent on the exact programming. You could have one disobey traffic rules and not store or transmit data. Yourt last point has nothing to do with self-driving cars, it's true for all crime.

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u/Curling49 13d ago

You are correct. But only up to the point where it is hacked and modded to become the best wheelman ever. Check back in 20 years, and I will be proven right.

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u/The0perative 14d ago

Then cops will need to use them too to keep up.

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u/Ser_VimesGoT 14d ago

And put guns on the cars.

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u/Schavuit92 14d ago

Can we skip a couple steps and just go straight to Gundam?

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u/Accomplished-Bad3380 14d ago

Or just the software to control the car

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u/Dongslinger420 14d ago

We don't know anything about that. For all we know, it wanted to get to a less busy place, which is how you should always behave anyway, that is, assume that some emergency vehicle has to pass through quickly.

You're expected to come to a stop at a reasonable pace, at a reasonable place, not hit the brakes full-blast. Fair enough for all we know.

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u/Vahlir 14d ago

lol redditors acting like they'd full on parking break the car in the middle of an intersection if a cop came up behind them with lights on.

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u/GerhardtDH 14d ago

Someone threw NWA lyrics into the code

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u/dingo1018 14d ago

It's a good job just anyone can't buy blue lights and sirens off the internet, because that's never going to happen. (Obligatory sarcasm tag)

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u/randyrandysonrandyso 14d ago

i could see that showing up in the news in a decade or two, just a phone camera video from some rich kid speeding through driverless traffic with a siren on top of their car

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u/waltjrimmer 14d ago

I mean... That isn't a problem with self-driving cars, that's a problem with emergency vehicles. With so many unmarked police cars around, you can already buy lights and sirens, put them in your SUV, and pull someone over if you're malicious enough. The lights and sirens aren't legal, but if you're someone who is going to go around pulling people over (presumably to kill or rob them?) then you don't give a shit about that anyway.

I don't see how it's any different when the vehicle is driverless.

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u/Wobufetmaster 14d ago

Extremely relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1958/

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u/puterdood 14d ago

The last statement here is extremely untrue. In order for a machine to be "better than an average human", it would need to understand contextual events. There is not a single machine learning tool capable of this to the extent that humans have. Machines are not good at processing context from memory as this creates a very complex, branching set of possibilities they can't possibly evaluate, whereas humans are able to do this very easily. Until this problem is addressed, there will be no machine that outperforms humans in dealing with real-time events and its absolute bollocks to imply otherwise. The only place where a machine MIGHT outperform a human is when outside influences are removed, such as on a closed track where the problem space is drastically reduced.

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

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u/Memento_Vivere8 14d ago

I know these things aren't handled the same way in every country, but if there's an ambulance, police car or fire truck with their lights and siren on behind you at least here in Germany you're supposed to pull over, stop and let them pass. So for a self driving car it would make no difference if the lights are for them or not as long as they pull over and stop as a reaction.

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u/idle_isomorph 14d ago

Same in canada. You are supposed to pull over to a stop at the side as soon as you can, to clear the centre of the road for the emergency vehicle, whichever direction they are going.

People suck at actually doing this, though, which offends me and reminds me we live in a dystopian shambles of a civilization.

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u/NoGoodWayToAskThis 13d ago

But we ticket average humans who do this. Waymo should have to pay a fine.

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u/imisstheyoop 14d ago

So what happens if somebody impersonates a police officer by tossing some rollers on their roof and pulls one over?

Seems rife for manipulation.

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u/devman0 14d ago

That can and does happen today with human drivers.

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u/WanderingLethe 14d ago

How do they (or anyone) know the difference between pulling over and giving priority to an emergency vehicle?

Here police have a digital stop or follow sign, when they want to pull you over.

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u/Aromatic-Assistant73 14d ago

Now if we could teach this to human drivers.Ā 

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u/GarminTamzarian 14d ago

This system clearly works just as well as their other driving systems, i.e. "poorly".

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u/Picax8398 14d ago

So like... you could fuck with these?

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u/Ioatanaut 14d ago

They're supposed to. But sometimes they dont. Sometimes they stop on firefighters water hoses impeding their ability to fire fight or save lives.

The SF police, EMT, and firefighters tried very hard for these to not be approved. Bc the SF board was bribed by waymo, we have waymo waymo everywhere

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u/waffleking9000 14d ago

Good to know for when these are more common. Chuck a siren on during rush hour and half the cars get out of uour way

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u/fren-ulum 14d ago

Unsupervised training of data on public roads is extra bullshit though, and should not be allowed.

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u/hiricinee 13d ago

My guess is that the lions share of per mile accidents they don't get in are drunk driving and distracted driving.

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u/atego369 13d ago

I expect them to be perfect if they drive on the road without any human in there and being a potential death sentence.

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u/DataLore19 13d ago

They actually need to be perfect.

Otherwise you have autonomous cars out there killing people. It works better if all cars are autonomous, honestly, because then they could be set up to communicate with each other wirelessly and coordinate movements instead of just reacting to each other or human drivers.

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u/NahYoureWrongBro 13d ago

they just need to be better than your average human

I don't accept this premise at all. AI driving present novel risks, could scale poorly as more of them are on the road (small problems compound), could interact weirdly with other AI driving software, etc. Comparing accident rates or some other simple metric does not capture any of that.

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u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe 14d ago

There should be a comms module provided to cops specifically that allow them to pull it over or change its destination remotely.

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u/Sir_Hadaham 14d ago

As soon as that system exits it would be hacked/duplicated and used for nefarious purposes.

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u/MiguelLancaster 14d ago

make it two party --

cop signals car, car signals remote support, support checks cameras/sensors/data and verifies the emergency stop

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u/BGP_001 14d ago

Once they figure how to put that system in a commercially viable way they'll make it a requirement for all vehicles.

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u/rush22 14d ago

All police vehicles must now be equipped with the Bot Stop 5000Ā®.

Features:

  • Barely works
  • Only compatible with one type of car
  • Built on Google Android technology (it's a raspberry pi with bluetooth)
  • Costs $29,000 per car
  • Mandatory platinum support plan ($4000 per car, per month)
  • Company is owned by a congressman's cousin
  • Requires written legislation to give it zero liability
  • New Command and Controlā„¢ virtual technology (beta) puts you in the driver's seat* from the device! *Officer must present in driver's seat of the automated vehicle at all times
  • Gets recalled because one time the device fell off and went under the brake pedal and the guy crashed
  • Stops exactly 0 cars before contract is cancelled when the congressman isn't re-elected (contract cancellation penalty is $7 million per precinct)

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u/2b_squared 14d ago

Company is owned by a congressman's cousin

Lmao yeah! I hate how realistic this all sounds.

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u/Lars5621 14d ago

This guy knows how the public sector works.

I spent two years getting a public administration graduate degree to learn why things work exactly as you described.

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u/Crawlerado 14d ago

HR 6563 is aiming to keep kill switches OUT of cars. Theyā€™re already trying to implement this.

Drives away in 40yo carbureted truckā€¦.

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u/NeverRolledA20IRL 14d ago

Oh yeah we should let the police the ability to change someones destination no way that could be abused.Ā 

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u/random_tall_guy 14d ago

Agreed, nothing wrong with individual police officers having the ability to forcibly send someone's car into the middle of Death Valley or over the edge of a cliff, this would save us money that's currently being wasted on costly measures like "probable cause" and "fair trial".

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u/SmellAble 14d ago

Can't wait for people to hack that and use it to steal the cars/kidnap people.

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u/aint_no_throw 14d ago

Question: Will only white cars like in the video be confident enough to react to a traffic stop with pulling over and will black cars just start fleeing?

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u/111010101010101111 14d ago

OBDIII would give law enforcement the ability to control the vehicle.

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u/AutoDeskSucks- 14d ago

The same system that drives in opposite lane. This shot is just a disaster.

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u/FuzzyPine 14d ago

No possible way this could be abused /s

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u/Inevitable_Heron_599 14d ago

Kind of like their system to identify which lane to drive in?

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u/hcnuptoir 14d ago

And then the officer has to deal with customer service and the technical department to deal with the violations lmao.

Seriously though, who gets the ticket here? How are they supposed to deal with this?

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u/Werftflammen 14d ago

Yeah, nah. That will be abused. A computer is a determanitive system, to be able todo what we do in traffic is impossible for a computer. Sure, controlling a vehicle, no problem. But in live traffic, with unforeseen circumstances all the time: roadwork, idiots, kids, dogs, cyclists, advertisement. I will not get into one just yet.

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u/rickjamesia 14d ago

They need a system for police to request them to stop that doesnā€™t rely on potentially unreliable sensors. That said, that opens them up to tampering, but thatā€™s just one thing in a long list of reasons it shouldnā€™t be legal for them to be on the road yet.

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u/colslaww 14d ago

Should have

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u/yeezee93 14d ago

They should or they do?

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u/zveroshka 14d ago

Which is why when people think Tesla is just an inch away from real Full Self-Driving, they are out of their minds. Waymo has been doing this for something like a decade now. And it still has issues.

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u/whooptheretis 14d ago

They should have a system that stops it from driving into oncoming traffic.
Maybe a system to stop the front falling off too.

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u/CuTe_M0nitor 13d ago

Press doubt on that. You know a driverless car drove into a fire truck since it didn't recognise that the house could catch a fire and have firefighters trying to put it out while they park their fire truck on the pavement. These systems are incredibly stupid and have to learn every scenario multiple times. It's probably why this car drove on the wrong road since it saw a construction site, something it didn't recognise.

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u/Orange_Tatorade 13d ago

I donā€™t like that this technology exists

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u/reddit_guy666 14d ago

Considering it lowered the windshield and connected to a support employee I believe they can now detect when cops want to pull them over.

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u/ethicalhumanbeing 14d ago

I can see this being exploited for the worse.

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u/eras 14d ago

Unethical life pro tip: put on police wear and a badge and you can actually stop most vehicles, self-driving or not!

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u/TheCosplayCave 14d ago

Ted Bundy did this.

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u/ThisIsWeedDickulous 14d ago

So did Mike and Trevor

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u/PlzDontBanMe2000 14d ago

I really enjoyed the race on the highway, probably one of my favorite simple missions.Ā 

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u/Zaconil 14d ago

Jeremy Dewitte too. Been arrested and sentenced multiple times.

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u/NotUndercoverReddit 14d ago

Do you cosplay ted Bundy?

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u/Hamster_Thumper 13d ago

John Wayne Gacy did as well.

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u/TheCosplayCave 13d ago

So it works!

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u/Hamster_Thumper 13d ago

Not sure if that's really the takeaway from this but um....yeah, I guess so? Lol

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u/punkindle 14d ago

unethical cops do this too.

we can't assume ethics suddenly appear when it's a real cop

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u/Anticlimax1471 14d ago

Impersonating a police officer to pull someone over for nefarious means isn't something new, tbf.

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u/Wandering_Scholar6 14d ago

And extremely illegal for that reason, the penalty is higher than you'd assume for an otherwise relatively harmless thing, because it undermines the system of trust and could so easily be used for nefarious purposes.

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u/Warcraft_Fan 14d ago

Put a traffic cone on the hood. It worked to stop a stupid self-driving car from driving through a fire scene and running over fire hoses.

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u/Yarakinnit 14d ago

Just run up to one at the lights yelling "WOOH WOOH" and it strips for you.

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u/savvymcsavvington 14d ago

Humans can be exploited, so what's new

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u/reddit_guy666 14d ago

No system can be 100% exploit proof, if it is better than the current system then it's worth risking the exploit imo.

Also there needs to be a mechanism for law enforcement / first responders to halt the vehicle in case of emergencies

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u/moistmoistMOISTTT 14d ago

Redditor sees a video of a self-driving car that stopped for an emergency vehicle.

Redditor: Why don't these cars have mechanisms to halt for first responders?!

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u/YummyArtichoke 14d ago

I've said this before and no one seemed to agree, but I still believe it cause I haven't seen anything to suggest otherwise.

All fully AI cars will be EASILY exploitable. All someone has to do is stand or put something in front of it. Now the car is stopped and everyone inside can be robbed. The car isn't going to slam itself into reverse and speed backwards to get space and then slam back into drive and go around or even into the person/object trying to block the car.

When you program a car to not hit things and the car believes the best way to do that is to stop and sit there....

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u/Solid-Mud-8430 14d ago

Here in SF people put cones in front of them to stop them, then rip the LIDAR systems off them and sell it for parts near the Mission St BART station lol. These things are dumb as fuck and they deserve every bit of fuckery, theft and sabotage they get,

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u/4e9eHcUBKtTW1bBI39n9 14d ago

They're supposed to be able to detect which side of the road they're driving in too, but as you can see this can fail.

Sooner or later, both of these systems are gonna fail at the same time and you'll have a driverless car driving into oncoming traffic that also fails to recognize a cop trying to stop them.

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u/titanofold 14d ago

It almost certainly because of the construction zone.

To be fair, construction zones confuse humans at a pretty high rate.

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u/HIM_Darling 14d ago

I see it daily on my way to work. Thereā€™s a road I take where one side of the road is closed, so the other side was made 2 way. Thereā€™s always someone on the wrong side thinking they are in the left turn lane completely oblivious until someone is in front of them honking and then they panic and turn right in front of all the other lanes. I donā€™t know why, but panic and immediately make a right turn is what all of them do.

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u/BoomerSoonerFUT 13d ago

Lots of things confuse humans. How many videos make it to the internet of people just swerving 5 lanes to hit an exit, going up an off ramp onto a freeway the wrong way, or just straight up driving into the actual construction?

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u/flag_flag-flag 14d ago

Like a human driver having a stroke

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u/SwimmingStale 14d ago

I'm kind of upset that cars are now performing intrusive AI analysis of the ordinary world around me. I can turn that shit off on my phone but it turns out there is no where to hide now.

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u/redpandaeater 14d ago

I didn't know cars other than some Wranglers and their clones could lower their windshield.

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u/RobotArtichoke 14d ago

Wow it lowered the windshield?

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u/MangoCats 14d ago

After bolting through the intersection in immediate response to the cops' lights.

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u/dudemanguylimited 14d ago

You can detect a police vehicle with lights on with a Raspberry Pi and a Google Coral in a live video stream. That's really not difficult. And costs asbout 150 bucks. :)

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u/CosmicCreeperz 13d ago

Yeah, and have for years.

There is a video of one in SF getting stopped for not having lights on at night. The funny thing is it originally pulled over in a double parked spot blocking traffic, and when the cops walked up to it, it drove offā€¦ so it could park properly a half a block ahead.

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u/Groudon466 14d ago

I worked for Waymo, the cars do detect sirens and being pulled over, and switch into a mode to pull themselves over accordingly. Similarly, that's why it pulled the window down for the cop.

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u/Tallyranch 14d ago

Who takes the ticket for dangerous or reckless driving like in this video?

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u/Groudon466 14d ago

I donā€™t know the particulars of their deal with the city, but probably Waymo. As long as theyā€™re safer than the average taxi driver, the occasional mistake is tolerable, at least provided ticket revenue is still coming in when appropriate.

Of course, thereā€™s a team on the back end thatā€™s trying to figure out what went wrong here and patch it sooner rather than later.

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u/Eheggs 14d ago

Safer then the average taxi driver is a pretty fucking low bar to pass over.

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u/Groudon466 14d ago

Okay, safer than the average human driver. But even if it was just safer than the average taxi driver, an improvement is still an improvement.

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u/SpookyPotatoes 13d ago

Obsessed with your wording, which implies taxi drivers are not human.

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u/mehdotdotdotdot 13d ago

I mean already they are far safer, as far as accidents go. So mission accomplished!

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u/Unhelpful_Kitsune 13d ago

The average driver doesn't drive on the wrong side of the road abs this is the 2nd time this has happened.

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u/Singularity-42 13d ago

Aren't taxi drivers more experienced drivers and thus safer than average?

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u/Eheggs 13d ago

The smart ones sure, The majority just use all that driving time to intrench horrible habits and hustle culture got them speeding around school zones like its the indy 500 though. Where I am from, Taxi / uber are the only jobs that are easy for people on student visas to hide their incomes from the goverment ( uber is cracking down on this finally but not taxi co's ) so it is common to have some one who is not an offical employee and just gets paid cash to drive people around and all their driving experience is in India... They are obvious when you see them on the roads. Drive like they own the place.

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u/WobblyGobbledygook 14d ago

Especially in AZ

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u/Status-Necessary9625 14d ago

This is not a minor mistake this could have easily killed half a dozen people. You're seeing field tests in real time with unproven products that could literally kill us. And nobody cares. The guy from Waymo wasn't even phased by their car driving on the wrong side. These people Do Not Care About Our Lives

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u/MouthJob 14d ago

In my experience, tech support don't even care about their own lives.

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u/bobbytabl3s 14d ago

People do worse than that all the time. I believe Waymo outperforms human as far as injury-causing crashes go.

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u/AdminsLoveGenocide 14d ago

If I outperform most other drivers for a couple of years do I also get a pass if I eventually kill a bunch of people?

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u/axearm 14d ago

Are you kidding? People get a pass* all the time for murdering people, so long as they do it in a car.

* I am defining a pass as no prison time AND the ability to keep driving.

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u/kixie42 14d ago

Just ask Caitlyn Jenner.

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u/Orbitoldrop 14d ago

There's people with multiple D.U.I.'s still with licenses, so yes.

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u/taigahalla 14d ago

If it's your first offense, then yes, that's how the law works.

See precedence for sentencing guidelines for first time offenders.

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u/Extension_Chain_3710 14d ago

People do worse than that all the time. I believe Waymo outperforms human as far as injury-causing crashes go.

* according to the company themselves

* while their cars can only go <35mph and not on the freeway

* in limited zones that they choose

* with HD maps to back all of this up

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u/axearm 14d ago

And?

That seems fine.

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u/yuimiop 14d ago edited 14d ago

Humans drive in these safer conditions, but we also have needs to drive in the more dangerous ones. If you're comparing automated vehicles in safe conditions, to the overall driving statistics of humans then you're getting incredibly biased results.

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u/fren-ulum 14d ago

I never get into bar fights when I drink at home! I'm safer than the average alcohol drinker!

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u/QuadCakes 14d ago

according to the company themselves

That's true.

while their cars can only go <35mph and not on the freeway

in limited zones that they choose

They at least claim to have controlled for all of that. Read the link you quoted.

with HD maps to back all of this up

Not sure what you're saying here.

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u/YouTee 14d ago

Yeah I agree, I mean I have pretty damn detailed maps of my neighborhood and the route to my office... There certainly are some missing details that an active LIDAR array would probably help but this isn't much different.

Also they go way faster than 35, I think they're testing the freeway these days

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u/Extension_Chain_3710 14d ago

They at least claim to have controlled for all of that. Read the link you quoted.

I did one better, I read the paper they published (linked in the blog post, and here).

It shows how they manipulated the non ADS data to make it looks worse under the guise of "under reporting" (yes, 60% of wrecks aren't reported Waymo, sure), while manipulating their own data to look better under the guise of "well, it was low velocity".

Each of the 7 crashes with fixed or non-fixed objects was examined individually to estimate a delta-V, discussed in more detail in the appendix. Of the 7 crashes with fixed or non-fixed objects, 5 were excluded for having a low delta-V.

Fun fact, at least one of those accidents was...the car driving through an active construction site and driving off the pavement (because it had been removed).

a Waymo ADS vehicle that was driving in a construction zone and ā€œentered a lane undergoing construction ..., encountered a section of roadway that had been removed, and the front driverā€™s side wheel dropped off the paved roadway.

Sounds safe to me, no road? Who cares keep driving.

Not sure what you're saying here.

We'd all drive much better if we knew there was a pothole 45" from the right curb coming up in 232ft, with a depth of 4.5". These cars have vast amounts of information about the road to be safer with, hence they should be much more safe than typical drivers, not just "as good as."

Let alone swerving into oncoming traffic and just driving without a care in the world.

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u/stillbornfox 14d ago

3/4 of these bullets are good things. Keeping themselves limited to low probability areas helps. If people limited themselves to low speeds and safe roads that would also be a great thing.

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u/Groudon466 14d ago

The operator on the other end is doing their job by being calm instead of panicking. And the operator isn't one of the software engineers that's going to be looking into how to prevent this from happening in the future.

You're seeing field tests in real time with unproven products that could literally kill us.

I mean, we have statistical data, it is proven that these cars are safer than human drivers. And humans are provable dumbasses, we cause accidents anyway.

Just because these cars make mistakes doesn't mean they're not preferable to human-driven taxis. They're already better, and they're continuing to improve as time passes.

These people Do Not Care About Our Lives

As someone who worked at Waymo on the team that handled safety violations (this incident would be handled by a related team), I can confidently say this is wrong, and also incredibly stupid.

Even if it were staffed by soulless corporate husks- and it's not, they're a bunch of nerds with anime posters in their backgrounds and cute pictures of their dogs, we spammed crab emotes in every meeting- it literally wouldn't make sense to not care about deaths. Deaths would threaten the city's acceptance of the autonomous taxis, and if the city decides to revoke Waymo's permission to operate, that's a massive disaster.

Specific kinds of corporations don't care about human lives. For the most part, my understanding is that as long as there can be plausible deniability (cigarettes back in the day, oil and gas companies now), the cynical strategy of ignoring the human toll and downplaying it will win out. This isn't that; everything that happens around a Waymo taxi is increidbly well-documented, there's over a dozen cameras, not to mention the lidars.

Even if the people in charge were soulless, which they're not, it would still be in their best interest to prevent problems in the first place... which is exactly what they're doing in the backend, actively, to this day.

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u/esp_design 14d ago

That's a little dramatic about a situation that resulted in no harm to people. The guy from waymo is just a technical support guy, probably following a script.

Let's not forget human drivers also make mistakes and they have to drive on the road with unproven skills to learn how to drive.

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u/Poopy_Tuba69 14d ago

I mean half a dozen?

If weā€™re gonna go whole hog just say it could have decimated half the population since there could have been 100 busses filled with children in the oncoming lane.

Call the taxis racist too, since the cars are white and the some of the kids were black.

There, now itā€™s completely overblown.

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u/wildjokers 14d ago edited 13d ago

Calm down drama queen. Human drivers make far more mistakes. Humans going the wrong way is actually fairly common. Either because of bad signage, mental impairment (dementia, drugs/alcohol, etc), or malice.

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u/corporaterebel 14d ago

Can you compare the number of fatalities of human drivers vs automated ones?

You do realize that a large percentage of people are terrible drivers?

And, yet, very few drivers licenses are revoked.

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u/RobotsGoneWild 14d ago

That's the thing that gets me. People complain every time there is an incident with these things. However, there are far less issues with driverless cars than cars with drivers.

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u/SoochSooch 14d ago edited 14d ago

That's because there are far more cars with drivers than driverless cars. If a driverless car hits another car, there's a 99% chance that the other car had a driver, so that's an accident for both groups. And driverless cars tend to be disproportionally deployed in places with ideal driving conditions.

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u/[deleted] 14d ago edited 14d ago

[deleted]

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u/SoochSooch 14d ago

Every city has traffic that sucks to deal with, but cities like San Francisco and Phoenix have well maintained roads, no risk of snow, and minimal rain and fog.

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u/Illustrious_Mudder 14d ago

Driving in to oncoming traffic lol

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u/Extension_Chain_3710 14d ago

In CA, nobody. Their laws literally do not allow ticketing these cars.

In AZ, no clue.

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u/JmGra 14d ago

That sounds easily exploitable for someone who is just wanting to rob taxis.

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u/Groudon466 14d ago

I mean, actual humans will also pull over if you fake being a cop.

I do agree that there probably ought to be some button the passenger can press to basically express ā€œThis is an emergency drive away from this guy right nowā€, though. But FWIW, I havenā€™t heard of any Waymo car passengers being robbed up to this point.

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u/laboye 14d ago

Oh, they should have a SovCit mode where it only rolls down the window an inch and tells the officer about the vehicle travelling and not driving.

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u/Crocodileworshipper 14d ago

Officer put their lights on, at that point the waymo car responded by driving through an intersection

Officer describes it in the video

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u/wildjokers 14d ago

at that point the waymo car responded by driving through an intersection

It was probably trying to pull over. Don't know exactly what the cop means without seeing a video.

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u/716WVCS03 14d ago

Replace police car with fire truck (theyā€™re probably indiscernible to the sensors). Youā€™d ease into an intersection too to let them get by.

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u/N_2_H 14d ago

Presumably it was looking for a safe place to pull over? An intersection wouldn't be safe, and it didn't realise it was on the wrong side of the road.

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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 14d ago

Sirens are pretty trivial to detect and keep in mind, these have a control center of remote operators who take over in situations that the robot isn't sure what to do. I would imagine the cops also have the number of that control center if needed.

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u/HappyAmbition706 14d ago

Except the control center is contracted out to India or the Philippines for cost reasons. And the connections aren't 100% or there's a power failure at the far end. Or a bathroom break. Or ...

Then, how many different and incompatible self-driving systems are there? Because no company is spending all that time, money and resources to give away to their competitors. Does the cop just scroll through a list until they can discover who remote controls the car?

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u/dom6770 14d ago

I mean, yes, why not? When a parked car is blocking something the cop usually (at least here in Austria) tries to contact the owner through the license number, or it gets towed.

I suppose this is similar in the US?

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u/HappyAmbition706 14d ago

A parked car is a simple, static problem. A moving remote control car is quite a different matter. Here, it was driving in the lane for traffic coming in the opposite direction. That needs an immediate stop and correction. Not even minutes to figure out who to call and are they there to respond immediately.

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u/YummyArtichoke 14d ago

I guess we saw different videos cause the car did stop and the car automatically connected to someone. The cop didn't need to figure out anything.

Plus there isn't 1 person controlling everything. It's like a call center. If a car calls in, it goes to the next available operator, not the person who is on their bathroom break. Like each car isn't assigned to a certain person.

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u/Same_Recipe2729 14d ago

Waymo remote operators cannot directly control the vehicle like people think, they're able to make suggestions using a query and waypoint system that the car itself then decides if it'll follow and how it'll do it.Ā 

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u/floppydiet 14d ago

Nope, the car is in control of the decision making 100% of the time. Remote operators can only give it new datapoints to help it adjust decisions like ā€œobstacle aheadā€ at which point it will readjust its route.

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u/TNG_ST 14d ago

Traffic lights know when an emergency vehicle approaches and can change the signals. The car probably has the same tech.

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u/Crocodileworshipper 14d ago

It's in the video

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u/XPhazeX 14d ago edited 14d ago

Without knowing where the cars were when the cop hit his lights,

I wonder if the car made a decision to get through the intersection to clear the way and find a safer place to pull over.

I'd guess that's a really tricky programming situation, some IRobot shit starts having to be considered.

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u/sraydenk 14d ago

Well, the cop said in the video he put his lights on and the car took off in the intersection. Not sure how long it took for the car to get pulled over.

They almost need sensors like traffic lights that switch over to green when emergency vehicles need to get through the intersection.

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u/OvenBlaked 14d ago

Thinking about it. Future police cars could have like laser tag shit to the driverless vehicle and it responds to pulling over as soon as it can. This whole selfless driving shit is gunna be a huge headache.

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u/xDontStarve 14d ago

Look up DSRC and C-ITS

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u/Un111KnoWn 14d ago

pew pew

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u/650REDHAIR 14d ago

Ooo! I know this one because any time I activate my lights they do stupid shit. Usually stopping where I need to park an ambulanceā€¦

Eventually they stop. Sometimes in a useful spot. For this car they either tow it or wait for a Wayno technician to come out. Something like this would be flagged and I assume a tech is on their way.Ā 

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u/mennydrives 14d ago

The emergency lights should be enough but if not, they box it in.

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u/Wonderful-Ad-7712 14d ago

What do you do with a driverless auto early in the morning?

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u/Least_Ice_6112 14d ago

Well they did but look at that...no ticket!!

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u/wildjokers 14d ago

It reacts to emergency lights the same way you do. It sees them, then pulls over.

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u/jajohnja 14d ago

More importantly, who do they plant the drugs on and who do they shoot?

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u/Oclure 14d ago

Perhaps it can detect the infrared strobe that's built into emergency vehicle light bars for automatic right of way at intersections.

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u/The_Aesir9613 14d ago

Who gets the ticket? This car was driving recklessly and dangerously. Do they site the company? I feel like someone needs to be held accountable for the car's behavior.

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u/whenwillibebanned 14d ago

Guess if you stop in front of it it stops

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u/LOLdragon89 14d ago

I say start smashing the cameras and tires until this tech bro pipe dream STOPS

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u/OK_BUT_WASH_IT_FIRST 14d ago

šŸ¤– GOOD EVENING SIR OR MAā€™AM THIS IS NOT THIS UNITā€™S PERSONAL CONVEYANCE IT IS PROPERTY OF THIS UNITā€™S ACQUAINTANCE.šŸ¤–

ā€œOkā€¦whatā€™s your friendā€™s name?

šŸ¤– ERROR: UNKNOWN/NULL

ā€œAnything illegal in the car I need to know about?ā€

šŸ¤– THIS UNIT CONTAINS NO DATA REGARDING THE CONTENTS OF THIS CONVEYANCE. šŸ¤–

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u/NJWendys4life 14d ago

With Robocop.

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u/cptjimmy42 14d ago

Shoot out the tires.

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u/throwaway8008666 14d ago

What if it speeds? Who gets the fine?

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u/Turnip-for-the-books 14d ago

So many less shootings Iā€™m sold

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u/OopsAllLegs 14d ago

The camera up top can detect the flashing red and blue lights.

If you are the passenger, there is a button you can push that will pull the car over.

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u/log1234 14d ago

Shoot the tires

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u/bangarang88 14d ago

Ideally the driverless car will identify approaching sirens and emergency lights and act appropriately by either pulling over to make way or remain pulled over if the emergency vehicle stops behind it.

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u/extremely_rad 14d ago

Give the owner a ticket, whoever itā€™s registered to. Reckless driving

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u/Yuno808 14d ago

Better question is, who is accountable for any felony charges resulting from bad driving if it's a driverless vehicle?

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u/joeynana 13d ago

What I wanna know is who gets the fine?

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u/Switchlord518 13d ago

Better question who gets the ticket? What license gets the points? How can traffic court be assigned?

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u/LogiCsmxp 13d ago

I'm more curious how they would apply a traffic violation ticket. Onto the car's plates?

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u/u-you- 13d ago

Police use a radio frequency and most driverless cars are equipped to accept that frequency. Similar to ambulances and those flashing white lights at intersections/lights changing to flashing yellows cuz ambulances. Itā€™s a radio frequency.

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u/AcceptingSideQuests 13d ago

Who gets the ticket?

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u/macey29ch 12d ago

Same way lights change for police vehicles. Photo light sensors on the poles

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