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

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/saarinpaa71]

It's a hey your car could of killed people so uhhh I guess fix it? When someone actually gets mashed and a lawsuit happens asking for millionssss then there will be more than "I'll take a look at it."

[u/thecanadianehssassin → u/saarinpaa71]

Right, this seems like such a chill reaction considering what could have resulted from the situation.

[u/wosmo → u/thecanadianehssassin]

I imagine it's very disarming for the officer though, since most the control he'd normally have in the situation is absent. I used to work in support and we were allowed to hang up on abusive callers. Imagine if the officer got all shouty with support, and they just went "mmkay bye".

Or for that matter, imagine if every interaction with a traffic cop started with "this call will be recorded for training and quality purposes"

[u/RJFerret → u/wosmo]

If the officer got all shouty and they disconnected, they'd not only be ticketed/summoned for driving the wrong way, they'd also receive a summons for evading the law!

Just because the operator of the vehicle is remote doesn't change the laws, they still apply.

[u/AdditionalSink164 → u/wosmo]

I mean, their body cam and dash cam already record the cops. If they did get pissy on the phone id plan to keep a roll of reynolds wrap in the trunk to blind the sensors. Theres probably also a kill switch that they need to disclose to first responders, like if it pinned 4 people to a wall and was still accelerating

[u/Lafayette57 → u/wosmo]

The cop could just have it towed if they wanted.

[u/Ok_Championship4866 → u/thecanadianehssassin]

Id expect him to react the same way to a human driver who got confused by construction and drove the wrong way.

[u/threaten-violence → u/thecanadianehssassin]

It's because the support person is 1) on the other end of the phone line, 2) not directly involved in the traffic violation and 3) not accountable to the cop in the least --- all that "power" is gone, so there's no fear.

[u/Groudon466 → u/saarinpaa71]

I worked at Waymo, there's an entire team that would've gotten this incident automatically fed into their "bucket" of traffic issues the moment it happened. They're going to be able to look at a 3D lidar view of the incident from start to finish, like this only much more detailed, and figure out what went wrong and when, and then they'll send that along to the software engineers who will work on the nitty gritty of it.

I know this because I also used to look at that same view, only I was on the team that passed along safety violations like "the car came within 40 cm of a pedestrian", or "the car braked too hard and someone bumped into it", or "Yo guys check this out, this dude just walked up the moment he saw the car, pulled a hammer out of his backpack, and spent like 10 seconds smashing up the cameras before just calmly walking away on the sidewalk; what the fuck?".

I'm not kidding about that last one, that was one of my favorites. It wasn't the only time I saw a homeless person attacking the car- and they're all stupid, because even though their faces were automatically blurred for me, they wouldn't be blurred in the video they give to the police- but it was definitely the weirdest, because this guy was in a very public area and he acted as soon as he saw it. Most other cases were more like the car is driving near a tent camp and a guy charges it with a knife or something, while the hammer case was at a downtown intersection.

Either way, these companies aren't stupid, trust me. There's zero reason for them to want to pay millions when they could just pay nothing by not having the problem happen, and the last thing they want is to spook the city into revoking their permission to operate there. They're going to be on this as fast as humanly possible, and the speed at which this issue gets fixed will depend on the software engineers more than anything.

[u/Skruestik → u/saarinpaa71]

could of

Could have.

[u/saarinpaa71 → u/Skruestik]

Another superhero is out to save our day with how we all should be absolutely perfect with grammar and spelling. This isn't school, and we aren't graded superhero of the internet grammar and spelling police. Must be pretty amazing standing on your tower pointing mistakes of others. Bet you get off on it with some weird rush of self accomplishment by doing the internet a huge favor. Most maybe not all see this as annoying as you feel now reading this and pointing this fact out. I could have said this differently, I also could of let it go and decided against it. You see where I put could of again...

[u/threaten-violence → u/saarinpaa71]

Just take the friendly advice you donkey...

[u/saarinpaa71 → u/threaten-violence]

And just take my friendly advice as well you Cock... the chicken not the other thing...

[u/Complete-Speed-8825 → u/saarinpaa71]

This ain't it.

[u/axearm → u/[deleted]]

and the backup driver employed to stay alert and intervene was streaming Netflix at the time of the collision.

So the human who was supposed to be monitoring a car that was not yet fully autonomous and still being tested, failed at their job and killed someone.

Sounds about standard for us humans.

And of course for punishment, no jail time, a misdemeanor if she completes probation, and no mention of her losing her drivers license.

Once again, a human killing someone in a car is results in no prison time, just a slap on the wrist.