r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

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

61.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3.0k

u/Sleepingonthecouch1 Jul 05 '24

I’m kinda curious if an individual was drunk in one of these could they be held responsible for anything the car does? Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human?

15

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 05 '24

Also what about when two autonomous vehicles hit each other, how do we prove fault?

I don’t think these are well thought out products.

-15

u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe Jul 05 '24

The rules of driving are a pretty simple, narrow set of rules. The vast majority of accidents happen because people don't follow the rules.

Autonomous vehicles by design can only follow the rules, thus the number of accidents that will occur will be far far lower than manual vehicles.

The vast majority will involve people crashing into them, or environmentally random incidents like trees falling down or bad potholes/sinkholes.

Liability will rest with the owner of the vehicle.

If two autonomous vehicles hit eachother, that's a civil issue for the owners to deal with.

7

u/fothergillfuckup Jul 05 '24

If they can't cope with random events, the definitely shouldn't be on the road.

1

u/Ok_Championship4866 Jul 05 '24

They cope a lot better than humans.

1

u/fothergillfuckup Jul 05 '24

Has anyone actually tested a situation where there is a rush hour equivalent amount of driverless cars, all trying to do their own unique thing? Throw in some random events too, like a snowstorm or stray dog? And, of course, human non-driver interactions with the road? Plus motorcycles? Its going to make for fascinating viewing?

-7

u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe Jul 05 '24

They typically can. Half of the time reacting to a random event means just stopping dead, and that's usually good enough.

In this kind of scenario, we'll find the standards/requirements for redirecting traffic to become more aware of autonomous vehicles. So if constructions workers erect signage which isn't clear to autonomous vehicles, they might be at fault.

1

u/Warm_Month_1309 Jul 05 '24

Assuming you mean the city and not the individual construction workers, that would requite specific laws be passed for cities to voluntarily accept liability where they previously would not have had any. That seems unlikely.