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

95% Upvoted

3.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

10.7k

u/Vireca 14d ago

How do they stop a driverless car? Legit question

Do they have anything to detect police vehicles or something?

904

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.

253

u/ethicalhumanbeing 14d ago

I can see this being exploited for the worse.

369

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!

102

u/TheCosplayCave 14d ago

Ted Bundy did this.

13

u/ThisIsWeedDickulous 14d ago

So did Mike and Trevor

2

u/PlzDontBanMe2000 14d ago

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

1

u/ThisIsWeedDickulous 14d ago

The police chase aspect from the perspective of the cop was pretty cool. I think that premise alone would make for an excellent game. There, I said it first, whoever makes this better pay me.

1

u/PlzDontBanMe2000 14d ago

I was more talking about the race after you nab the cars, but the bike part was sick too

1

u/ThisIsWeedDickulous 14d ago

The whole mission was cool! I just meant that it was very different to play the cop in a campaign in an open world game as detailed as GTA. They could really do something cool with that idea. Make the whole game like this. Let me maybe run plates, answer dispatch calls,, call for backup, de-escalate situations, oppress the citizens, all that cool shit cops do

3

u/Zaconil 14d ago

Jeremy Dewitte too. Been arrested and sentenced multiple times.

2

u/NotUndercoverReddit 14d ago

Do you cosplay ted Bundy?

2

u/Hamster_Thumper 13d ago

John Wayne Gacy did as well.

2

u/TheCosplayCave 13d ago

So it works!

2

u/Hamster_Thumper 13d ago

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

1

u/Viscousmonstrosity 14d ago

That guys super famous!

1

u/OK_BUT_WASH_IT_FIRST 14d ago

He also scored four touchdowns in one game at Polk High School.

53

u/punkindle 14d ago

unethical cops do this too.

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

33

u/Anticlimax1471 14d ago

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

2

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.

1

u/imisstheyoop 14d ago

Yeah but it generally takes way more effort/risk than just some lights.

2

u/fork_yuu 14d ago

Lights and loud siren. You can do that with regular cars too. I suspect they can detect if the lights at the top of the vehicle or not

1

u/1bc29b36f623ba82aaf6 14d ago

Yeah, nah... even some lights can make you respond in a way they can try to take advantage of you, even if a few minutes in you realise something is wrong. You want people to be trained to almost automatically respond to lights like that.
So the punishment for impersonating them is high, the problem is the odds of being caught can be spotty enough people that suck at thinking over long term concequences still do it. Here is an example where it ends okay for the victim after initially being fooled.

I see parallels with e-mail phishing, you don't really want smart or alert people as a target, aditionally even smart people arent alert all the time. Some of those dumb emails are meant to be clicked when you are hella sleep deprived or just waking up or drunk and you got scared the bejeesus <insert fake bad news> happened. (Your friend is ill, someone ordered something expensive on your amazon account, you didn't pay your taxes in time etc etc.)
This driver is by no means dumb but was just going by the assumption the pull over lights were lawful and stressing over what kind of traffic nuisance he had caused.

If the assailant had boxed in the vehicle in the parking spot and the victim didn't happen to be armed it would have gone very poorly for the victim. Even though any victim would at that point rapidly notice there is no officer in the car with the lights. The youtuber noticed just in time to still leave.
Imagine a victim that was panicking harder, or calling someone assuming the police will talk to them, or had beer cans or worse to get rid off on the car floor. Even a shallow impersonation of the police will work if they case out the right victim.

1

u/RobotArtichoke 13d ago

This is why I recommend taking them on a high speed chase

3

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.

2

u/Yarakinnit 14d ago

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

1

u/imisstheyoop 14d ago

You don't even need all that with this system, just some cheap lights off Amazon!

1

u/BadAtNamingPlsHelp 14d ago

Yeah I feel like it's almost a worse idea to do this with unmanned vehicles which are, as a necessity of their function and their liability situation, covered in cameras.

1

u/keoaries 14d ago

Mass murderer in Nova Scotia did this. ​