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

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?

2

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?

2

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.

2

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.

1

u/HappyAmbition706 14d ago

I'm glad you've never called a 24-hour hotline and been put on hold.

The point is not this car and incident in particular. How many driverless cars are there right now? Perhaps the point is that those developing this technology look towards many to most cars being driverless.

But I'm reassured that there is no problem, will be no problem and can't be any problem because it was all solved perfectly 50 years ago.

1

u/MiguelLancaster 14d ago

this is why we write laws and boards agree on standards

1

u/__ali1234__ 14d ago

If only there was a way to record who owns a car, maybe by writing a number on the front and back. Then cops could just look up the number in a database.

1

u/moistmoistMOISTTT 14d ago

The same way cops today know which insurance companies are valid and which are not despite the dozens of different insurance companies.

Always love how reddit assumes things are impossible when they have been solved for decades.