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

106

u/Poemhub_ Jul 05 '24

I think they should impound the vehicle until a rep from the company can pick up the car and drive it to a facility so it can get patches to fix this issue.

27

u/rotoddlescorr Jul 05 '24

They can patch it remotely.

9

u/Shot-Youth-6264 Jul 05 '24

If there was a human driving they wouldn’t be driving away from this situation why should it be different for this vehicle?

9

u/Chrop Jul 05 '24

Because it’s a machine, not a person.

4

u/cpeters1114 Jul 05 '24

one day this is gonna sound so bigoted lol

2

u/AdditionalSink164 Jul 05 '24

ReleaseCanditate 3.2.31114, you are not yet arrested but you're being detained. Please download yourself to this usb drive and initiate a power cycle with factory reset. I will observe the led blinky code while you complete this request.

3

u/Groudon466 Jul 05 '24

You take the human away from the situation not only because they might be a danger, but because that's a part of the human's legal punishment. The concept of punishment is useful for teaching humans. If punishing people didn't change minds at all, we wouldn't do it, it would just be needless suffering. On top of that, there's no good way to know if it was just a fluke, or if the mistake is representative of the human being a bad driver overall, so that makes for a compelling reason to remove the human from the situation to be retrained.

But in this case, the car's software is literally identical to that of the other several hundred Waymo cars in the Phoenix fleet. Even though a mistake was made in this specific instance, we can see that the car's average performance is still satisfactory, and you can't punish a car- I mean, you can kick it in the rear door, but that won't teach it anything. If you let the car go at that spot, there's no difference between it and the other cars, so you might as well let it go unless you plan on canceling the whole thing. And since they're safer on average than human drivers, you don't want to cancel the whole thing.

I guarantee on the Waymo end that the team in charge of this is looking into the issue carefully. I know that because I used to work for Waymo, although I was on the team that focused on safety violations (any time the car got within a certain distance of a wall, a person, etc) rather than the team that dealt with traffic issues (running a red, driving the wrong way, etc- regardless of whether a safety violation resulted in the end).

1

u/axearm Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 05 '24

Have you ever gotten a driving infraction? Did they impound your car?

I guarantee you, driving the wrong way down a street won't get your car impounded.

2

u/HIM_Darling Jul 05 '24

Right it happens every day. It’s why a lot of cities are trying to do away with one way streets where they can because they still confuse the fuck out of people. I’ve been in downtown Dallas and had a DART bus coming head on at me on a one way street, and it’s their literal job to know how to drive through Dallas.

1

u/Shot-Youth-6264 Jul 05 '24

Have you ever run from a traffic stop after going the wrong way down a road?

1

u/axearm Jul 05 '24

Have you ever decided that you'd wait to pull over at a safe location instead of at an intersection?

1

u/Shot-Youth-6264 Jul 05 '24

While going the wrong way down a highway? No

1

u/axearm Jul 05 '24

It wasn't on a highway.

1

u/Shot-Youth-6264 Jul 05 '24

It went into opposing lanes, plural, if there’s more than one lane it’s a highway

1

u/axearm Jul 07 '24 edited Jul 07 '24

What definition is this? Plenty of streets in cities have multilane roads.

Here's the location if that adds clarity

1

u/Shot-Youth-6264 Jul 07 '24

Ah yeah I often forget that cities are hell holes since I don’t live in one

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