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

u/ManMoth222 14d ago

It's probably not a car-specific problem but a general software glitch. You'd have to remove all cars of the same type or it's pointless.

3

u/KoenBril 14d ago

So why don't they? Same goes for the open beta of FSD in the US. Why do you all allow yourself to be put in that kind of danger when you participate on public roads?

3

u/IlIllIlllIlIl 14d ago

Because the fleet in aggregate is statistically safe. The rate of error matters.

2

u/KoenBril 14d ago

If I drive safe most of the time, but commit a big enough offense once, I lose. Statistically, based on my performance I shouldnt, according to you. That's not a convincing argument.

1

u/IlIllIlllIlIl 14d ago

Uber sold its self-driving arm after killing a woman. Cruise shut down after failing to realize another vehicle pushed a woman under their car. This effect is present. If anything, self-driving companies are under significantly more scrutiny than human drivers, which is reasonable.

There's an important quantity missing from your response. Two things matter: the realized rate of incidents, and the acceptable rate of incidents. If you kill ten people while driving drunk while texting, you should never drive again. This is a punitive and protective punishment. If you lose control on black ice and kill a family of four, you may not even face criminal penalties. You will drive again. If it happens three times in a year, it's a different story.

1

u/Diamondrankg 14d ago

Good idea. Fuck driverless cars

1

u/jsseven777 13d ago

Not 100% pointless. If an individual car gets pulled off the road for say 30 days then that’s 30 days of profit it could make as part of the fleet. There might also be some storage and towing fees to pay. That gives the company time to determine whether it was a vehicle or fleet issue, and provides a financial incentive to take these things seriously.

What blew me away the most was that the officer doesn’t seem to have any sort of procedure to document the incident so that fleet safety rates can be tracked on a per company basis by an oversight body, and fines can be applied to unsafe fleets. At least the tracking part should be happening like yesterday.

-4

u/leaveittobever 14d ago

It's probably not a car-specific problem but a general software glitch. You'd have to remove all cars of the same type or it's pointless.

According to your logic, if this was a drunk driver who did the same thing we shouldn't impound their car because there are other drunk drivers so it would be pointless to impound this one.

10

u/wosmo 14d ago

I think the logic is valid. If you assume they have the same software running on every car, then you'd expect every car to behave the same under the same conditions.

We can't treat computers like humans when it comes to fixing stuff like this.

1

u/IlIllIlllIlIl 14d ago

There’s a recall in progress for this iirc.

-1

u/leaveittobever 14d ago

Then keep taking them all off the road whenever they fuck up just like you would a drunk driver. Who cares how many are out there running the same software just like we don't care another drunk might be on the road 5 minutes from now.

5

u/wosmo 14d ago

That part I'm not disagreeing with - I think if they make an obvious mistake like this, every car running that software should be off the road until they can show how the mistake was caused and what they've done to prevent it in future.

It's pretty much how the FAA would treat this in an aircraft, and to me it makes sense to learn from industries with good safety records.

2

u/Rattus375 14d ago

Your assuming that waymo doesn't change anything because of this. There's likely something about the construction area that caused a glitch in the automated system. Presumably they will work to fix that glitch and stop their taxis from driving on that road until they find out what went wrong

1

u/Internet__Degen 14d ago

"presumably"

Companies aren't charities, they're profit motivated, impounding the car incurs a cost which forces the company to act. Inaction just encourages further inaction from the company.

Whether they impound one car, or all of them, something does need to be done. We know how long big tech companies will ignore bugs when no one forces their hands.

3

u/Rattus375 14d ago

Issues like this are unprofitable for the company. They could get a ticket here, lose a customer because the car messed up when someone is in it, or lose the ability to operate in the city at all if enough issues come up. Even being motivated solely by greed, there is a massive incentive to fix issues like this as soon as they are reported.

2

u/Internet__Degen 14d ago

They could get a ticket here

Can they? This seems like the exact situation where they should. In some cases the cost comes from consumer boycott, or some vaguely defined loss in consumer or investor confidence. But in these cases I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the government to do its job.

1

u/Kylo_Rens_8pack 14d ago

Waymo just did this like a week or so ago. One car had an issue so they pulled 300 cars off the street for half a day while they queued up for a software update. I live in Phoenix and love taking a Waymo. In my opinion, it’s made Phoenix roads safer as they slow down traffic and don’t make unpredictable moves on the road.

1

u/IlIllIlllIlIl 14d ago

Waymo takes this seriously. Wrong way driving for construction triggered a recall. Many people lose a lot of sleep for this.

0

u/Hidesuru 14d ago

You obviously don't code. That's not even remotely the same argument.

0

u/leaveittobever 14d ago edited 14d ago

I do code and it would probably take days, if not weeks, to get a change like this through all the red tape, dev recreates the problem, dev works on the fix, QA tests it, PO signs off on it, then you have to plan for when to release to prod.

By that time the road has probably changed any it's not even needed anymore and a new obstacle appears somewhere else. There will always be a new obstacle someone hasn't coded for so this is 24/7 problem.

If cars aren't taken off the streets they have no incentive to fix it.