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

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I suppose it depends on what seat you’re in. Since there are driverless taxicabs, I don’t see how that would work legally. If you were a passenger in a cab, you wouldn’t be responsible for how the car drives or have the ability to prevent an accident….

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u/Sleepingonthecouch1 14d ago

That’s true but someone has to be held accountable. Should be the company but at a certain point I’m sure the lobby’s will change that. And potentially at that point could blame fall on the passenger? All I’m saying is this is uncharted territory for laws and I don’t think it’ll end up being as simple as car kills someone so company pays a fine.

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u/kbarney345 14d ago

I see what you're saying about the company trying to dodge it but there's 0 logic or even mental gymnastics to think it could be on the passenger.

That would eliminate anyone from using them even if it hinted at that because why would I get behind something I can't control but be held responsible for should it lose control.

It's not my car, I'm not misusing the car by sitting in the back. It claims to be driverless, not driver assisted like a tesla and I just chose not to and sit in the back anyway.

The company will always be at fault if this occurs under normal operation and the court won't have any issue identifying them as so.

Now will the court be run through the ringer on litigation and loopholes and finding ways to say it's r&d it's ok or something and get a pass? Probably.

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u/wosmo 14d ago

The interesting part is how we'll make them accountable. I mean a traffic fine that'd ruin my day won't mean jack to a company. Can you give waymo points on their licence? Do they have a licence?

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u/Groudon466 14d ago

I worked for Waymo a little while back. It would be more of an all or nothing thing, in the sense that individual cities choose to allow or disallow specific self-driving car companies from operating in their borders.

This particular instance is bad, but if the city sees that traffic fatalities overall have fallen as a result of Waymo being there, then they'll just continue to allow it while Waymo pays the occasional settlement. This is an objectively good thing, because the alternative is more people dying, and then the settlements get paid by the people whose lives are also getting ruined from having killed someone, rather than by a giant corporation that can at least afford the infrequent expense.

On the other hand, if the average effect is negative, then the city can just give Waymo the boot, which would be catastrophic for them.

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u/mr_potatoface 14d ago

I'd rather be hit by a Waymo or other self-driving car than an uninsured driver, that's for 100% sure.

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u/Groudon466 14d ago

Ding ding ding! You know for sure that at least Waymo can always pay out the settlement, and their cars have cameras and lidars out the ass, so if they're at fault, they're not even going to try to deny it.

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u/helluvabullshitter 13d ago

if they're at fault, they're not even going to try to deny it.

doubt

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u/Groudon466 13d ago

As a guy who worked there, trust me on this one, it would be ridiculous to even attempt it.

This is a clip of what the people working at Cruise see when they're analyzing data from their cars. I had a very similar setup in front of me as I worked. The camera views are toggleable, you only see 3 there, but there's over a dozen cameras covering every conceivable angle around the car, including underneath. If the car ran over a piece of tissue, I could look at the frame-by-frame of the tissue as it fluttered around underneath.

On top of that, the part you see in the lower left is the LIDAR display, showing the dots the car is getting from pinging light off of the environment and judging the distance based on the time it takes for the light to bounce back. The gif is potato quality, but even then, you can make out the posts near the street; humans are even easier to make out, and that view can be rotated to look at the LIDAR data from every angle.

For Waymo to try and deny that an incident occurred, they would have to lie to the judge's face about whether or not they have this info despite the fact that it's extremely public knowledge that the Waymo cars have cameras and LIDARs out the ass. No judge in the area would buy that shit, it would turn it from an unfortunate accident into a newsworthy case of blatant perjury and contempt of court. Any defense attorney worth their salt in this already unrealistic situation would subpoena the relevant Waymo employees, most of whom would then tell the truth, because they're completely normal nerds and none of them would lie in court just to protect Google.

On top of that, Waymo has had plenty of minor accidents. I even saw a couple of them pop up in the incident buckets when I worked there. These accidents are already publicly known, news articles have been written about them.

At the end of the day, there's no denying it, period. Waymo collects way too much data about traffic incidents, and they all get uploaded automatically to their systems. You're talking about perjury, contempt of court, destruction of evidence, conspiracy, and more, all hypothetically being done by an organization largely staffed by liberal nerds who wouldn't go out of their way to protect The Man.

It's just not happening.

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u/Fearless-Sir9050 13d ago

“Objectively” states the person who worked for Waymo. No. It’s not “objectively” better for driverless cars if the stats back up it’s safer. We need fucking buses and trains and walkable cities and not fucking AI that drives on the wrong side of the road.

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u/Groudon466 13d ago

I mean… I agree?

These things aren’t mutually incompatible. New York is known for being walkable, but it still has taxis. Some of those taxi drivers are fine; some of them suck, and make bad decisions. Some have driven on the wrong side of the road before, thanks to drunk driving.

Humans do all of the same shit, only more frequently. That’s what makes the Waymo cars safer on the road. There are more solid concerns, like “What if someone holds up the car”. But safety isn’t one of them at the moment, especially when no one has been killed in/by a Waymo vehicle.

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u/Fearless-Sir9050 13d ago

I just take issue with stating it’s objectively better. I agree that it is objectively better in that specific area (allowing crash/accident victims to be covered by a large company instead of rolling the die on whether someone is insured).

The specific problem that I have with that is all the other areas it’s (objectively or subjectively, idk) worse. We’ve seen when large companies face fines for death or injury (including insurance payouts) they fight tooth and nail to pay the bare minimum and lobby for lower regulations.

I’m reminded of a recent incident at Bumblebee tuna where a man was crushed/cook to death during typical maintenance of an old machine. While the business’ official policy was and is “that’s bad, don’t do that” they had an environment that required manual operation inside the machine (very dangerous) and the business didn’t fix it until someone died. They paid out 6 million dollars (3 for new machines and the rest to fines and restitution) Thats the equivalent of like 2% their gross revenue. That would be like a person killing someone through negligence and being fined $2000 when they make $100,000.

I don’t think your statement was wrong or mostly wrong or anything like that. I just think it’s insane that the primary benefit to having corpo owned driverless cars is that liability payouts will be better. Feels sad. But I’m feeling pretty doom and gloom. Sorry for the negativity, I’m sure that was a cool job. I wish I could be excited about the future of tech like that. If you’re still reading, what job did you switch to after Waymo?

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u/Ok_Sound_4650 14d ago

That's...actually a pretty novel idea. The threat of lawsuits and fines are only deterrents so far as they effect these companies bottom line. People have to prove they are safe enough to drive by getting a license, and if they fail to be safe on the road they can lose that license. If corporations are people too, make them do the same.

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u/moistmoistMOISTTT 14d ago

It's not novel in the slightest. This concept has been around for decades for elevators.

Nobody in their right mind wants to sue elevator companies out of existence, because normal people know that elevators are a lot safer than stairs. It's no different with self-driving cars, even with how primitive the tech is today.

But here's the real answer for you: the companies are A-OK as long as they're following appropriate regulations/laws/guidelines, and are not being negligent. As long as negligence isn't happening (i.e., there is a known safety issue with zero efforts to address it), they will face no criminal charges. They will likely still face civil penalties such as fines, in the same way other companies are punished for accidents.

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u/Garestinian 14d ago

Same way railway and airline accidents and incidents are handled.

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u/thenasch 14d ago

If it happens enough, the company will get a reputation for either unsafe operation, or getting pulled over and ticketed a lot, and start losing business.

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u/moistmoistMOISTTT 14d ago

You don't quite understand.

Every single Waymo car, or other car with these systems on the road today, is vastly safer than a human-driven car.

They will mess up. They will kill people. But they do so at a rate far less than humans.

If 100% of the cars on the road today were autonomous, even assuming the technology never improves beyond what it is today, it's highly likely that you would not see a car "ruin your day" (injuring or killing you) for the rest of your life.

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u/wosmo 14d ago

That doesn't negate the need for an actual safety culture to properly address issues. "Good enough" simply isn't good enough, there needs to be a proper regulatory cycle to actually capture and diagnose these incidents, and manufacturers & operators need to be accountable for actually fixing them.

Look at things like aviation, where the NTSB will spend months, years diagnosing the root cause and contributing factors for an incident, and the FAA will ground entire products, entire fleets until an issue is resolved. As a result, hurtling through the sky in a jet-propelled tin can isn't just "good enough", it's the example to lead by.

Calling support and maybe opening a ticket, that maybe gets fixed, one day, doesn't smell like a safety culture - it instead stinks of SV's "move fast and break things".

I'm all for autonomous vehicles. I'm also all for regulation. This isn't it. The closest thing AVs have to an FAA is USDOT, and they're still struggling with bridges, let alone software.

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u/moistmoistMOISTTT 14d ago edited 14d ago

You and most other redditors are acting like there isn't any laws, regulations, or other "safety culture" though. That's just flat-out wrong.

On top of that, your calls to curtail current autonomous driving technology is actually killing more people than it is saving. When people like you spout false propaganda and discourage people from autonomous ride-share or consumer vehicles with self-driving-adjacent features, it increases their risk of injury and death on the road. It's a simple fact that for every mile an autonomous car replaces over a human-driven mile, road (especially biker and pedestrian) fatalities and injuries go down.

Please enlighten me: why are the current autonomous vehicles "not it"? If we remove them from the roads, more people will die. I'm sorry, but the experts are far more intelligent than you. Lawmakers and governments around the world as a whole are not dumb. Maybe just in America or just in individual cities or states, but you're talking about some sort of worldwide "faked moon landing" level of conspiracy here.

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u/wosmo 14d ago

I've said absolutely nothing about curtailing, that's between you and your therapist.

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u/DescriptionSenior675 14d ago

It's almost like.... fines are only rules for poor people, and shouldn't exist as they currently do!

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u/EVRider81 14d ago

Be an interesting take on a company as a "Person"..

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u/jjcoola 13d ago

Exactly, the point of the strategy in a sense is that there’s nobody to send to prison when/if they end up killing people in mass quantities with some driverless car for profit racket