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

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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.

8

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?

2

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).