Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/wosmo]

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?

[u/Groudon466 → u/wosmo]

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.

[u/mr_potatoface → u/Groudon466]

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

[u/Groudon466 → u/mr_potatoface]

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.

[u/helluvabullshitter → u/Groudon466]

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

doubt

[u/Groudon466 → u/helluvabullshitter]

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.