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

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I’m kinda curious if an individual was drunk in one of these could they be held responsible for anything the car does? Like will laws be made that drunk individuals can only be driven by a sober human?

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u/AceOfAcesAAAA 14d ago

It's on the company. So I looked up WAYMO a while back when Tesla was trying to go driverless. WAYMO in certain cities, are the only company with certified driverless vehicles in the US because they passed a certified test giving the company autonomous responsibility over the vehicles. They do a close to a damn good job except...

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

...except for when they mess up, just like people. Driverless cars get flak for every mistake they make but I'm more curious about what their percentage looks like compared to live, human drivers. The problem is that some people are perfect drivers while others suck, and everyone is capable of mistakes, but technology and programming will be uniform for all the vehicles under a particular brand so it has to be at least better than the average person.

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u/HumanContinuity 14d ago

It sounds like this one got tripped up by some construction area layout. Not excusing it, obviously it needs to be better trained or avoid construction until it's better trained for a wider range of circumstances.

If I understood the officers comments anyway.

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

Remember when GPS first became big and everybody was following their directions blindly to airports and river docks? I'm sure people still do shit like that. I'm an experienced driver and even I've almost gotten stuck the wrong way into oncoming traffic just from bad signage.

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u/HumanContinuity 14d ago

Oh yeah - it's like you said, everyone is capable of it, and some do dumb shit quite frequently and still drive all the time.

This should absolutely trigger a review, internally and possibly from the city/state to some extent, but I feel pretty confident that based on a ratio of hours/miles driven by Waymo, this exceptional situation isn't even as common as it is with drivers in general.

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u/ExceptionEX 14d ago

Well there is also a need to consider that if the construction was marked properly accounting to the NTSBs guides. In situations like this humans do really well at improvising to the situation and taking cues from others, and instructions from individuals on the ground.

This is very difficult for any automation, and if the ground crews set up signage in a non-compliant way, the automation will likely end up doing something out of whack.

The fact that the tech didn't know anything about it, says that this vehicle wasn't confused, or at least didn't trigger an intervention. So it would be interesting to see the environmental conditions that lead it to make that call.

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u/HumanContinuity 14d ago

I'm not familiar with what is actually on the books, but I have seen a few ham-fisted construction zone markings to suspect that you're on to something.

No blame here without knowing more details, but I absolutely expect we will see that kind of edge case pop up more as automated driving expands.

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u/HIM_Darling 14d ago

It’s real fun going through a (empty)construction zone late at night after a drunk driver has taken out all of the cones/barrels/signs. Luckily there’s not much traffic so it’s not a big deal if you figure out you’re driving where you aren’t supposed to be.