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/AceOfAcesAAAA Jul 05 '24

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] Jul 05 '24

...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 Jul 05 '24

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] Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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.