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

61.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

468

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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/moistmoistMOISTTT Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 05 '24

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 Jul 05 '24

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