Waymo robotaxi drives down wrong side of street after being alarmed by unicyclists A self-driving Waymo taxi in San Francisco was filmed passing unicyclists and scooters – which would have been mundane if it weren't for the fact that the autonomous vehicle drove down the wrong side of the street to do so. The computer error happened at the intersection of Mission and First in the South of Market district …
Oh, so just like a human then ?
If that is the case, then what's the point in automated vehicles ?
You're supposed to do better. You're supposed to have the means to detect issues dozens of times per second. You're not supposed to get distracted.
If you can't do better than a human, you're useless.
You only need to make some of the incidents (not accidents) which a human would describe as unavoidable and avoid them. That doesn't mean that there are now no incidents where you don't have the time to avoid.
Of course all that assumes that your priority is travelling fast... it used to be the case that we were taught to drive in such a way that we could stop in the distance we could both see to be clear, and reasonably expect to remain clear. Parked vehicles along a road in a residential area mean you can't reasonably assume that the road will remain clear.
You confuse "better" with "infallible."
There are always going to be situations where the physical laws of the universe preclude an outcome where no one gets hurt.
I confess that I'm somewhat ambivalent about robot vehicles and think there are many places where their performance can be improved but at least their performance can be improved.
Humans? Not so much.
Humans are the ones that get distracted, get drunk, or experience violent incidents of "road rage."
I've never heard of a Waymo texting while driving, getting a DUI, or intentionally forcing another driver off the road because it was annoyed the driver took too long at a stop light.
Your mileage may vary.
If that is the case, then what's the point in automated vehicles ?
Well, for one thing, a significant fraction of the population can't, or shouldn't drive and would likely be better off with a reliable and reasonably safe automated vehicle than questionably available human driven taxis. But what about public transportation? Fine if you live in a big city and don't need to deal with bulky and/or heavy loads. I used it when I lived in Tokyo and I'd certainly use it if I were condemned to live in New York City. But it's neither efficient nor effective in rural or semi-rural areas or even in most North American cities. Utopian ideas notwithstanding, that situation is only going to get worse as working from home gets more and more common.
> Utopian ideas notwithstanding, that situation is only going to get worse as working from home gets more and more common.
So the past truly was a Utopia, until we let in the Dystopian Ideal of Universal Car Ownership.
Humans: We can cock it up for you, wholesale.
If you watch the video of the event, it is far worse. The car is actually on the wrong side of double yellow lines. You would get pulled over and severely fined for that.
It is wasn't for that, briefly being to the left of the centreline isn't necessarily a bad thing if it is safe and you are passing slow or wide traffic.
To my mind, the taxi seemed to be driving rather more aggressively than I would.
Not dangerously surprised... just "not what I expected".
Overtaking slow moving vehicles is, in the UK, an explicit exception to crossing solid lines - so it shouldn't come as a surprise that a driver may choose to do so when safe.
Thanks for pointing out that video Cornetman. I bypassed it on the first read. Have a thumbs up!
Seeing that video and re-reading this article after seeing the video, the article only mentioned "a half minute". That doesn't do justice to just how severe of a traffic infraction and dangerous situation that robot created. From my count (and I'm not from the area), it looked like it traveled in the on-coming lane for nearly two full blocks.
And Waymo's explanation is bullshit. That's not "passing" an obstruction by any stretch of the imagination.
WayMoreFailure here.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1ca1z8m/longer_video_of_the_wrong_way_incident/ works for me.
But yes, something's up with the www version linked.
Edit: The link in the article is fine. For me, it seems to be related to NoScript in nuke mode on my machine. Probably why the old.reddit.com works, since that's an older format/code and probably doesn't have all the bullshit code and requirements that www.reddit.com has.
The car is actually on the wrong side of double yellow lines
Watching that, I wondered if it had learned "you must never cross double yellow lines" and had got stuck on the wrong side. And then..., when the double yellow ended, it crossed back to the correct lane. Make of that what you will.
Nice to see that the electric vehicle revolution has been thoughtful enough to cater for the irritating show-off prick demographic. Just when you think peak San Francisco has been reached, it excels itself yet again. There's probably an office full of people feverishly working on full self driving for them, so they can concentrate on their juggling as they whizz around town.
Yes, this is a story where the video is definitely needed (or a much clearer textual description of the situation).
I'll confess that I also read "unicyclists" and immediately thought of a standard-issue ("Yes, we are all individuals!") bunch of chilled-out hippy types (colourful clothing and/or hair and/or flowers according to individual taste) with juggling balls [1], on (fairly) conventional unicycles, on a balmy sunny afternoon, but what the video actually showed was some kind of neon-future mashup of Tron and Blade Runner at night (or is it just the all-pervasive tech-noir obligatory smog?) that I totally wasn't expecting! [2]
Hmm, I guess I must be getting old…
[1] And there's nothing wrong with any of that, I hasten to add.
[2] Also quite cool, to be honest, although if these things are self balancing, there's sadly not quite the same level of skill involved. #CheatMode… (And I'm not so sure about the treating the street as a giant playpark, either (you do have a duty of care for both your own and for other road users' safety), but if it was late at night and there was very little other traffic, it's perhaps not the end of the world.)
"Will it be prosecuted and be banned from driving?"
A human doing the same would be fined. I doubt prosecuted and definitely not banned, unless they had prior.
Which leads to an interesting question - how do you do the equivalent of 'points on the license' for a robocar? On one hand assigning points / warnings to a specific vehicle seems too lenient since there are multiple vehicles using the same software/hardware. On the other hand, a whole fleet having the same number of points as a single human seems too strict. Maybe consider every new software version as a new driver with 0 license points. To prevent taking the piss with constant updates have a time window limit on how many times it can be reset within a given period.
For example if the fleet collectively 'earns' the same points in a 6-month window as would get a human their license suspended, the whole fleet is grounded until a software update happens, and there can't be more than 1 such 'reset' every 6 months. The exact details can vary but the point is there has to be some jeopardy and some pre-established enforcement mechanism
Good question.
Interestingly, there was an article in The Register (https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/waymo_files_recall_after_pheonix/) where two Waymo cars hit the same cock-eyed towed vehicle behind a tow truck within minutes of each other because the software responded identically to the input stimulus. (Makes sense, if you think about it.)
I'd say they're all identical and therefore should all be considered a single driver. A software update is like remediation and/or additional court-required training.
Accumulate enough infractions however, or abuse/use all your ways to shed points and you're off the road until those infractions reset on whatever time-scale and/or court visits a regular meatbag might require.
Unless and until the congress critters (likely local governments and/or state governments) choose to change the laws for robots and until then, the robots are no different than the meatbags, in the eyes of the law.
"Which leads to an interesting question - how do you do the equivalent of 'points on the license' for a robocar? "
For something like this, big fines.
They supposedly have an office full of people working on these cars so it's not just one driver in a car making bad decisions, it's a whole load of people in a bunch of cars making the same bad decision since all, or nearly all, of the cars will be running the same software/control algorithms. Perhaps the implementation of fines for being caught might make pushing out new revs a more tested and thoughtful thing rather than just putting it out there and seeing what happens.
I had to watch the full video to understand what the issue was.
My first reaction had been "passing a bicycle by offering a proper safety distance by getting into the other lane as long as there's no oncoming traffic" sounded like what you're supposed to do (and with mandated safety distance to cyclists, it's the *only* way to pass).
But that car was crossing double lines and there *was* oncoming traffic. One vehicle looked like it had to swerve off to the right to avoid a collision.
And yet, I'm so conflicted: looking at the SanFran style "unicyclist mob". The little guy with horns and pitchforks hovering over my right shoulder went "get them! get them!". Are we certain some of those weren't Waymo employees - or from some similar tech bro outfit?
Are these “vehicles”? If so then there were more traffic violations from them than the car (and no, I am not a Waymo supporter). The camera operator rode across a pedestrian cross walk and crossed the divider as the car did. Yes, the performance of these autonomous vehicles is les than ideal, but there are far more out of control scooters, electric bikes, unicycles and other “personal electric transport devices” on the road that cause absolute mayhem - human struggle to deal with heir antics, no wonder the Waymo car had a problem!!
You should come to any UK City where they hunt at night. Often with a green/orange box strapped to the back branded as Just Eat/UberEats/Deliveroo.
Though at least Waymo’s iPace would at least be driving on the correct side of the road.
New Zealand - which has a system of state-provided injury insurance cover, so tracks stats closely - has already documented that injury/death rates on scooters and one-wheelers are at least an order of magnitude higher than those of motorcyclists and get into the regions seen in extreme sports participants(*). Even worse, a significant fraction of those injuries are inflicted on bystanders, not the riders (there have been a number of serious injuries of pedestrians hit by Lime scooters as one example)
There are good reasons for requiring licenses or restricting the things to no faster than walking pace
(*) The most common cases are (expensive) facial injuries caused by faceplanting due to a pothole or simple rider stupidity, followed by neck and skull injuries
@Alan,
Your claimed stats about scooters are bogus. A few months ago the first fatality from a scooter happened here in AU. Im not mental giant but im pretty sure the mortality rate for cars is hundreds a year here so please tell me which is more deadly CARS or SCOOTERS ?
100%. The operation for safety here is to roll along behind the obstructions. Not least because it didn't appreciably overtake anything.
The more concern for me is it just moved into and back out of another lane without any indication of it's intention to do so. That's unnecessarily dangerous regardless of any of the other factors, and leads to the question if that's missing out of it's software, what else is?
Yeah, pretty bad that it elected to go into the oncoming lane.
I will comment... once it was IN the oncoming lane, it did have limited choices, the cyclists on the right ahead of it kept speeding up and slowing down, and then there were several to the right behind it... so there was a gap for it, but not a safe one -- after all, the blame would be on the car too if the traffic ahead and to the right slowed down while it was changing lanes, so it then cut in front of cyclists and hit the brakes. Of course at that point the best thing to have done would have been for it to go dead slow so the stuff to it's right gets past.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
