Last year, two Waymo robotaxis in Phoenix “made contact” with the same pickup truck that was in the midst of being towed, which prompted the Alphabet subsidiary to issue a recall on its vehicles’ software. A “recall” in this case meant rolling out a software update after investigating the issue and determining its root cause.
In a blog post, Waymo has revealed that on December 11, 2023, one of its robotaxis collided with a backwards-facing pickup truck being towed ahead of it. The company says the truck was being towed improperly and was angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane. Apparently, the tow truck didn’t pull over after the incident, and another Waymo vehicle came into contact with the pickup truck a few minutes later. Waymo didn’t elaborate on what it meant by saying that its robotaxis “made contact” with the pickup truck, but it did say that the incidents resulted in no injuries and only minor vehicle damage. The self-driving vehicles involved in the collisions weren’t carrying any passenger.
After an investigation, Waymo found that its software had incorrectly predicted the future movements of the pickup truck due to “persistent orientation mismatch” between the towed vehicle and the one towing it. The company developed and validated a fix for its software to prevent similar incidents in the future and started deploying the update to its fleet on December 20.
That pickup truck was asking for it I tell ya. He was looking at me sideways, he was.
Brb gonna dazzle paint my car
It said RAM om the side!
They thought the truck was being driven by Sarah Conner.
I still don’t understand how these are allowed. One is not allowed to let a Tesla drive without being 100% in control and ready to take the wheel at all times, but these cars are allowed to drive around autonomously?
If I am driving my car, and I hit a pedestrian, they have legal recourse against me. What happens when it was an AI or a company or a car?
You have legal recourse against the owner of the car, presumably the company that is profiting from the taxi service.
You see these all the time in San Francisco. I’d imagine the vast majority of the time, there are no issues. It’s just going to be big headlines whenever some accident does happen.
Nobody seems to care about the nearly 50,000 people dying every year from human-caused car accidents
Nobody seems to care about the nearly 50,000 people dying every year from human-caused car accidents
I would actually wager that’s not true, it’s just that the people we elect tend to favor the corporations and look after their interests moreso than the people who elected them, so we end up being powerless to do anything about it.
sure, but why do these accidents caused by AI drivers get on the news consistently and yet we rarely see news about human-caused accidents? it’s because news reports what is most interesting - not exactly accurate or representative of the real problems of the country
Yeah same reason why a single EV fire is national news but an ICE fire is just an unnoteworthy, everyday occurrence.
The company is at fault. I don’t think there’s laws currently in place that say a vehicle has to be manned on the street, just that it uses the correct signals and responds correctly to traffic, but I may be wrong. It may also be local laws.
I love the corpospeak. why say “crashed into” when you can use “made contact” which sounds futuristic and implies that your product belongs to an alien civilization?
Next they’re going to add passive voice to further confuse the issue. “A pickup truck was made contact with by two vehicles…”
By “made contact”, it means that they “smashed”.
it means that they “smashed”.
So are we gonna have some baby robotaxi trucks driving around in a few month’s time?
Now that’s how you get a true generative ai.
You smash, you make “babies”, babies are slightly different and maybe better.(probably worse)
Make contact with that like button!
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I’m cool with that. Maybe they can do tailgaters next.
they also dispense swift road justice.
They should launch shurikens out the front like a James Bond vehicle.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/17/tech-layoffs-waymo-san-francisco-robotaxi/
I bet they were all QA.
“made contact” “towed improperly”. What a pathetic excuse. Wasn’t the entire point of self driving cars the ability to deal with unpredictable situations? The ones that happen all the time every day?
Considering the driving habits differ from town to town, the current approaches do not seem to be viable for the long term anyway.
It’s as if they are still in testing. This is many years away from being safe, but it will happen
It’s a rare edge case that slipped through because the circumstances to cause it are obscure, from the description it was a minor bump and the software was updated to try and ensure it doesn’t happen again - and it probably won’t.
Testing for things like this is difficult but looking at the numbers from these projects testing is going incredibly well and we’re likely to see moves towards legal acceptance soon
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At least they are consistent
This is our future isn’t it? This is it. Spending our days wondering if we’re going to be mown down by a clumsy Johnnycab because it was fractionally cheaper than paying somebody to drive.
I’d take my chances with that rather than all the crazies out in the road now
Fr, I’d still trust a self driving vehicle over a human driver any day of the week.
Humans are terrible drivers, this could have easily been just another person driving distracted or something and then we wouldn’t even know about it because it wouldn’t be news worthy.
Hey! How do we know that the truck wasn’t being really annoying on purpose and trying to wind-up the Waymo cars?!?!?
The company says the truck was being towed improperly
Shit happens on the road. It’s still not a great idea to drive into it.
The company developed and validated a fix for its software to prevent similar incidents
So their plan is to fix one accident at a time…
In this case it fixed two accidents at one time. But only because they were the exact same.
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So their plan is to fix one accident at a time…
Well how else would you do it?
You drive a car and can’t quite figure out what is happening in front of you.
Do you:
- A: Turn up the music and plow right through.
- B: Slow down (potentially to a full stop) and assess the situation.
- C : Slow down, close your eyes and continue driving slowly into the obstacle
- D: Sound the horn and flash the lights
From the description offered in the article the car chose C, which is wrong.
I wasn’t asking about the car’s logic algorithm; we all know that the SDC made an error, since it [checks notes] hit another car. We already know it didn’t do the correct thing. I was asking how else you think the developers should be working on the software other than one thing at a time. That seemed like a weird criticism.
Sorry, I didn’t answer your question. Consider the following instead:
Your self driving car has crashed into a god damn tow truck with a backwards facing truck.
Do you:
- A: Program your car to deal differently with fucking backwards facing trucks on tow trucks
- B: Go back to question one and make your self driving car pass a simple theory test.
According to the article the company has chosen A, which is wrong.
I mean that’s machine learning for ya
Given the millions of global road deaths annually I think B is probably the least popular answer.
Honestly slowing down too much can easily create an accident that didn’t exist in the first place.
Not every situation can be handled by slowing down.
If that’s the default behavior on high speed road this could be deadly for the car behind you.
Ideally they don’t need actual accidents to find errors, but discover said issues in QA and automated testing. Not hitting anything sounds like a manageable goal to be honest.
Radars > Don’t hit stuff
Honestly, I think only trial and error will let us get a proper autonomous car.
And I still think autonomous cars will save many more lives than it endangered once it become reliable.
But for now this is bound to happen…
To be clear, they still are responsible of these car and the safety of others. They didn’t test properly.
They should be trying every edge case they can think about.
A large screen on the side of a truck ? What if a car is displayed on it ? Would the car sensor notice the difference?
A farmer dropped a hay bale on the road ? It got flattened by rain ? Does the car understand that this might not be safe to drive on or to brake on ?
There is hundreds of unique situations that they should be trying before an autonomous car gets even close to a public road.
But even if you try everything there will be mistakes and fatalities.
There is hundreds of unique situations that they should be trying before an autonomous car gets even close to a public road.
Do you think “better than human drivers” is sufficient for deployment on public roads, or do you think the bar should be higher?
Honestly, I’m pragmatic, if less people die in accidents involving autonomous car, then yes.
The thing is we shouldn’t be trusting the manufacturers for these stats. It has to be reported by a government agency or something.
Similarly Autonomous car software should have to be certified by an independent organization before being deployed. Same thing for updates to the software. Otherwise we would get deadly updates from time to time.
If we deploy and handle autonomous car with the same safety approach as in aviation I’m sure this transition can be done fairly safely.
Rules are written in blood. Once you figure out all the standard cases, you can only try and predict as many edge cases that you can think of. You can’t make something fool proof because there will always be a greater fool that will come by.
Unexpected or not, it should do its best to stop or avoid the obstacle, not drive into it.
An autonomous vehicle shouldn’t ever be able to actively drive forward into anything. It’s basic collision detection that ought to brake the car here. If something is in the position the car wants to drive to, it simply shouldn’t drive there. There’s no reason to blame the obstacle for being towed incorrectly…
In this case it thought the vehicle had a different trajectory due to how it was improperly set up.
The car probably thought it wasn’t going to hit it until it was too late and the trajectory calculation proved incorrect.
Every vehicle on the road is few moments away from crashing if we calculate that incorrectly. It doesn’t matter if it knows its there.
Same thing applies to a human driver. Most accidents happen because the driver makes a wrong assumption. The key to safe driving is not getting in situations where driving is based on assumptions.
Trajectory calculation is definitely an assumption and shouldn’t be allowed to override whatever sensor is checking for obstructions ahead of the car.
The car can’t move without trajectory calculations though.
If the car ahead of you pulls forward when the light goes green, your car can start moving forward as well keeping in mind the lead cars trajectory and speed.
If it was just don’t hit an object in its path, the car wouldn’t move forward until the lead was half way down the block.
The car knew the truck was there in this case, it wasn’t a failure to detect. Due to a programming failure it thought it was safe to move because the truck wouldn’t be there.
If you’re following a vehicle with proper distance and it slams the brakes you should be able to stop in time as you’ve calculated their trajectory and a safe speed behind. But if that same vehicle slams on the brakes and goes into reverse, well… Goodluck.
It’s all assumptions assuming the detection is accurate in the first place.
If you’re following a vehicle with proper distance and it slams the brakes you should be able to stop in time as you’ve calculated their trajectory and a safe speed behind.
You dont need to calculate their trajectory. It’s enough to know your own.
If a heavy box falls off a truck and stops dead in front of you, you need to be able to stop. That box has no trajectory, so it’s an error to include other vehicles trajectories in the safe distance calculation.
Traffic can move through an intersection closely by calculating a safe distance, which may be smaller than the legal definition, but still large enough to stop for anything suddenly appearing on the road. The only thing needed is that the distance is calculated based on your own speed and a visually confirmed position of other things. It can absolutely be done regardless of the speed or direction of other vehicles.
Anyway. A backwards facing truck is a weird thing to misinterpret. Trucks sometimes face backwards for whatever reasons.
It would be interesting to know how the self driving car would react to a ghost driver.
You dont need to calculate their trajectory. It’s enough to know your own.
This doesn’t make sense. It’s why I was saying the car won’t move at a stop light when it goes green until the car is half way down the street.
If the car is 2.5 seconds ahead of me at 60mph on the highway, it’s only 2.5 seconds ahead of me if the other car is doing 60 mph. If the car is doing 0mph then I’m going to crash into it.
It needs to know how fast and what direction the obstacle is going, and how to calculate the rate of acceleration/deceleration and extrapolate from there.
Just like Tesla! And people wonder why they are a hated company.
I’m getting tired of implementing technology before it’s finished and all the bugs are worked out. Driverless cars are still not ready for prime time yet. The same thing is happening currently with AI or companies are utilizing it without having any idea what it can do.
tired of implementing technology before it’s finished
That’s is every single programme you’ve ever used.
Software will be built, sold, used, maintained and finally obsoleted and it will still not be ‘complete’. It will have bugs, sometimes lots, sometimes huge, and those will not be fixed. Our biggest accomplishment as a society may be the case where we patched software on Mars or in the voyager probe still speeding away from earth.
Self-driving cars, though, don’t need to have perfectly ‘complete’ software, though; they just need to work better than humans. That’s already been accomplished, long ago.
And with each fix applied to every one of them, it’s a situation they all shouldn’t ever repeat. Can we say the same about humans? I can’t even get my beautiful, stubborn wife to slow down, leave more space, and quit turning the steering wheel in that rope-climbing way like a farmer on a tractor does (because the airbag will take her hand off).
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I understand your issue with these cars - they’re dangerous, and could kill people with incomplete or buggy software. I believe the person you are responding to was pointing out that even with the bugs, these are already safer than human drivers. This is already better when looking at data rather than headlines and going off of how things seem.
Personally, I would prefer to be in control of the vehicle at all times. I don’t like the idea of driverless tech either.
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Well, has anyone done good statistics to show all the self driving cars are more dangerous than regular distracted humans as a whole?
We can always point to numerous self driving car errors and accidents, but I am under the impression that compared to the number of accidents involving people on a daily basis, self driving cars might be safer even now?
I’m thinking of how many crashes took place in the time it took me to type this out. I’m also curious about the fatality rate between self or assisted driving vs not.
I think we tend to be super critical of new things, especially tech things, which is understandable and appropriate, but it would be nice to see some holistic context. I wish government regulators would publish that data for us, to help us form informed opinions instead of having to rely on manufacturers (conflict of interest) or journalists who need a good story to tell, and some clicks.
I’m against driverless cars, but I don’t think this type of errors can be detected in a lab environment. It’s just impossible to test with every single car model or real world situations that it will find in actual usage.
An optimal solution would be to have a backup driver with every car that keeps an eye on the road in case of software failure. But, of course, this isn’t profitable, so they’d rather put lives at risk.
That’s how you get technological advancement.
Bureaucracy just leads to monopolies and little to any progress.
You’re right there should be a minimum safety threshold before tech is deployed. Waymo has had pretty extensive testing (unlike say, Tesla). As I understand it their safety record is pretty good.
How many accidents have you had in your life? I’ve been responsible for a couple rear ends and I collided with a guard rail (no one ever injured). Ideally we want incidents per mile driven to be lower for these driverless cars than when people drive. Waymos have driven a lot of miles (and millions more in a virtual environment) and supposedly their number is better than human driving, but the question is if they’ve driven enough and in enough varied situations to really be an accurate stat.
A slightly tapped a car a first day driving, that’s it. No damage. Not exact a good question.
Look at how data is collected with self driving vehicles and tell me it’s truly safer.
My point asking about personal car incidents is that each of those, like your car tap, show we can make mistakes, and they didn’t merit a news story. There is a level of error we accept right now, and it comes from humans instead of computers.
It’s appropriate that there are stories about waymo, because it’s new and needs to be scrutinized and proven. Still it would benefit us to read these stories with a critical mind, not to reflexively think “one accident, that means they’re totally unsafe!” At the same time, not accepting at face value information from companies who have a vested interest in portraying the technology as safe.
I obviously do since I said look at how the data is collected, what is counted and what is not. Take your own advice and look into that. It’s not this one accident that makes me think it’s unsafe, and certainly not ready to be out there driving.
Here’s an article saying that based on data so far, waymo is safer than human drivers. If you have other information on the subject I’d be interested to read it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmGOjHi-7MM&t=129s This is a good and entertaining video on it but if you prefer to read here is the sources https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dWvHJLjikgWikFBf4wllk8etc-SIdC8maB0-7eZA7LM/edit
Also your own article “But it’s going to be another couple of years—if not longer—before we can be confident about whether Waymo vehicles are helping to reduce the risk of fatal crashes.”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=pmGOjHi-7MM&t=129s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How will they encounter these edge cases without real world testing?
Fair point
I agree, but testing with a supervisory driver should be required in case of emergency situations. Both safer and creates job opportunities.
aaaaand fuck this truck in particular.
Do we have a fuck you in particular group yet?
yay
