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Cops, firefighters bewildered as driverless cars behave badly

29 points| sonofaplum | 2 years ago |missionlocal.org

12 comments

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scohesc|2 years ago

Human lives are at stake and all Cruise can recommend is "call the hotline and we'll send someone out to move the vehicle" otherwise you're cutting it open.

Can they guarantee someone will be out there in minutes or hours? I hope firefighters just adopt a standard of "If we see a cruise vehicle heading towards an active call, smash the windshield and ask questions later."

Can Cruise not tap into some system that first responders use? Say a fire call is on the corner of X and Y - can their cars just flat-out refuse to go within a 2-3 block radius of a passengers destination due to an emergency call? Seems like a good compromise if there isn't a faster way to commandeer the vehicle, especially if lives are at risk.

It doesn't help the cases where the cars just stop and refuse to move for emergency service vehicles actively responding to a call though.

I will loathe the day that these self-driving cars start to show up where I live - thankfully the weather and the chronic trashy road conditions will ward them off for hopefully another decade.

It was cathartic watching the Cruise vehicle getting chopped into pieces from the video another poster linked in the comments.

BenjiWiebe|2 years ago

As a first responder, there are dispatch systems that can forward data like that to outside systems. The issue is that the dispatch systems aren't unified - in Kansas, for example, every county has it's own dispatch system set up it's own way, not tied to the others.

NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago

Wouldn't police/fire/emergency no-go areas be a goldmine of intel for bad actors too?

taffronaut|2 years ago

Non-US solution - give emergency services the ability to override self-driving vehicles

US solution - equip all emergency services with anti-materiel rifles

albatross13|2 years ago

> US solution - equip all emergency services with anti-materiel rifles

Yes.

bcrl|2 years ago

Are self driving cars going to be the same as all the big platforms? If you're a platform, making it impossible to contact a human when your account has been wrongfully disabled / blacklisted is pretty much the de facto standard for support, as users are a cost that has to be minimized "at scale". What happens when self driving car peddlers decide that having access to human oversight is not viable "at scale"?