Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles

[_jab]

My guess is that the car is looking for a place to pull over (perhaps because the rider pressed the "pull over" button. In this mode, the car hugs the right side of the road until it can find a spot to stop, which would normally work alright, except in this one particular spot where the "right side of the road" is only this tiny island.

So the car just circles around it indefinitely.

[bhhaskin]

It's all of these edge cases that makes self driving cars impractical outside of optimal conditions.

[whyleyc]

The video is wild - Waymo support apparently struggles to remotely control the car.

[blibble]

these things need to have a giant E-STOP button accessible to the passengers

otherwise they should simply be banned

[likeabatterycar]

Realistically, how much can she do from a cubicle in the Philippines?

Maybe driverless cars should have remained a relic of 80s Schwarzenegger movies.

[spuz]

I guess the only option they have is "pull over" which in this case just caused the car to continue circling looking for a safe place to pull over. If they had an actual kill switch, we'd probably be watching another video of some guy on a call to waymo support while stuck in the middle of a highway.

[Kozmik1]

It's easy enough to imagine an actual emergency which would necessitate remote or local intervention to stop the car, and the call seems to indicate that they don't have an emergency override or at least not without escalation.

What if there were a:

medical emergency of the passenger

crash up ahead

fire up ahead

earthquake

flood

malfunction of the driverless car

really anything that would make you pull over your actual car to the side of the road for your own safety or emergent needs.

And then you have to imagine if so, even with an e-stop button are you in a less safe situation if you do not have ability to reach the wheel from the back seat.

Those are concerns that would give me pause.

[Aloisius]

There's a Pull Over button that will stop the vehicle.

He was "not immediately aware" of it and "did not have an opportunity to use it."

[methou]

these conditions will be off not already covered in the TOS, and exempted the operator from being responsible for.

[throwawee]

I usually think it's a stretch when people compare new tech to old sci-fi stories, but "brilliant machine just runs in circles endlessly and nobody can stop it" is straight out of I, Robot.

[jvanderbot]

I have never worked on a single robot that didn't go through a circle spin phase. It's a meme at this point, at least for folks I've worked with.

[Terr_]

I remember "Speedy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)

[WantonQuantum]

So the guy is in the car and he's concerned about catching his flight but when the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it. Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?

[olyjohn]

Could it be that Waymo should just be able to stop the car? It doesn't seem at all ridiculous to you that he is already on the phone with them, and then they just read the script to tell him to pull out his phone and fire up the app? Just what I want is to ride in a car with Comcast level of customer service.

[jrflowers]

> Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?

The guy kept filming for under sixteen seconds after asking about and receiving clarification that she is unable to intervene with the car and needs him to use the app. I like the idea that this somehow indicates bad faith or ineptitude in your estimation.

[bigbones]

That clearly seems the case, doesn't mean the video wasn't worth making though. This situation would terrify a lot of people

[fullshark]

I.e. the user is always at fault, the engineering manifesto.

[finnthehuman]

It's interesting how quickly we've gone from discussing an interesting failure mode of autonomous robots that travel in public spaces, and switched to calling it PEBKAC.

This is a unironically a great signal society is willing to accept self driving cars. Even computer security isn't this good at playing blame the user.

[happytoexplain]

Yes, that could be. And you could focus on being annoyed at this guy's social media behavior, if you like. However, it doesn't mitigate, and is less important than, the problem of the car getting into this state and Waymo not having control over it.

[hilbert42]

"…the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it."

Why are you trying to offer an excuse for the inexcusable?

The app should have nothing to do with it. Where are the emergency stop and exit controls for the passenger? He should be able to exit the vehicle at any time.

I fed up with this bad tech and the fact that governments let Big Tech act irresponsibly to get away with this shit. Why aren't there regulations in place before this tech is allowed loose on an unsuspecting public?

If CEOs of tech companies were held directly responsible with the threat of jail time it'd stop almost instantly.

[dns_snek]

Is "he's just doing it for clout" really passing for a thoughtful response on this topic, on this site?

[kbelder]

Yeah, I got a negative impression of the guy. It looped around the parking lot for five minutes. I'm not a fan of self-driving cars, but this doesn't seem like a huge deal.

[mrayycombi]

It's called "drifting donuts" and that's a feature, not a bug.

[p3rls]

At least he didn't get shipped to a billionaire's private island

[shepherdjerred]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI

[3vidence]

Quality reference ;)

[radar1310]

Welcome to AI people. It will only get worse from here. Enjoy the ride!

[mauvehaus]

Can we please get some clarification on "trapped" from someone who's used a Wayno? Surely the driverless car hasn't locked him inside. Right?

Surely every driverless vehicle ought to have a button that when pressed gracefully stops the car so the passengers can safely exit.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> Surely the driverless car hasn't locked him inside. Right?

Every (modern) car I’ve been in, driverless or not, will lock the doors once the vehicle is in motion - automakers are not in the habit of letting passengers fall into the road like that. Just imagine the lawsuits…

[moralestapia]

>Surely the driverless car hasn't locked him inside.

Yeah, why didn't he just jumped out of a moving car, right?

[moralestapia]

This is wild! Wow! I used to think highly of Waymo but this could be the worst possible way to handle a situation where a 2-ton object went awry.

She should have stopped the car immediately after she became aware of the situation, within the first few seconds of the call. She kept following this dumb scripted conversation as if it was someone calling support because their router won't turn on. What an absolute shit display of incompetence and recklessness.

[jeffrallen]

Thank you for calling Waymo, have you tried turning it off and on again?

[throw310822]

Obligatory sci-fi reference: "Road Stop" by David Mason:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61309/61309-h/61309-h.htm

[bell-cot]

It's autos, so wouldn't the phrase be "Tesla is laps down from Waymo"?

[renewiltord]

Yeah, this happened to me at home. I have this lock on the door and I couldn’t get in because it was locked. I called support and they said I needed to use the key on the lock but that SHOULDN’T BE NECESSARY. Completely unsafe that the door wouldn’t unlock. Shelter is a human right and I was trapped outside of my house just because I wouldn’t use some “device” that so-called “support” was trying to get me to use.

Same situation as this guy and the “End Ride” button. It’s actually horrifying.

[Terr_]

Beneath the satire, you're asserting that the primary purpose of locks on cars are to prevent adult passengers from exiting? That's not right at all.

Might as well design a desktop environment that forces you to enter your password in order to log off.