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Man trapped inside driverless Waymo car as it spins in circles
- whyleyc 2y agoThe video is wild - Waymo support apparently struggles to remotely control the car.
- likeabatterycar 2y agoRealistically, how much can she do from a cubicle in the Philippines? Maybe driverless cars should have remained a relic of 80s Schwarzenegger movies.
- spuz 2y agoI 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.
- likeabatterycar 2y ago> If they had an actual kill switch I'm unfamiliar - we have these in train cars, did the architects behind driverless techshit not think it was necessary?
- Waterluvian 2y agoTrain cars? As in the vehicle on a track where an immediate stop is almost never more dangerous?
- likeabatterycar 2y agoI didn't say pull the hand brake at 60mph. There should be an emergency "pull over and stop gracefully" button.
- amclennon 2y agoThey do. I'm guessing there was a bug in finding a place to safely pull over?
- Terr_ 2y agoSounds likely, in which case there needs to be a much more "break glass in case of emergency" control which gradually lowers the maximum speed cap of the vehicle. So even if the vision/pathfinding believes there is nowhere to park and nowhere else to turn, it will still coast to a stop in a way that is not inherently less-safe than a more-normal car running out of gas and stalling on the road.
- troad 2y agoYes, in much of the world there are mandatory passenger-facing emergency break levers in every carriage of passenger trains. The US is the outlier here. And yes, passengers should absolutely be able to bring their vehicle to an immediate stop. It's an "emergency break"! Of course you need an emergency break in an autonomous car! What exact alternative are you proposing for when you're in an AI-operated car hurtling under the chassis of a white truck that it failed to detect in snow conditions? It seems like an incredibly obvious and basic legislative requirement for self-driving cars to have some kind of immediate manual break for emergencies. I'm kind of shocked that that apparently isn't the case now?
- throwawee 2y agoIf they can remotely kill the engine of any Waymo car in motion, so can hackers.
- likeabatterycar 2y agoIf they can't secure it, then the entire project should be scrapped. But GM already has this capability with OnStar. Stolen vehicles can be slowed down then stopped and and disabled remotely.
- spuz 2y agoTo be clear, I'm talking specifically about the first line of support at Waymo here. I am not precluding that they have higher levels of control behind layers of authorisation.
- blibble 2y agothese things need to have a giant E-STOP button accessible to the passengers otherwise they should simply be banned
- moralestapia 2y agoI expressed this exact same concern a couple months ago (and was downvoted, a common theme w/ Google fanbois nowadays): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117343 From @simonw back then, >Yes, there's a "pullover now" button on the dashboard at all times. Well, doesn't seem to be the case here.
- Aloisius 2y agoThe pull over button is in fact on the screen. According to his spokesperson, he wasn't aware of it.
- fragmede 2y agothe button is giant and blue and impossible to miss and you can see from the video it isn't on the screen. the screen in the video is mostly brown with a sliver of blue on the side.
- lyime 2y agoAbsolutely not. While that might sound like a safety feature it can also be extremely unsafe. Imagine letting a passenger in a car use the e-brake at any time. It's a tricky problem.
- troad 2y ago> Imagine letting a passenger in a car use the e-brake at any time. Alright, I'm imagining. Seems extremely sensible, especially in an AI-operated vehicle. Much of the world (the US being an outlier) puts passenger-facing emergency breaks in every carriage of passenger trains.
- 2y ago
- WantonQuantum 2y agoSo 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?
- bigbones 2y agoThat clearly seems the case, doesn't mean the video wasn't worth making though. This situation would terrify a lot of people
- binoct 2y agoIt's worth making, but there's some serious drama queen vibes that make it feel pretty overblown. If an uber is late to the airport a reasonable person doesn't threaten the driver with covering the cost of their flight.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI might if my uber driving was doing donuts in the parking lot lmao
- jameslars 2y agoIf an Uber driver caused you to miss a flight by driving around a parking lot in circles at a speed you can't exit the vehicle, you don't think it would be a reasonable request for the customer to ask Uber to make it right?
- whamlastxmas 2y ago[flagged]
- p3rls 2y agoAt least he didn't get shipped to a billionaire's private island
- 3vidence 2y agoQuality reference ;)
- shepherdjerred 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI
- mauvehaus 2y agoCan 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 2y ago> 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…
- kayodelycaon 2y agoThe locks on my car don’t prevent me from opening front doors while driving. The only rear doors have a child safety switch which would stop the doors from opening when locked. But you have to turn that on. You don’t want a locked door preventing you from exiting the car if you have a crash.
- mauvehaus 2y agoIt's been my (limited) experience that there's a manual override that can still be unlocked. Can't I slide the lock lever to the unlocked position while the car is in motion? I'd also submit that in any case where I'd open the door while the vehicle is in motion, I'd have a damned good reason for wanting to do so[0] and would not take kindly to being thwarted. [0] Usually: backing the plow truck up to a small, flat utility trailer that's invisible through the rear window.
- denysvitali 2y agoI think it's usually locked from the outside. Opening the door from the inside (in most cars I've been in) works. I would actually be surprised of the opposite (not being able to leave a vehicle because the doors are locked). This sounds very scary in an emergency situation where you have to leave the vehicle
- 2y ago
- renewiltord 2y agoYeah, 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_ 2y agoBeneath 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.
- renewiltord 2y agoAh you’re right. I should’ve used The Adage of The Man With The Door Handle. Unusual story about a guy who was trapped in his home because he had to press down on a device to disengage a lock. Perhaps President Biden will issue an order against these terrible things. Are door handles evil? Find out this weekend on Hacker News as it explores the concept of clicking “End Trip” on an app dispatched taxi ride that was embarked on by app.
- throwawee 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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_ 2y agoI remember "Speedy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)
- _jab 2y agoMy 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 2y agoIt's all of these edge cases that makes self driving cars impractical outside of optimal conditions.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoThat would be the definition of an edge case
- steve_adams_86 2y agoIslands are so common in driving, I would expect them to be anticipated or encountered early on in development.
- emmelaich 2y agoBuridan's principle will tell you that there will always be edge cases. There will always be room for improvement. The best you can do is to make them vanishingly rare.
- throw310822 2y agoObligatory sci-fi reference: "Road Stop" by David Mason: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61309/61309-h/61309-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61309/61309-h/61309-h.htm
- moralestapia 2y agoThis 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 2y agoThank you for calling Waymo, have you tried turning it off and on again?
- Kozmik1 2y agoIt'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.
- methou 2y agothese conditions will be off not already covered in the TOS, and exempted the operator from being responsible for.
- Aloisius 2y agoThere'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."
- fragmede 2y agoedit: there's a small blurry one that plausibly could be it at the very end of the video. ~you can see in the video that it's not showing that button on the screen though.~
- mrayycombi 2y agoIt's called "drifting donuts" and that's a feature, not a bug.
- radar1310 2y agoWelcome to AI people. It will only get worse from here. Enjoy the ride!