Waymo issued a recall after two robotaxis crashed into the same pickup truck

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?

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..

Hmm, so it’s only designed to handle expected scenarios?

That’s not how driving works… at all. 😐

The description of an unexpected/(impossible) orientation for an on road obstacle works as an excuse, right up to the point where you realize that the software should, explicitly, not run into anything at all. That’s got to be, like, the first law of (robotic) vehicle piloting.

It was just lucky that it happened twice as, otherwise, Alphabet likely would have shrugged it off as some unimportant, random event.

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.

Why is an update called a recall?

aaaaand fuck this truck in particular.

That pickup truck was asking for it I tell ya. He was looking at me sideways, he was.

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.

Having worked at Waymo for a year troubleshooting daily builds of the software, this sounds to me like they may be trying to test riskier, "human" behaviors. Normally, the cars won't accelerate at all if the lidar detects an object in front of it, no matter what it thinks the object is or what direction it's moving in. So the fact that this failsafe was overridden somehow makes me think they're trying to add more "What would a human driver do in this situation?" options to the car's decision-making process. I'm guessing somebody added something along the lines of "assume the object will have started moving by the time you're closer to that position" and forgot to set a backup safety mechanism for the event that the object doesn't start moving.

I'm pretty sure the dev team also has safety checklists that they go through before pushing out any build, to make sure that every failsafe is accounted for, so that's a pretty major fuckup to have slipped through the cracks (if my theory is even close to accurate). But luckily, a very easily-fixed fuckup. They're lucky this situation was just "comically stupid" instead of "harrowing tragedy".

"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.

Do we have a fuck you in particular group yet?

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.

See? Waymo robotaxis don't just take you where you need to go, they also dispense swift road justice.

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?

They thought the truck was being driven by Sarah Conner.

https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/17/tech-layoffs-waymo-san-francisco-robotaxi/

I bet they were all QA.

Maybe it was a cybertruck and the super stealth design made it's signature very small.

It was in an orientation our devs didn't account for and we don't want liability.

"Towed improperly"

At least they are consistent

Developers are not testing all of the edge cases properly.

Don't assume a vehicle was under its own power, as like in this case, as it could be towed, so the towing vehicles parameter should be considered.

Check those tires! Make sure they are all on the ground.

Hey! How do we know that the truck wasn’t being really annoying on purpose and trying to wind-up the Waymo cars?!?!?

🚘🔥

And they wonder why we set them on fire...

fuckThatVehicleInParticular(truck) was accidentally pushed as part of a software update.

Waymo is going full kamikaze drone on Pick-up, next step will be SUV ?

Maybe this is a solution for oversized vehicules

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.