Honestly, I’m happy they picked this as a default “car doesn’t know what to do” scenario. From what I’ve seen Tesla’s default is to just ignore the unknown thing, they I wouldn’t be surprised if Robotaxis would have just treated all the blank lights as green.
Comment on A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections
fuzzywombat@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
This is really bad. You need to have emergency service vehicles able to move around the city. Blocking road like that could mean life or death for some. Public road isn’t some playground for doing beta testing. Waymo needs to be heavily fined for putting public at risk.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 20 hours ago
Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
What’s the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?
finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 57 minutes ago
The default at least in most of the US, is to treat a malfunctioning light as an all-way stop sign, with traffic alternating in each direction. The waymos instead stopped and blocked intersections, failing to reach the basic expectation for human drivers. Should we not hold these machines to a higher standard, if not at least the same standard as human drivers? Self-driving vehicles are supposed to be safer and ‘better’ than human drivers.
jokerwanted@lemmy.zip 18 hours ago
An intersection with the lights no longer working is treated as a stop sign.
unphazed@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I admit I scratch my head at 4 way intersections with blinking yellows on all 4 though. Usually the bigger road gets the yellows for caution, the adjacent lanes have to yield.
isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t drive.
A LOT of drivers actually don’t know the answer to this one!
zbyte64@awful.systems 44 minutes ago
Most humans can learn on the fly though. If they see people taking turns at a broken stoplight they’re likely to follow that example.
Uruanna@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
My first assumption giving them the benefit of the doubt would be that it’s a rhetorical question to point out that there is a proper response and the car should have been taught to do that instead. Even if a lot of actual drivers don’t know the answer.
unphazed@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Police and firefighters would love to have an excuse to go demolition derby on these things I bet.
naticus@lemmy.world 41 minutes ago
They’d probably love to, but wouldn’t. Lithium fires could make a bigger problem than slowly going around them.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 28 minutes ago
police literally have a pusher on the front of their cars for shit like this
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 2 hours ago
As long as the car isn’t moving, this is the best thing they could do. Emergency vehicles can drive around cars that aren’t moving. There should be plenty of room in any intersection for multiple vehicles.