Police and firefighters would love to have an excuse to go demolition derby on these things I bet.
Comment on A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections
fuzzywombat@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
unphazed@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
naticus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They’d probably love to, but wouldn’t. Lithium fires could make a bigger problem than slowly going around them.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
police literally have a pusher on the front of their cars for shit like this
naticus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, “push” rather than ram. Lithium fires take 10-30x more water than a conventional fire, something that firefighters are wary of containing.
unphazed@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Waymo didn’t switch to Sodium? I would have thought they’d use the newer batteries to save money.
naticus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Afaik, no they haven’t. Everything I’ve seen said they’re on lithium.
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks 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.
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It seems like one of the first things you’d want a self driving car to do is to pull over
cheesybuddha@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Until it’s multiple self driving cars getting stuck in that intersection
xthexder@l.sw0.com 3 weeks ago
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.
Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
What’s the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?
jokerwanted@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
An intersection with the lights no longer working is treated as a stop sign.
unphazed@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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!
Uruanna@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
zbyte64@awful.systems 2 weeks 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.
Miaou@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
Another option is, there a more than one country on earth.
finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks 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.
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It can be tough not to. Earlier this fall I was out of town and drover through an intersection before realizing no there was a traffic light there. Since it was night and the light was out, I had no reason to expect one so I effectively treated it like a green light.
I’m probably not the only one: next time I went past that intersection the city had placed cones and temporary stop signs