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Locals Reportedly Are Frustrated With Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars (cnbc.com)
More than a dozen people who work near Waymo's office in Chandler, Arizona, have complained about the self-driving cars to The Information. "One women said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn, while another man said that he gets so frustrated waiting for the cars to cross the intersection that he has illegally driven around them," reports CNBC. From the report: The anecdotes highlight how challenging it can be for self-driving cars, which are programmed to drive conservatively, to master situations that human drivers can handle with relative ease -- like merging or finding a gap in traffic to make a turn. Waymo has been testing its vehicles in the Phoenix suburbs for little more than a year and is widely seen as the furthest along in the self-driving car space, but its safety drivers have to take control of the vehicles regularly, people with direct knowledge of the issues tell The Information.
A Waymo spokesperson said its cars are "continually learning" and that "safety remains its highest priority" during testing. The spokesperson also said that Waymo is using feedback from its early rider program to improve its technology, though it declined to comment specifically on the intersection complaints mentioned in The Information story. The company has previously said that it plans to launch a commercial self-driving taxi service before the end of the year, but that its service will still include a Waymo employee in each car as a "chaperone."
A Waymo spokesperson said its cars are "continually learning" and that "safety remains its highest priority" during testing. The spokesperson also said that Waymo is using feedback from its early rider program to improve its technology, though it declined to comment specifically on the intersection complaints mentioned in The Information story. The company has previously said that it plans to launch a commercial self-driving taxi service before the end of the year, but that its service will still include a Waymo employee in each car as a "chaperone."
Alphabet is a cereal, right?
local are idiots and bad drivers... I recommend dropping few cops around there to teach em how to drive
turn
Try driving conservatively here in NJ, NYC, or any major city and you'll be an obstacle to be run over. Self driving cars, to be successful, need to adapt to the drivers around them instead of being an outlier when it comes to driving habits.
Is this the same group of locals who were complaining yesterday, or is this a whole new group?
#DeleteChrome
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, IBM
Self-driving vehicles are inevitably the future, should the human population of Earth continue as Alpha species, which seems quite likely.
Early technological setbacks are simply part of the evolution.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Ahh, Phoenix, the land of the Snowbird and the proud tradition of pulling out in front of people.
It's both a great and horrible place to test, because the drivers are so incredibly unpredictable. When I lived there, at least a few times a day I'd nearly hit somebody who would pull out onto a main street without looking. And that's when I was in a minivan. On my motorcycle, I was as good as invisible.
I doubt they're the worst drivers in the country, but they've gotta be close.
I've been behind these vehicles and they just suddenly hard brake for seemingly any reason.
As a generally law-abiding driver who drives the speed limit, comes to full stops, waits until both lanes are clear before pulling into traffic because you never know when someone will switch lanes into the one you'd like to enter, etc, I identify with the Waymo. The vast majority of drivers seem to drive with contempt for the law and safety.
I constantly see people crossing solid lines near stop lights, changing lanes during turns, turning right on red when not in the outer lane, weaving through traffic, never leaving the 1 second per ten miles per hour gap to the cars in front of them, not using blinkers, driving while looking at their laps, passing cyclists as close as a couple of feet to them without slowing instead of giving them the rights of an equal vehicle, etc.
Just today I had somebody honk their horn at me when I pulled in front of them to get out of the way of a fire truck and ambulance in my lane. They were driving along as if nothing was happening, apparently in full ignorance that they were supposed to be slowing or pulling over and yielding to any other vehicles that need to move to allow the emergency vehicles by. They should have cameras on the emergency vehicles recording all blatant failures to yield and hold hearings to revoke their driving privileges. Lives are often at stake.
I've said for a while that we should require full instrumentation of every new vehicle with the same sensors as self-driving cars for a few years before we go full bore on the self-driving cars. During those years, we should both use that to collect all of the data and true, reliable statistics on how bad people really drive while evolving a system of full automatic enforcement of the traffic laws. After that, deployment of self-driving technology should be a cinch. Nobody will want to drive themselves if they have to do it legally. It is too boring.
My first accident was caused by it. I'm driving down a major thoroughfare (5 lanes, it's a small town) and I see someone trying to do a left from a stop sign start to just go. So I slow down. Bear in mind she's at a dead stop and I'm doing 45 on a major street. So she stops and I, thinking she sees me, speed back up to be about my way. She floors it and t-bones me.
Later when I asked her why she said she saw me slowing and thought I was going to stop. In the middle of the street. A 5 lane street.
Now, the girl was a ditz, it's true. But had I not slowed down she never would have gone.
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I was in Tempe about 2 weeks ago and these things were all over the place. Twice i observed them driving erratically. One time it was trying to change lanes, but seemingly couldn't decide what to do. It moved halfway over, before reaching an intersection, then moved back over, applying the brakes unnecessarily, and then trying again. The first attempt it was wide open to make the move, the second one was a little dicey and i had to back off because i thought there was going to be an accident in front of me.
Scott
Could this lead to a new version of cow tipping?
Asking for a friend.
The phrase "Little old lady from Pasadena" was, after all, coined in L.A. to describe someone who basically drives like a self driving car. In Los Angeles you are either driving aggressively or you're parked. There is no moderate option. I spent about 40 years driving there and learned the basic rule is to always drive as fast as you can. That may be anywhere between 80 and 0 mph and it's subject to change at any moment. If you attempt to leave a "safe" interval between cars on a L.A. freeway you can be pretty sure someone will simply change lanes and pull into that space. And don't even think about Mexico City.
She just has to change her name to Carlos Danger. Problem solved!
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Same shit different day.
Put a learner plate on them till they know what they are doing, enforce learner speed limits and 0% alcohol
Go well
If you don't want to hit someone who stops suddenly, don't be so far up the persons ass that you nearly crash into them. Always keep a safe distance from the car in front.
We can't have cars on the road that respect traffic laws or the world comes to an end.
One women said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn.
Zero sympathy for that. People may need to make a sudden stop for any number of reasons. If you hit them from behind, you are at fault. Every day on my commute I see people driving too close to the vehicle in front of them for the speed they're going. It is, quite literally, an accident waiting to happen.
Tech boys finding driving is not so easy to replicate in replacing human's. That either says how incredibly hard it is to perfect, or how well human's for the most part actually perform tasks like driving.
As expected the bulk of Waymo reports are rear end collisions when the car panic stops, probably for lens flare or some stupid figment of the car's imagination.
If you hit the car ahead of you then YOU are at fault for not maintaining assured clear distance ahead. The car ahead of you panic stopping for any reason should not matter at all and the driver that will be and should be cited is the one with the crumpled front bumper. Maintain enough distance between you and the car ahead of you and it's not a problem no matter what they do.
They panic stop for stupid reasons that other drivers have no reason to anticipate because no human would behave similarly.
Except that humans panic stop routinely for all sorts of reasons not obvious the car behind. And again, the fault is with the idiot behind the car stopping for making unjustified assumptions about the future actions of the driver (or bot) ahead of them.
The humans have no problem in those cities.
Are you seriously arguing that humans never cause accidents in those cities? HAHAHAHAHAH..... Humans cause thousands of accidents DAILY in these cities, most of which are due to incompetent driving. One of the primary motivations for self driving cars is precisely because humans have proven that they are quite bad at driving safely. Over 40,000 fatalities in car accidents a year in the US alone last year.
There is only one possible way I can see self driving cars working, if we don't want to wait another decade for them. You need to eliminate all the non-self driving cars from the equation. And like most of you out there, that simply will not happen. I don't want to give up my right to drive myself. I'm guessing it's the same for many people out there. So how do we do this? Below is the only way I can see it happening.
First, you would need to establish a new "neighborhood", whether for commercial or residential, it would work either way. Designate the entire neighborhood as self driving cars only. Make it illegal to have a non-self driving car inside the designated area. Have a parking garage on the border for people to leave their non-self driving cars. If their can has a self driving feature, they can have it activated when they enter the designated "neighborhood", and deactivated when they leave the area.
You need to remove the human element from the equation in order for this to work properly. And the only way I can see that happening is by having an area where no human element was allowed to take hold in the first place. No amount of programming can account for the stupidity of people.
Like the old saying, make something foolproof, and the world will make a better fool.
Seeing one person out of ten thousand make a mistake, and then holding all people responsible for that mistake is bullshit. Seeing one Google self driving car make a mistake and holding all Google self driving cars responsible for that mistake is a reality of self driving.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The tech will never work in the mainstream, nobody asked for it, and it's probably gone on long enough. The hubris of Google is matched only by the delusions of Google. I know they'll drop it at some point, they always do. Also at some point the investors in these companies are bound to get fed up and walk away.
These people didn't hit the cars. It's still annoying as hell when you have to slam on the breaks just to maintain that comfortable space.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You can park the self-driving car next to the flying car.
and safety is our highest priority are not aligned and in fact are opposite statements.
Safe distance is a nice academic idea which ignores the reality of driving on busy roads. Leave enough of a gap between yourself and the car in front and someone will cut in and fill it. And in fact while not as safe, close driving is far more efficient in terms of utilising road space in city enviroments.
Right but if you stop suddenly in front of someone you're an ASSHOLE.
Not if you stop for a good reason. Are you seriously going to argue that you've never once slowed or stopped your car because you were confused about the situation and wanted to be safe? (If you say yes you are a liar) If you are following too close to someone such that them stopping in front of you is a problem then YOU are the asshat, not them. If you are driving appropriately then a sudden stop isn't a serious problem. If they are confused then maybe consider trying to help or at least be understanding instead of going all third degree jackass.
It is entirely within Google's power to do better, they just don't want to.
??? You seriously think Google isn't trying to improve their vehicles? You think they are just driving and spending all that money for grins and giggles?
One thing that is sure is that everyone has seen, at one point in their lives, a human behind the wheel doing an incredibly stupid thing. What we forget to notice is the ten thousand others doing the right thing.
She almost hit the vehicle in front of her -- making her almost an unsafe driver. This is not grounds for her to complain.
Safe drivers allow sufficient stopping distance between themselves and the vehicle ahead. Doesn't matter why the vehicle ahead stops abruptly (driver had a stroke, software crashed, doesn't matter). The vehicle behind is always responsible for not hitting the vehicle ahead.
-kgj
Safe distance is a nice academic idea which ignores the reality of driving on busy roads.
Physics doesn't care about your social problems. If you cannot stop without hitting the car ahead of you then you were following too close. There is no debate to be had here. If you don't maintain an adequate gap then you are purposely taking a risk.
Leave enough of a gap between yourself and the car in front and someone will cut in and fill it.
Then you adjust your speed to allow the car to get ahead of you to a safe distance. If the cars behind you have a problem with you driving safely then they can change lanes and pass or simply slow down themselves and suck it up. It's not rocket surgery to figure this one out. And it is not relevant on single lane roads which account for the vast majority of roads anywhere. Believe it or not, not all driving occurs on multi-lane highways.
And in fact while not as safe, close driving is far more efficient in terms of utilising road space in city enviroments.
You don't get both. Safety and efficiency are not always complementary concepts. The choice to drive more dangerously is one you can make but then you don't get to bitch about the consequences when things go badly. If you want driverless cars to be safe then they are going to maintain assured clear distance just like you should. Your failure to maintain an adequate gap is not the fault of the car ahead of you.
"I didn't like how the self-driving car was obeying the law, so I broke driving laws to get away from it."
This is exactly how accidents happen - putting one's self above respect for others.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Have a real human driving the things. Give the neural net a wheel like Maggie Simpson (it does nothing). Make the NN watch and mimic everything the driver does. Review the tapes. Punish/Reward the NN based on the tapes. Yes, this will take a long time. But it's better than letting these things on the road with a bored passenger watching her phone.
Driving predictably is safer.
Maintaining assured clear distance IS being predictable as well as assures that you cannot hit the car ahead of you no matter what dumb ass thing they do. Driving right up on someone's bumper on the other hand makes it impossible for you to react quickly enough to avoid an unexpected problem. Physics is unfortunately quite unforgiving in this matter.
If you drive 25mph in a 55mph zone because you insist on keeping a large space in front of your vehicle while everyone in a large line behind you leapfrogs in front, you will be dead or cited for impeding traffic.
I'm sure you would but that's not what actually happens outside of your strawman argument. To maintain assured clear distance you simply have to drive just slightly slower than the car ahead of you for a short period of time. 54mph for a few seconds when the guy ahead of you is going 55 is adequate to accomplish the task. Once you get an adequate gap then you resume traveling at a speed that matches the car ahead of you. Anyone who has actually driven a car knows this intuitively.
The crux of the problem is trying to intermingle human driven cars with self-driving cars. The two simply do not mix very well, and in my opinion, they probably shouldn't be mixing.
If we're going to do self-driving cars, we need to redesign everything around them, so they operate as efficiently as possible. This mingling of the two types of drivers is folly as we have repeatedly seen.
Is this really a problem, that our cars do not drive for us? Maybe I've been living under a rock, but i don't recall anyone going "gee Marge, life is such a soul sucking drag because I have to drive the car myself." Why are the auto makers so hell bent on solving this perceived problem that no one has?
They didn't hit the car, but nice attempt to use a straw man as a deflection.
Why are you people apologizing for this? This is horribly annoying behavior from a driver.
Or, are you just the same type of person who apologizes for cops who shoot unarmed people in the back?