Former Top Waymo Engineer Altered Code To Go on 'Forbidden Routes', Report Says (arstechnica.com)

In the early days of what ultimately became Waymo, Google's self-driving car division (known at the time as "Project Chauffeur"), there were "more than a dozen accidents, at least three of which were serious," according to a new article in The New Yorker . From a report: The magazine profiled Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who was at the center of the Waymo v. Uber trade secrets lawsuit. According to the article, back in 2011, Levandowski also modified the autonomous software to take the prototype Priuses on "otherwise forbidden routes."

Citing an anonymous source, The New Yorker reports that Levandowski sat behind the wheel as the safety driver, along with Isaac Taylor, a Google executive. But while they were in the car, the Prius "accidentally boxed in another vehicle," a Camry.

As The New Yorker wrote: "A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google's software wasn't prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry's driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guard rail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries." This was apparently just one of several accidents in Project Chauffeur's early days.

Comments

How Not To Write A Headline

[American AC in Paris]

These two yutzes cause a crash on the freeway and they don't even bother to stop and check if the other people are injured?

They don't even bother reporting the crash to the authorities, they just driiive on back to HQ and hush it up?

"Former Top Waymo Engineer Altered Code To Go On Forbidden Routes" is not the headline I would have chosen for this story, folks.

Re:How Not To Write A Headline

[chispito]

If you don' t know something, just make it up? Who said they didn't stop?...Do you have some cite for information that says they did not report this accident, one that you're keeping secret from the law enforcement authorities who would like to know about it?

I am not blaming you. The summary quotes the horrible Ars writeup, which itself butchers the New Yorker piece. In the New Yorker piece, it explicitly states about the incident

The Prius regained control and turned a corner on the freeway, leaving the Camry behind. Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident.

The quote from Ars doesn't even make it explicitly clear that the "forbidden route" was involved with the near miss which led to the Camry crashing. It should be noted, however, that the Camry driver was by all accounts at fault in that scenario. It sounds like the Camry thought he could be more aggressive and overtake the Prius, but the Prius (human or robot) has the right of way.

Re:How Not To Write A Headline

[Roger W Moore]

These two yutzes cause a crash on the freeway and they don't even bother to stop and check if the other people are injured?

Doesn't that actually depend on who has to give way when merging? In most countries, traffic merging has to give way to that on the main road. If this is true in California while the safer thing to do would have been to slow down and let the Camry in what was preventing the Camry from slowing down and merging in behind i.e. giving way to existing traffic as it merged?

While the software could have taken steps to avoid this behaviour that it not the same thing as saying that it caused the accident. If you leave your house door open and you get burgled you have not caused your house to be burgled nor have you done anything wrong you just failed to anticipate that your actions would encourage bad behaviour by others.

Re:How Not To Write A Headline

[msauve]

"These two yutzes cause a crash on the freeway"

You're not reading the same summary the rest of us are. They didn't cause any accident. It was the Camry which was merging onto the freeway. No doubt one of those assholes who merges - not by looking for a gap in traffic, positioning and adjusting speed - but by simply letting the white line on the outside of the merge lane "push" them into traffic, which they expect to make way for them. The Waymo car didn't do that, nor was it required to. The Camry continued to drive on the shoulder, and the Camry driver caused their own crash.

Re:How Not To Write A Headline

[MachineShedFred]

In the United States, and specifically in California, the traffic entering the highway yields to traffic already on the highway.

If there was no collision between the cars, then the Camry was at fault. They should have moderated their speed (read: slow down) and merged behind the Prius instead of trying to outrun it before the auxiliary lane went away. Bad, aggressive driving was responsible for this wreck.

Re: How Not To Write A Headline

[mrchew1982]

You're so fucking wrong that it's not funny. Before you kill somebody here is the relevant line from the CA DMV handbook: "Freeway traffic has the right-of-way." From: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/... Every state that I have lived in has been the same, some going so far as to post "YIELD" signs on the on-ramp.

Re: How Not To Write A Headline

[MobyDisk]

Here in the US, the "zipper principle" applies when two lanes are merging into one, but not when a car is merging onto the highway. Are you sure that, in Denmark, the zipper principle applies when merging onto a highway? That doesn't seem to apply since there should be many many car lengths of space between each car merging onto the highway, and there should not be a long line of cars require such a merge.

Re:How Not To Write A Headline

[MDMurphy]

while the safer thing to do would have been to slow down and let the Camry in what was preventing the Camry from slowing down and merging in behind i.e. giving way to existing traffic as it merged?

I've been screwed by the people who think slowing down to "let merging traffic in" is safer. I enter an onramp and adjust my speed to slip behind the person in the lane. What do they do? Slow down as well, hanging out in my blind spot as I run out of onramp. If you're on the road maintain your speed, don't speed up to cut someone off but don't slow down either. Then the person who's merging knows where you are and how fast you're going. If I see a slow vehicle merging onto the road and it seems we might be trying to share the same space I'll change lanes to the left, leaving them the lane to merge into. I do not alter my speed except to avoid an accident with an idiot who doesn't know how to enter a freeway.

Re:What else is Google/Waymo/whoever hiding?

[klingens]

I might sound callous to you but this has always been the case.
Explorers who sought India, how many expeditions died? How many of them found what they actually sought? How many flight pioneers died so now we can travel to a beach resort two times a year? How many people died so far in rockets? How many people died before we thought "Hey, seatbelts would be a swell idea!". Airbags too but seatbelts would have been a possible tech from 1900 onwards while an airbag is much harder to build.

New and possibly dangerous technology will always kill a number of people before it is made safe enough for the average user and commoditized. Driverless cars are even at the very beginning, so there will be many more deaths and injuries in the future I'd think before driverless cars will be common day usage.

Re:Who Does the time for HIT and RUN (crime)

[jittles]

Seriously, why are there not criminal charges pending? Perhaps they stopped and reported it. But had they done that, why did the PR at Waymo not cite the police report? Conversely, a police report would have been created for the victim in the case of a hit and run -- where is the investigation into the Camry? Shoddy journalism. Fairly one sided view of the incident

If they were not involved in the accident they are not obligated to stop or report anything. Unless I misread the article, they were not in an accident. AN idiot who does not know how to merge was in a single car accident, unless I am mistaken.

Re:Who Does the time for HIT and RUN (crime)

[commodore64_love]

WHAT hit and run? There was NO hit (the Google car was never impacted). It reminds me of when I was cruising down the interstate, and the guy behind me was distracted (probably on his phone)...... he came up behind me very rapidly, suddenly saw my car with mere feet to spare, and turned hard to avoid me (eventually hitting the guard rail).

I thought "Should I stop?" and then remembered I'm in a flyover state where they own guns & quick to anger. So I kept going thinking "I didn't do anything wrong. I was in my lane, driving 65, never deviating from my course

"I can't help if the idiot CRASHED HIMSELF without any intervention by me." Same with the google car, which did not cause the Camry to crash.... the Camry driver crashed himself with reckless, uncontrolled swerving.