White, the Austin police official, said Waymos can get stuck when they’re forced to interact with people. “The human element is what’s killing them,” he says. “The moment you introduce the human element, [the vehicles] lack that social awareness of what to do, and they freeze.” Freezing creates “a significant danger to public safety,” he told federal regulators.
Nothing to see here. Carry on.
And floods, apparently. Can’t find it anymore, but there’s a pic where a Waymo got stuck in a flooded street right under a sign saying “don’t use when flooded”.
But of course the inhuman aspect is worse.
If they fail to get out of the way or do what is reasonable, fine their asses heavily. If their interference causes further harm to anyone they are responding to, then they will be liable in a law suit.
I’m not against self driving cars, but this isn’t a matter where the public should have to wait out their kinks. If waymo feels that it is too harsh, they are free to have human supervisors that can take over until they worked out the issue.
Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina wrote: “We deeply value our partnership with first responders and our shared commitment to safety. Their ongoing feedback has been instrumental in driving impactful improvements to the Waymo service.” […] The company says it has conducted in-person training for more than 35,000 emergency responders across the country.
Instead of adapting Waymo to the needs of humans and emergency services, let’s just tell them how they need to change to fit us instead!
reflect long-simmering and sometimes vocal frustrations expressed by city leaders since at least late last year. Since autonomous vehicle operations are regulated in California and Texas by state rather than city officials, local first-responder departments and those who represent them can generally only request that developers like Waymo make specific changes to their operations.
Sounds like they don’t really value those relationships like they claim to.
to connect […] with Waymo operators to move the vehicle, […] it had taken up to three minutes to connect with a remote agent in the past. They reiterated that Waymos don’t always respond well to hand signals, especially ones from police mounted on motorcycles. Waymo declined to attend the meeting […] the Waymo spokesperson, said the company has "already had the substantive conversations this moment calls for,” and said the company has answered questions from city officials.
Translation: we’re tired of listening to you, get out of our way and let our cars run free!
“We will keep working with Austin’s leadership and first-responder community, because ongoing collaboration is how we build the trust this city deserves and make Austin’s streets safer,” she wrote.
Lol, that’s not at all what you’re doing. Are you taking Republican lessons in lying, double-speak, and aggressive non-listening?
They’re “talking to leadership”
Which entails wining and dining them, taking them on vacations and outright giving them money until they see things the corporate way
Said something about how an ambulance was blocked for quite a while waitng for one of these stupid things to move.
Um, push it out of the way. Not like an ambulance is small. Get them all push bars and move those fucking pieces of shit with a good shove. Tell the people in the Waymo to GTFO and then push the fucking thing over.
Then send Waymo a bill for any damages to the ambulance, cop car, fire truck, etc.
Why is this so hard? I’m not normally a fan of brute force and ignorance, but it does have it’s uses. Waymo isn’t doing anything because there are no consequences. They don’t come to meetings, they don’t fix the problem and they issue bullshit public statements that mean nothing. Fine, you want to choose the “do nothing” option, we’ll choose the “shove your stupid piece of shit high-school science project into a ditch” option.
Fire trucks will gladly push a Waymo out of the way, but an ambulance doesn’t have that kind of horsepower, not to mention the fact that purposely colliding with another vehicle with a patient in the back is a great way to be sued and probably lose your qualifications
Why are you assuming the ambulance is the first car behind the Waymo? Are they supposed to bash through all traffic to get to the Waymo and then push it? You know a lot of ambulance drivers are just low level private employees with a couple weeks of training, right? They’re not going to just use the ambulance like a tank and then tell their corporate ambulance company employer to sue Waymo, a huge and powerful tech company. Christ man join reality.
I think you may be overestimating the power of an E-450.
So little torque from such a big engine. My 3 liter has more. They need turbodiesels.
Maybe that low torque is desirable for patient stability?
Then why not have a smaller engine? It’s not like that huge 7.3 liter beast revs high either so it doesn’t have much power either.
These engines are optimized for torque, the E450 just gets the weakest version of it. A modern diesel can have the same power and torque output with much better fuel economy at half the engine size.
It’s not just the ambulances either, but any version of the E450. Why does a van need a petrol V8 anyway? Just for the engine sound? They all have inline 4 diesels where I come from. Because usually you don’t need to race your van. Okay, they want more torque than that for the 5 ton towing capacity… But again, my 3 liter diesel has more torque than the Ford Godzilla.
Of course they would.
Even if we perfect self driving cars, capitalism would demand more profits so they would get worse.
What if they get high insurance premiums? Then they will just find ways to change the law.
Hiring a driver who cares about not getting into an accident was a very important balance to capitalistic greed.
God do I hate CEO corpo speech. Nobody talks like that and it’s is almost exclusively used to dress up something ugly to look pretty, or yoake a lie look like the truth or just weasel your way out of an indefensible position
Fuck CEO’s
They need to turn the “freeze” command to “Pull as far right as possible/safe and then freeze.”
They‘re probably learning that reckless driving gets you there faster… or not at all and they just take the gamble. Basically bad parameters, I‘m guessing.
