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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Clearly this is an orientation video that is going to play in the waiting area for people who are using a self driving car for the first time. Its calm, everyone around it is calm, and nothing unexpected happens during the entire video.

I of course want to see the video where the human drivers do things that human drivers do. They illegally pull out of left turn lanes to go straight, they fail to stop when they turn right in the intersection you are about to enter, they make an illegal u-turn when they realize they turned the wrong way. What does the car do when someone tailgates it? What does it do when pedestrians step off the curb but then don't cross? Watching how the car navigates those situations would make me feel a lot better than watching it drive around where everyone was following the rules.

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According to https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-ca... Waymo is testing such scenarios and more.

There's little upside for them to release videos from such testing. It's not sexy, it's not polished and they don't tip off competitors about how advanced (or not) they are.

Exactly. Or a car stopped blocking your lane so you need to break the rules and go into the on coming lane to pass. So many odd situations are possible.

Eerily enough, the environment feels very constructed as well. Makes me wonder if it was a bunch of actors in a scripted setting.

It's like "The Truman Show" for autonomous vehicles.

The car was programmed to be sentient and think he was giving rides to real people... but it was all fake so they could make a fancy tech demo. And when the car finds out how people act in the real world, that's the beginning of judgement day.

They did publicize videos of their cars handling abnormal events. See https://youtu.be/Uj-rK8V-rik?t=25m.

Them programming for “unexpected” situations is not quite what is being talked about though.

The above scenarios are great, but I like the one Mercedes got in a little trouble for “is the cars priority your saftey or is it other people’s? You bought the expensive car, it should protect you first”, gets into a trolley problem pretty quickly.

The trolley problem is an interesting dilemma, TIL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

Got any links on the Mercedes issue?

I don’t. Basically someone high up in that division made the claim in some venue that of course your $80,000 car is going to put your security first, and it was a bit of an issue. I don’t remember if it was an internal Diamler event or a media snafu.

There is a logical answer though. He’s right. Each car is going to look out for itself primarily. They have to. No car is going to have a “sacrifice” mode.

Exactly. Or someone attempts a carjacking.

Raises an interesting privacy question since the car is scanning with lidar and radar all of the pedestrians as it is going along. At what point does is capture gait analysis and allow home base to tell the cars to be on the lookout for someone with a particular gait [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925574/

Or fleet analyse your driving style and adjust their reactions to you and your car.

At some point they'll flag some other drivers as idiots and avoid them, speed past or fall back a safer distance. Other drivers will be aware of what the Waymo car is doing - oh look, it sped past that OAP driving, why? Are they jabbing the breaks unexpectedly? Drifting out of lane? Hm.

Then this data is going to get fed into other agencies and insurance dudes...

This whole thing is going to get messy and just push everyone to get rid of cars and just use taxi services.

I'm curious why the downvotes on this. SDC will absolutely be an immense tool for insurance companies to price their product according to the risk the perceive from specific driving actions.

They already do this, however their source of data is just the DMV via traffic violations.

This can also be a source of (small) revenue for mapping providers and sensor aggregators (eventually).

I think it's because they don't want it to be true. Or they read some sort of perceived insult in my comment.

The marketing video will likely be the opposite, much like the recent batch of car ads that show crash avoidance.

AI drivers also react much faster than humans.

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