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Comment by mathewpregasen | Hacker News Reader

"Cruise, Waymo pitch: First responders should train to disable self-driving cars" this is a crazy sentence

Right? Like a firefighter trying to put out a burning car should have to get into some "your call is important to us" phone queue just to get the robot car off the firehose.

They have emergency override controls and trained procedures around it for elevators; I don’t see much of a leap for autonomous cars, assuming the override process isn’t itself ridiculous.

Give firefighters a way to completely take control for 10 miles or something with a relatively low barrier to entry seems like a perfect way to eliminate vast numbers of weird scenarios

the method will leak eventually subjecting all selfdriving cars to dos attacks

The potential for abuse of a car driving around with nobody in it is massive. The thing is you can already DoS them with a knife. Just poke a little hole in the tires and that thing isn't going anywhere. You don't even need to book a ride or even get in it.

Sure, but you don’t need to handover full capability for it to be sufficient. That’s why I noted an arbitrary limit on mileage once the procedure is engaged — you can imagine all sorts of arbitrary other limitations; eg once in 24 hrs, limited featureset, auto-enabled tracking, flags to server that it’s been engaged, etc.

There are ao many reasons that comparison does not work.

I hate this kind of low effort comment. Go ahead and list a few of them if there are so many.

The law is that vehicles need to give right of way to emergency vehicles. If autonomous cars repeatedly demonstrate that they cannot do that, then take their license away, just like you would for a natural person. Why do legal persons get to externalize the difficulty of their autonomous driving problem onto the police and fire departments (and the affected citizenry)?

Indeed, yet the other replies seem to be missing the insanity: any mechanism that permits this sort of override has another name: “backdoor”. If this capability exists widely enough for all emergency personnel to use it, then it would only be a matter of time until the mechanism is cracked wide open and abused.

IMO in this case it doesn't really matter. The cars aren't owned by you anyways. They can already be remotely controlled by Waymo/Cruise.

I mean, those cars have cameras everywhere, you can easily imagine the lawsuits if people started doing that

"He’s still disgruntled by an incident last weekend in the Richmond District, during which an autonomous vehicle entered the scene and parked between a fire engine and a vehicle on fire."

"People should just learn to live with it, we're disrupting here!" is pretty standard fare.

At least this thread, no one has yet suggested a shootable kill-switch area that police are supposed to aim for on a misbehaving vehicle.

The entire car is a kill switch - you can smack them with your HAND to set off a collision sensor and trigger a remote intervention.

SFFD and SFPD should know that by now; that falls under basic knowledge required to do their jobs.

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