Waymo illegal overtake into wrong-way driving

One possible explanation would be that it detected the unicyclists as pedestrians, assumed that it would be able to overtake them, and was unable to do but kept trying to overtake them.

Seems like a failure of their path planning in this case, the same way if someone were to try to overtake on a two lane road, one would have to abort the overtake if the vehicle one is trying to pass keeps on accelerating such that overtaking isn't safe anymore.

It’s kinda funny that the Waymo car is so impatient. I’m pretty sure in this situation I would have just waited until the group ride cleared out to ahead of me and then continued. I would not want to crowd or find my way around them. If I wanted to get past such a big group ride I would probably reroute onto another block since they would keep catching me at stop lights.

My guess is that the police car in the wrong lane confused the system. If a car is going in a direction, 99% of the time it's safe to follow the car and go in the same direction.

Everyone seems to be an expert on what to do in this situation. I would argue that it's not as trivial as it seems. Yes the waymo cars seems to be on the wrong side of the road for far too long but when surrounded with erratic uniwheeler, stopping is not necessarly the right thing to do either. As a human driver, i got into some strange situation where I had to play damage control because of an early bad decision. In a big city, not crossing the double yellow line mean you will probably end up stuck every block. I personally see this as a good example to learn from but not necessarly a reason to stop testing. I would also restrain from making any decision before seeing the actual data from the car cameras/lidar/radar system.

What I find revealing is it utter inability to reset to a safe position.

It stays in the wrong lane; is it because it can't rejoin because the lane is occupied by the unicyclist (looking at the video it does not appear to make efforts to go back) ? or because it has already forgotten the context and is now driving happily in a lane ...

It only stopped when its path is blocked ...

It is a really really really bad sign that these companies feel the obsessive need to lie and distort around what are safety-critical incidents. Where is the safety culture? If this is how it's going to be, why on earth should we trust them to deploy them on public streets?

I love the :

> before returning to its original lane of travel

When it was only able to do so when someone started to block its path to force it to stop ...

Waymo car here like some drivers never consider option to slow down. They just have to overtake at all costs.

That statement is PR bullshit, I expected better from Waymo. Nobody fell, so it misidentified the situation. And there was nothing careful about the overtake maneuver here, there was no safe place to end the maneuver in sight.

These kinds of mistakes will very likely happen with self-driving cars, the important part is to address them and improve the cars. I don't expect the cars to be flawless from the start (I do expect some fundamental safety mechanisms to work reliably from the start like the automatic braking before obstacles). Downplaying the issue here is a bad look for Waymo.

What if something was coded/learned to recognize the "people on the road surrounding the vehicle" situation, so that the car could try to get away or even ram them.

> the human uni-cyclist steers in front of Waymo, knowing that it will brake

That's a level of optimism I don't have....

...on the same level as a bloke I saw advertising a food blender on the shopping channel, sticking his fingers into the thing to prove the safety mechanism would stop the blades.

I've said it over and over: the American automobile transit system is inherently unsafe. That's why I've been a self driving skeptic. We have a system where there drivers must break the rules and/or drive in an unsafe manner regularly. This involves: excessive speed when others are driving too fast, entering the oncoming lane when needing to pass someone double parked, making blind turns because a big truck is blocking your view, not knowing when a pedestrian will enter a crosswalk and needing to slam on the brakes, having to yield when crossing a lane of traffic... the list goes on and on. There isn't an actual safe set of rules, and the rules we have are so commonly broken that a learning algorithm won't follow them.

I'd put this inherent danger at somewhere around 0.1% of the time. I'd say I'm forced to drive dangerously about once every 10 miles of driving, but the fact that people must drive dangerously occasionally to use the system means that a machine can't ever learn to use it safely.

Probably about the time that we realize 100% safety is an impossible goal, and better-than-human safety is achievable.

I fully admit to having done things in the car far dumber and more dangerous than this when I was young. I'm not excusing the Waymo, rather I'm putting it in perspective.

One alternative to autonomous driving in San Francisco:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HoqFlDuuBI

First we need to admit that the current level of human capabilities are not sufficient for safe driving.

To be fair, I've seen many human drivers doing equally stupid things.

That's why they still are in research and not widely available.

I sure did. And I sure did even bigger screwups while driving.

It's the humans fault for not being lawful and considerate to the AI murderbot:

> a former Baidu executive, Drive.AI board member, and one of the industry’s most prominent boosters — argues the problem is less about building a perfect driving system than training bystanders to anticipate self-driving behavior. In other words, we can make roads safe for the cars instead of the other way around. As an example of an unpredictable case, I asked him whether he thought modern systems could handle a pedestrian on a pogo stick, even if they had never seen one before. “I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” he told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.”

> “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-w...

You would expect a captcha that shows you two yellow lines, and asks you on which side of the yellow lines a car should be driving. Wether there are unicycles present is totally irrelevant.

> Maybe it thought they were on a bike lane? Where I'm from it's illegal to ride like that in a group outside of police-sanctioned events

I’m in Massachusetts where lane splitting is legal in some cases (single lane each direction, posted speed limit below some amount, probably something else). Some other states have similar rules, but in most it’s flatly illegal.

I believe California is an unusual outlier in that lane splitting is allowed with no additional restrictions.

> you're supposed to ride one after the other and keep right.

In many states bicycles are entitled to use the full lane. I often feel safer riding in the center of the lane for a few reasons:

1. The center of the lane is less likely to have small ride-ruining debris like glass, sticks, and nails

2. Cars surprisingly give me more space when passing if I’m not riding off to the side

3. It seems that potholes occur more often to the side of the rode than in the center, or at least get fixed more often when they’re toward the middle of the road

Note: I’m talking about the middle of the lane vs the side, not the middle of the lane vs the shoulder. The shoulder isn’t something you should travel in anyway, even on a bike.

Is it also illegal to ride into oncoming traffic, in the wrong lane?

Still no excuse for driving on the opposite lane ;-)

The devices they're riding are called electric unicycles, often abbreviated to EUC.

>a human clicked on the “overtake” button

Ok. So what are the consequences for this human operator and/or Waymo?

Human drivers make mistakes all the time, it’s true. But there are consequences for those mistakes. If a human drives into the opposite lane that’s a big problem, especially if they end up causing property damage or bodily injury. Why are the same standards not being applied here?