Hacker News Reader

Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

>During a DUI enforcement operation, officers in San Bruno pulled over a car without anyone behind the wheel after the autonomous vehicle made an illegal U-turn at a light.

I'd bet a lot of money that the intersection isn't signed or is poorly signed (because if there's one thing these vehicles do pretty well it's obey obvious signage) or not signed and the illegality of the U turn is implicit, the software learned that the path was valid from other drivers because it's a easy/tasteful place to do a U turn and the cops just spawn camp it (because they need a legal pretext for the stop, so something like that works well) when they want to go fishing.

View on HN

> the illegality of the U turn is implicit, the software learned that the path was valid from other drivers

One would hope that the traffic laws of an area are "hard coded" and not dependent on what other drivers do.

I don’t think you can really bake that in because the traffic rules can change day-to-day.

For example, there’s a street in my neighborhood that’s normally open for two-way traffic, but one of the buildings that fronts it is being renovated so the street was changed to one-way for about a month, and as of a couple of days ago it’s still one-way but in the other direction. Imagine trying to get a car to work that out on its own.

That's exactly a situation where signage is mandatory (and, I think, legally required) to say what the current rule is. The hard-coded traffic law that would apply here is "obey the traffic signs".

The point I was making is that these cars should absolutely not be "learning" what rules to follow by observing what other drivers actually do. When there is no clear signage, there are well-defined laws about what drivers need to do and self-driving cars need to follow those even if human drivers don't.

> Imagine trying to get a car to work that out on its own.

Wdym imagine? I was told self driving cars are better at literally following rules than humans?

That depends on what other drivers, I guess

The Waymos I ride have developed a habit of swinging right into bus turnouts.

A bus turnout looks like a dedicated right-turn lane, except it ends and you must merge before turning right!

So these Waymos are illegally entering these lanes for no good reason and seem completely unaware of their actual designated use or signage. I cannot figure out why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com