Waymo issued a recall after two robotaxis crashed into the same pickup truck
Waymo issued a recall after two robotaxis crashed into the same pickup truck
In December, two Waymo robotaxies in Phoenix collided with the same pickup truck that was in the midst of being towed, which prompted the Alphabet subsidiary to issue a recall on its vehicles' software.
Last year, two Waymo robotaxis in Phoenix "made contact" with the same pickup truck that was in the midst of being towed, which prompted the Alphabet subsidiary to issue a recall on its vehicles' software. A "recall" in this case meant rolling out a software update after investigating the issue and determining its root cause.
In a blog post, Waymo has revealed that on December 11, 2023, one of its robotaxis collided with a backwards-facing pickup truck being towed ahead of it. The company says the truck was being towed improperly and was angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane. Apparently, the tow truck didn't pull over after the incident, and another Waymo vehicle came into contact with the pickup truck a few minutes later. Waymo didn't elaborate on what it meant by saying that its robotaxis "made contact" with the pickup truck, but it did say that the incidents resulted in no injuries and only minor vehicle damage. The self-driving vehicles involved in the collisions weren't carrying any passenger.
After an investigation, Waymo found that its software had incorrectly predicted the future movements of the pickup truck due to "persistent orientation mismatch" between the towed vehicle and the one towing it. The company developed and validated a fix for its software to prevent similar incidents in the future and started deploying the update to its fleet on December 20.
I love the corpospeak. why say "crashed into" when you can use "made contact" which sounds futuristic and implies that your product belongs to an alien civilization?
Next they're going to add passive voice to further confuse the issue. "A pickup truck was made contact with by two vehicles..."
The company says the truck was being towed improperly
Shit happens on the road. It's still not a great idea to drive into it.
The company developed and validated a fix for its software to prevent similar incidents
So their plan is to fix one accident at a time..
Rules are written in blood. Once you figure out all the standard cases, you can only try and predict as many edge cases that you can think of. You can't make something fool proof because there will always be a greater fool that will come by.
Unexpected or not, it should do its best to stop or avoid the obstacle, not drive into it.
An autonomous vehicle shouldn't ever be able to actively drive forward into anything. It's basic collision detection that ought to brake the car here. If something is in the position the car wants to drive to, it simply shouldn't drive there. There's no reason to blame the obstacle for being towed incorrectly..
Honestly, I think only trial and error will let us get a proper autonomous car.
And I still think autonomous cars will save many more lives than it endangered once it become reliable.
But for now this is bound to happen...
To be clear, they still are responsible of these car and the safety of others. They didn't test properly.
They should be trying every edge case they can think about.
A large screen on the side of a truck ? What if a car is displayed on it ? Would the car sensor notice the difference?
A farmer dropped a hay bale on the road ? It got flattened by rain ? Does the car understand that this might not be safe to drive on or to brake on ?
There is hundreds of unique situations that they should be trying before an autonomous car gets even close to a public road.
But even if you try everything there will be mistakes and fatalities.
Just like Tesla! And people wonder why they are a hated company.
So their plan is to fix one accident at a time…
Well how else would you do it?
You drive a car and can't quite figure out what is happening in front of you.
Do you:
- A: Turn up the music and plow right through.
- B: Slow down (potentially to a full stop) and assess the situation.
- C : Slow down, close your eyes and continue driving slowly into the obstacle
- D: Sound the horn and flash the lights
From the description offered in the article the car chose C, which is wrong.
Radars > Don't hit stuff
Ideally they don't need actual accidents to find errors, but discover said issues in QA and automated testing. Not hitting anything sounds like a manageable goal to be honest.
Hmm, so it’s only designed to handle expected scenarios?
That’s not how driving works… at all. 😐
Face it, that's actually better than many drivers can do
The description of an unexpected/(impossible) orientation for an on road obstacle works as an excuse, right up to the point where you realize that the software should, explicitly, not run into anything at all. That’s got to be, like, the first law of (robotic) vehicle piloting.
It was just lucky that it happened twice as, otherwise, Alphabet likely would have shrugged it off as some unimportant, random event.
Billionaires get to alpha test their software on public roads and everyone is at risk.
It's great though - that's how you get amazing services and technological advancement.
I wish we had that. In Europe you're just stuck paying 50 euros for a taxi in major cities (who block the roads, etc. to maintain their monopolies).
Meanwhile in the USA you guys have VR headsets, bioluminescent houseplants and self-driving cars (not to mention the $100k+ salaries!), it's incredible.
I didn't read it as them saying "therefore this isn't a problem," it was an explanation for why it happened. Think about human explanations for accidents: "they pulled out in front of me" "they stopped abruptly". Those don't make it ok that an accident happened either.
It should of course not run into anything, but it does need to be able to identify obstacles at the very least for crash priority when crazy shit inevitably happens. For instance, maybe it hits a nice squishy Pomeranian that won't cause any damage to itself instead of swerving to avoid it and possibly totalling itself by hitting a fire hydrant.
Or maybe it hits the fire hydrant instead of a toddler.
At any rate, being able to identify an obstacle and react to unexpected orientations of those obstacles is something I think a human driver does pretty well most of the time. Autonomous cars are irresponsible and frankly I can't believe they're legal to operate.
I can't believe they're legal to operate.
That's the neat part. They aren't always legal. It doesn't stop them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-dmv-calls-ubers-autonomous-autos-illegal-1481761533
It would have been a different article if two waymos decided to take a wrong turn off a cliff.
I'm getting tired of implementing technology before it's finished and all the bugs are worked out. Driverless cars are still not ready for prime time yet. The same thing is happening currently with AI or companies are utilizing it without having any idea what it can do.
tired of implementing technology before it's finished
That's is every single programme you've ever used.
Software will be built, sold, used, maintained and finally obsoleted and it will still not be 'complete'. It will have bugs, sometimes lots, sometimes huge, and those will not be fixed. Our biggest accomplishment as a society may be the case where we patched software on Mars or in the voyager probe still speeding away from earth.
Self-driving cars, though, don't need to have perfectly 'complete' software, though; they just need to work better than humans. That's already been accomplished, long ago.
And with each fix applied to every one of them, it's a situation they all shouldn't ever repeat. Can we say the same about humans? I can't even get my beautiful, stubborn wife to slow down, leave more space, and quit turning the steering wheel in that rope-climbing way like a farmer on a tractor does (because the airbag will take her hand off).
That's is every single programme you've ever used.
No software is perfect, but anybody who uses a computer knows that some software is much less complete. This currently seems to be the case when it comes autonomous driving tech.
And with each fix applied to every one of them, it's a situation they all shouldn't ever repeat.
First, there are many companies developing autonomous driving tech, and if there's one thing tech companies like to do is re-invent the wheel (ffs Tesla did this literally). Second, have you ever used modern software? A bug fix guarantees nothing. Third, you completely ignore the opposite possibility - what if they push a serious bug in an update, which drives you off a cliff and kills you? It doesn't matter if they push a fix 2 hours later (and let's be honest, many of these cars will likely stop getting updates pretty fast anyway once this tech gets really popular, just look at the state of software updates in other industries).
I'm against driverless cars, but I don't think this type of errors can be detected in a lab environment. It's just impossible to test with every single car model or real world situations that it will find in actual usage.
An optimal solution would be to have a backup driver with every car that keeps an eye on the road in case of software failure. But, of course, this isn't profitable, so they'd rather put lives at risk.
How will they encounter these edge cases without real world testing?
Fair point
I agree, but testing with a supervisory driver should be required in case of emergency situations. Both safer and creates job opportunities.
You're right there should be a minimum safety threshold before tech is deployed. Waymo has had pretty extensive testing (unlike say, Tesla). As I understand it their safety record is pretty good.
How many accidents have you had in your life? I've been responsible for a couple rear ends and I collided with a guard rail (no one ever injured). Ideally we want incidents per mile driven to be lower for these driverless cars than when people drive. Waymos have driven a lot of miles (and millions more in a virtual environment) and supposedly their number is better than human driving, but the question is if they've driven enough and in enough varied situations to really be an accurate stat.
That's how you get technological advancement.
Bureaucracy just leads to monopolies and little to any progress.
Why is an update called a recall?
Because Tesla was fixing significant safety issues without reporting it to the NHTSA in a way that they could track the problems and source of the issue. The two of them got into a pissing match, and the result is that now all OTA's are recalls. After this, the media realized that "recall" generates more views than "OTA", and here we are.
I think it's slightly more nuanced - not all OTAs are recalls, and not all recalls are OTAs (for Tesla). Depending on the issue (for Teslas), the solution may be pushed via an OTA in which case they "issue a recall" with a software update. They're actually going through this right now. For some other issues though, it's a hardware problem that an OTA won't fix so they issue a recall to repair the problem (ex: when the wiring harness for their cameras was fraying the cables).
This is 100% from the NHTSA shenanigans, though.
What typically happens when a recall is issued for other vehicles? Don't they either remove and replace the bad part or add extra parts to fix the issue?
How is removing bad code and replacing it with good code or just adding extra code to fix the issue any different?
Do you want to physically go somewhere?
The fleet of cars is summoned back to the HQ to have the update installed, so it causes a temporary service shutdown until cars are able to start leaving the garage with the new software. They can't do major updates over the air due to the file size; pushing out a mutli-gigabyte update to a few hundred cars at once isn't great on the cellular network.
Actually there have been several Tesla "recalls" that were just simply OTA updates.
They often are. Many recalls for other manufacturers are similar. They don't actually buy back the cars and crush them.
aaaaand fuck this truck in particular.
That pickup truck was asking for it I tell ya. He was looking at me sideways, he was.
It said RAM om the side!
Brb gonna dazzle paint my car
After an investigation, Waymo found that its software had incorrectly predicted the future movements of the pickup truck due to “persistent orientation mismatch” between the towed vehicle and the one towing it.
Having worked at Waymo for a year troubleshooting daily builds of the software, this sounds to me like they may be trying to test riskier, "human" behaviors. Normally, the cars won't accelerate at all if the lidar detects an object in front of it, no matter what it thinks the object is or what direction it's moving in. So the fact that this failsafe was overridden somehow makes me think they're trying to add more "What would a human driver do in this situation?" options to the car's decision-making process. I'm guessing somebody added something along the lines of "assume the object will have started moving by the time you're closer to that position" and forgot to set a backup safety mechanism for the event that the object doesn't start moving.
I'm pretty sure the dev team also has safety checklists that they go through before pushing out any build, to make sure that every failsafe is accounted for, so that's a pretty major fuckup to have slipped through the cracks (if my theory is even close to accurate). But luckily, a very easily-fixed fuckup. They're lucky this situation was just "comically stupid" instead of "harrowing tragedy".
Get your beta tests off my tax dollar funded roads pls. Feel free to beta test on a closed track.
They've already been testing on private tracks for years. There comes a point where, eventually, something new is used for the first time on a public road. Regardless, even despite even idiotic crashes like this one, they're still safer than human drivers.
I say my tax dollar funded DMV should put forth a significantly more stringent driving test and auto-revoke the licenses of anybody who doesn't pass, before I'd want SDCs off the roads. Inattentive drivers are one of the most lethal things in the world, and we all just kinda shrug our shoulders and ignore that problem, but then we somehow take issue when a literal supercomputer on wheels with an audited safety history far exceeding any human driver has two hiccups over the course of hundreds of millions of driven miles. It's just a weird outlook, imo.
Full releases have plenty of bugs.
Do we have a fuck you in particular group yet?
I still don't understand how these are allowed. One is not allowed to let a Tesla drive without being 100% in control and ready to take the wheel at all times, but these cars are allowed to drive around autonomously?
If I am driving my car, and I hit a pedestrian, they have legal recourse against me. What happens when it was an AI or a company or a car?
You have legal recourse against the owner of the car, presumably the company that is profiting from the taxi service.
You see these all the time in San Francisco. I'd imagine the vast majority of the time, there are no issues. It's just going to be big headlines whenever some accident does happen.
Nobody seems to care about the nearly 50,000 people dying every year from human-caused car accidents
Nobody seems to care about the nearly 50,000 people dying every year from human-caused car accidents
I would actually wager that's not true, it's just that the people we elect tend to favor the corporations and look after their interests moreso than the people who elected them, so we end up being powerless to do anything about it.
The company is at fault. I don't think there's laws currently in place that say a vehicle has to be manned on the street, just that it uses the correct signals and responds correctly to traffic, but I may be wrong. It may also be local laws.
In a blog post, Waymo has revealed that on December 11, 2023, one of its robotaxis collided with a backwards-facing pickup truck being towed ahead of it. The company says the truck was being towed improperly and was angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane.
See? Waymo robotaxis don't just take you where you need to go, they also dispense swift road justice.
I'm cool with that. Maybe they can do tailgaters next.
they also dispense swift road justice.
They should launch shurikens out the front like a James Bond vehicle.
"made contact" "towed improperly". What a pathetic excuse. Wasn't the entire point of self driving cars the ability to deal with unpredictable situations? The ones that happen all the time every day?
Considering the driving habits differ from town to town, the current approaches do not seem to be viable for the long term anyway.
It's as if they are still in testing. This is many years away from being safe, but it will happen
It's a rare edge case that slipped through because the circumstances to cause it are obscure, from the description it was a minor bump and the software was updated to try and ensure it doesn't happen again - and it probably won't.
Testing for things like this is difficult but looking at the numbers from these projects testing is going incredibly well and we're likely to see moves towards legal acceptance soon
They thought the truck was being driven by Sarah Conner.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/17/tech-layoffs-waymo-san-francisco-robotaxi/
I bet they were all QA.
It was in an orientation our devs didn't account for and we don't want liability.
"Towed improperly"
Maybe it was a cybertruck and the super stealth design made it's signature very small.
At least they are consistent
Developers are not testing all of the edge cases properly.
Don't assume a vehicle was under its own power, as like in this case, as it could be towed, so the towing vehicles parameter should be considered.
Check those tires! Make sure they are all on the ground.
Hey! How do we know that the truck wasn’t being really annoying on purpose and trying to wind-up the Waymo cars?!?!?
And they wonder why we set them on fire...
🚘🔥
Waymo is going full kamikaze drone on Pick-up, next step will be SUV ?
Maybe this is a solution for oversized vehicules
This is our future isn't it? This is it. Spending our days wondering if we're going to be mown down by a clumsy Johnnycab because it was fractionally cheaper than paying somebody to drive.
I'd take my chances with that rather than all the crazies out in the road now
Fr, I'd still trust a self driving vehicle over a human driver any day of the week.
Humans are terrible drivers, this could have easily been just another person driving distracted or something and then we wouldn't even know about it because it wouldn't be news worthy.