They're super conservative. I rode just once in one. There was a parked ambulance down a side street about 30 feet with it's lights one while paramedics helped someone. The car wouldn't drive forward through the intersection. It just detected the lights and froze. I had to get out and walk. If we all drove that conservatively we'd also have less accidents and congest the city to undrivability.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Back in February, I took a Waymo for the first time and was at first amazed. But then in the middle of an empty four lane road, it abruptly slammed the brakes, twice. There was literally nothing in the road, no cars and because it was raining, no pedestrians within sight.
If I had been holding a drink, it would have spelled disaster.
After the second abrupt stop, I was bracing for more for the remainder of the ride, even though the car generally goes quite slow most of the time. It also made a strange habit of drifting between lanes through intersections and using the turning indicators like it had no idea what it was doing—it kept alternating went from left to right.
Honestly it felt like being in the car with a first time driver.
Maybe the reason they crash less is because everyone around them have to be extremely careful with these cars. Just like in my country we put a big L on the rear of the car for first year drivers.
How long ago was that? Last year I took a couple near Phoenix and they did great, lights or no. The hardest part was dropping me off at the front of a hotel, as people were in and out and cars were everywhere. Still didn't have issues, just slowed down to 3mph when it had 15 years left or so
just slowed down to 3mph when it had 15 years left or so
Damn, spending 15 years in a car going 3mph sounds terrible.
Haha, yeah I didn't check that, was eating. 15 yards. I'm actually still sitting there.
Considering the sort of driving issues and code violations I see on a daily basis, the standards for human drivers need raising. The issue is more lax humans than it is amazing robots.
it's hard to change humans. It's easy to roll out a firmware update.
Raising the standards would result in 20-50% of the worst drivers being forced to do something else. If our infrastructure wasn't so car-centric, that would be perfectly fine.
:Looks at entire midwest and southern usa:
The bar is so low in these regions you need diamond drilling bits to go lower.
What's a zipper merge?
Screams in Midwestern
I have spent many years in both the midwest and the south.
In some areas of the south, people drive extremely aggressively and there are lots of issues with compliance to various traffic laws but it is usually not difficult to get over if you need to. People will let you in. The zipper merge is a well-honed machine and almost everyone uses it and obeys it.
In the midwest, drivers tend to me more docile, cautious, and lawful overall but have an extreme sense of entitlement over their place in line. "How dare that person use that completely empty lane to get ahead of me! Can they not see there is a line!" They will absolutely not let you in. It does not matter if the zipper merge would improve traffic flow. It just is not going to happen.
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I used to hate them for being slow and annoying. Now they drive like us and I hate them for being dicks. This morning, one of them made an insane move that only the worst Audi drivers in my area do, a massive left over a solid yellow across no stop sign with me coming right at it before it even began acceleration into the intersection.
As a techno-optimist, I always expected self-driving to quickly become safer than human, at least in relatively controlled situations. However I’m at least as much a pessimist of human nature and the legal system.
Given self-driving vehicles demonstrably safer than human, but not perfect, how can we get beyond humans taking advantage, and massive liability for the remaining accidents?
how those robot food delivery "robot ai boxes"? by starship doing?
Evolution took a billion years too, so it's kinda fair to say "well, vehicles need some training".
Thing is, the end goal after sorting out all the bugs in the AI is no human druven cars since having both will only lead to crashes dur to AI being unable to predict a human. All the AI cars would be linked to a central system to communicate with eachother and alwats know where eachither are. Then all we have to do is make sure people only use the cross walks and traffic accudents will be solely due to idiots.
I doubt a central system would ever be viable, but they would certainly communicate to other nearby cars with more than just blinky lights
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