Cops, firefighters bewildered as driverless cars behave badly

https://missionlocal.org/2023/05/waymo-cruise-fire-department-police-san-francisco/

by sonofaplum • 3 years ago

29 12 3 years ago

rideontime• 3 years ago

The training video[0] is hilarious. A firefighter is supposed to call a hotline to ask someone to kindly turn their remote-control car around? I'd probably just smash it with a hammer too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM3kfauMgZY

taffronaut• 3 years ago

Non-US solution - give emergency services the ability to override self-driving vehicles

US solution - equip all emergency services with anti-materiel rifles

albatross132• 3 years ago

US solution - equip all emergency services with anti-materiel rifles

Yes.

euroderf• 3 years ago

Or how about some sort of "bang sticks" that flatten tires.

scohesc• 3 years ago

Human lives are at stake and all Cruise can recommend is "call the hotline and we'll send someone out to move the vehicle" otherwise you're cutting it open.

Can they guarantee someone will be out there in minutes or hours? I hope firefighters just adopt a standard of "If we see a cruise vehicle heading towards an active call, smash the windshield and ask questions later."

Can Cruise not tap into some system that first responders use? Say a fire call is on the corner of X and Y - can their cars just flat-out refuse to go within a 2-3 block radius of a passengers destination due to an emergency call? Seems like a good compromise if there isn't a faster way to commandeer the vehicle, especially if lives are at risk.

It doesn't help the cases where the cars just stop and refuse to move for emergency service vehicles actively responding to a call though.

I will loathe the day that these self-driving cars start to show up where I live - thankfully the weather and the chronic trashy road conditions will ward them off for hopefully another decade.

It was cathartic watching the Cruise vehicle getting chopped into pieces from the video another poster linked in the comments.

BenjiWiebe• 3 years ago

As a first responder, there are dispatch systems that can forward data like that to outside systems. The issue is that the dispatch systems aren't unified - in Kansas, for example, every county has it's own dispatch system set up it's own way, not tied to the others.

mindcrime• 3 years ago

The issue is that the dispatch systems aren't unified - in Kansas, for example, every county has it's own dispatch system set up it's own way, not tied to the others.

Agreed. And it can be even worse than that. At one time, my county (Brunswick County, NC) had three separate dispatch centers: the primary county 911 center, then a Southport specific dispatch center, and then a Long Beach specific center. And none of the agencies involved had any kind of integration of their systems (radio or CAD, etc).

That has improved somewhat now (everybody is dispatched by one center now, and everybody uses the NC VIPER radio system) but the point remains that most dispatch centers aren't integrated with each other. The CAD system for one county doesn't "know about" incidents happening in neighboring counties, or anything. They are generally almost completely isolated islands, with the primary means of interop being telephone calls from one center to another to request mutual aid or EMS move-ups, etc.

So yeah, expect it to be a while before there's any meaningful integration that can be expanded to include private companies or other 3rd parties, when the dispatch centers barely have any interop between each other.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Wouldn't police/fire/emergency no-go areas be a goldmine of intel for bad actors too?

Gordonjcp• 3 years ago

You wouldn't necessarily make it (easily) publically available.

When someone dials 999 in the UK, the call goes to the 999 handling centre where it's directed on to the appropriate agency (Police, Fire and Rescue, Ambulance, Coastguard etc - often one will pick it up and then bring the rest). Both the 999 receiving centre and the agency that the call is handed off to get the location of the caller, but only if it came in via a 999 line, got handed over via a "999 to agency" line, and then over a special dedicated connection that you most definitely do not have.

I'd expect that for something like self-driving cars it'd use the opposite of "Greenwave" which will adjust green light timings on routes to suit emergency vehicles. I know that city buses where I used to live also had Greenwave and would update their control room with their GPS position, which would then "nudge" traffic light timing to speed them up or slow them down so they ran to schedule.

bcrl• 3 years ago

Are self driving cars going to be the same as all the big platforms? If you're a platform, making it impossible to contact a human when your account has been wrongfully disabled / blacklisted is pretty much the de facto standard for support, as users are a cost that has to be minimized "at scale". What happens when self driving car peddlers decide that having access to human oversight is not viable "at scale"?

Cops, firefighters bewildered as driverless cars behave badly

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