Traffic can be difficult, and few people are as aware of this as the engineers attempting to train robots to drive vehicles. The latest example of an autonomous test car getting into a spot of bother comes from San Francisco, and involves a Waymo vehicle and an SFMTA bus becoming deadlocked in an intersection.
Footage of the incident was posted to Reddit earlier this month, showing a number of passengers disembarking from their bus, and walking around the front of it to look at a Jaguar I-Pace modified by Waymo to test self-driving technology.
The incident occurred on June 19 at the corner of Clay and Leavenworth streets, reports KRON4, and from the video posted to Reddit, it can clearly be seen that there is no human behind the wheel of the Waymo vehicle. Although the title of the post is “Self-driving car parks in intersection and blocks traffic,” the tech company disagrees with that characterization of the incident.
Read: Software Bug Causes Waymo Traffic Than Usual In Bizarre Driverless Jam
To begin with, a Waymo spokesperson told us that it was the bus, not the company’s robotaxi, that started the incident by reversing back into an intersection that it had already turned through.
“Though unclear why, passengers began exiting the bus within about 15 seconds of the bus stopping in the intersection,” the spokesperson said. “At that point, it was clear that the bus would not begin moving again and that our vehicle would need to take a different route.”
The company further claims that, although the vehicle did stop in the intersection, it was only parked there for about one minute, after which it navigated around the bus, and through the intersection.
We have reached out to SFMTA and to the original Reddit poster for more information and are awaiting their responses.
Although Waymo maintains that its vehicle was not to blame in this situation, people remain eager to attribute responsibility to its autonomous vehicles, and those of other companies. The vehicles have had difficulty navigating some unusual situations, becoming stuck on streets in San Francisco, in particular. More alarming still, test vehicles operated by Cruise have gotten into tricky situations with emergency vehicles, failing to stop and threatening to run over firefighters’ hoses. The same company’s vehicle crashed into an SFMTA bus in March, prompting a recall.
[OC] Self-driving car parks in intersection and blocks traffic
by u/mFanch in sanfrancisco