We Followed a Waymo Self-driving Car for Miles, Here's What we Saw

link > One of the world’s first fully-driverless taxi firms has been blocked from expanding its business in California, where several of its vehicles have recently been involved in accidents. > Waymo, which is the driverless car division of Google parent Alphabet, currently operates in parts of San Francisco. Attempts to roll-out its robotaxi service to Sunnyvale and Los Angeles were suspended for up to 120 days following a ruling by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division (CPED). Then there's the federal investigation for Arizona crashes: link Your cars honking at each other in their own parking lot, at 4AM: link Your cars getting confused by a traffic cone: link Your cars barely able to make a lane change under the most ideal circumstances: ▶ this video Unable to respond to the instructions of a police officer and it taking a minute and a half for employees to manually control the car: link Blocking a fire truck: link Breaking the law and getting pulled over by police for driving in the oncoming lane: link One of your cars cutting off another one of your own cars in a wildly unsafe, illegal maneuver: One of your cars running a red light: link ...and then a few minutes later, illegally entering an intersection and stopping, then continuing to block the intersection because someone made a u-turn 30 feet in front of it while it was stopped: link And here's the icing on the cake: your company harassing reporters, ca

They can barely change lanes: ▶ this video ...and are completely flummoxed by a couple of traffic cones closing off a lane: link

They have some quite impressive demo videos. Also they've been operating in demanding conditions compared to Waymo. eg NYC rush hour link Lane change in heavy traffic link while when reporters "Followed a Waymo Self-driving Car for Miles' the Waymos seemed to have some issues ▶ this video

> In this video, the Waymo isn't avoiding a crash so much as potentially causing a rear-ender: link wtf. This is a shitty example. If you either (1) read the captions on the video or (2) watch their full video where they talk about this, you'd realize that the waymo car stopped because a car off-camera ran the red into the intersection and that braking actually was avoiding a crash (or rather, decreasing the severity of a crash). ▶ this video