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posted by takyon on Tuesday January 01 2019, @04:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the defenseless-car dept.

The old gray lady reports that the people of Tempe AZ, a popular testing location for self driving cars, are fighting back. Here are a couple of snippets from the longer article:

The [tire] slashing was one of nearly two dozen attacks on driverless vehicles over the past two years in Chandler, a city near Phoenix where Waymo started testing its vans in 2017. In ways large and small, the city has had an early look at public misgivings over the rise of artificial intelligence, with city officials hearing complaints about everything from safety to possible job losses.

Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

[...] "There are other places they can test," said Erik O'Polka, 37, who was issued a warning by the police in November after multiple reports that his Jeep Wrangler had tried to run Waymo vans off the road — in one case, driving head-on toward one of the self-driving vehicles until it was forced to come to an abrupt stop.

His wife, Elizabeth, 35, admitted in an interview that her husband "finds it entertaining to brake hard" in front of the self-driving vans, and that she herself "may have forced them to pull over" so she could yell at them to get out of their neighborhood. The trouble started, the couple said, when their 10-year-old son was nearly hit by one of the vehicles while he was playing in a nearby cul-de-sac.

"They said they need real-world examples, but I don't want to be their real-world mistake," said Mr. O'Polka, who runs his own company providing information technology to small businesses. "They didn't ask us if we wanted to be part of their beta test," added his wife, who helps run the business.

It looks like The New York Times used this article from December 11 as part of their story:

A slashed tire, a pointed gun, bullies on the road: Why do Waymo self-driving vans get so much hate?

This seems to be happening everywhere Waymo is testing, not just Tempe.

Lots of comments about this article on other sites, SoylentNews should get in on the fun too! A quote from a "media analyst" suggests that driverless cars are like scabs, hired to break a union strike.

Also at The Hill.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @02:03AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @02:03AM (#780831)
    Look at the videos on youtube, including the AR, read the comments. One person who did similar following/taping said that Waymo in automatic mode drives a bit better than a stoned driver, and a bit worse than a first time driver. You call that "better than most humans?" Even the AR video shows dangerous driving (dangerous by indecision, a moving obstacle.) It is not safe to do what Waymos do on a busy street; this is why they drove their "thousands of miles" literally around the block in residential areas - a feat that a child can do. This is why they are hated - because they dare to test on small streets. I saw Waymo on Central Expressway in Sunnyvale, it was hopeless (25 in 55 mph zone) - a church lady would look like a Formula 1 driver compared to it. (They are equally slow on other roads, but speed limits there are lower.) I do not know how often Waymos drive on freeways; chances are that a Waymo has difficulties with entering the freeway because of dense traffic - it needs a large free space to merge in - good luck finding one.
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:02AM

    by Knowledge Troll (5948) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:02AM (#780859) Homepage Journal

    I've seen a video on Youtube of a Waymo car taking a freeway on ramp, indicating that it needed to merge, crawled along the on ramp while trying to find a place to fit in, not finding one, and taking the connected next offramp.

    I've also seen a video of a Waymo car take a freeway on ramp and be unable to find a spot to merge. There was no connected off ramp though so it had to merge. It just came to a stop.