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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: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:29AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:29AM (#780911) Journal

    Autos kill around half a million people a year

    Automobile fatalities in total right? Not number of automobile fatalities that have a root cause or were made worse by a defect in the machine?

    And includes regions that are a lot slacker about quality of cars and road safety. Point is that a lot of death is acceptable in automobile travel and engineering bugs aren't normally going to respect country borders.

    It's also worth noting that there are serious problems with how the developed world handles the liability of bug fixes. We already have various critics conflating research into a problem as proof of negligence or worse and some of that occasionally gets [nytimes.com] into the courts. Even mistakes made by a virtuous company which aggressively pursues dangerous bugs and flaws in its products is enough to end up in the courts. And there will be mistakes.

    These are two big reasons why criminalizing car design and construction is a bad idea. Perfection is not possible and people will die due to flaws in design or code. Similarly, detection isn't perfect either and more people will die before a virtuous business can fix the problem. That's why all these examples of dangerous flaws in products mentioned in this thread shouldn't be considered crimes.

  • (Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:17PM

    by Knowledge Troll (5948) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:17PM (#781089) Homepage Journal

    You are correct that criminalizing any mistake or anything that leads to injury is a mistake. For instance when the Dehaveland Commet started exploding a little bit while flying people died. Turns out square windows in a pressure vessel isn't a very good idea. Who knew? Well, nobody. We got some new science from that and oval windows in every airplane that follows. Ignorant? Yes. Criminal? No.

    Toyota produces a control system for a machine that is intended to have humans inside of it, the control system manages the high power output propulsion system, and there is no mechanical override. It turns out that writing shoddy code that ignores the lessons of the past and further ignores industry practices that were created to avoid those very problems is a bad idea. Who knew? Essentially everyone that's a professional software developer and anyone that is an electrical engineer creating software for control systems. Ignorant? No. Criminal? Yes. At least in my eyes. I don't see how Toyota can get a pass here as if the situation they created was full of unknown results or surprises.

    In the case of GM it is possible the engineers were not entirely aware the product had a design flaw. Though there is the pesky issue where GM corporate laid down some rules regarding the adjectives engineers are allowed to describe the machines they produce. For instance the term "rolling sarcophagus" is right out, can't say that anymore. You have to say "does not work as intended." Hmmmmm. Maybe they do know something isn't right in this process and culture?

    Another example of a non-crime dangerous machine I think is the Corvair. Dangerous at any speed like Nader wrote about or just a twitchy rear-wheel drive car that's prone to oversteer? It's the latter. I also drove a car that was rear wheel drive, twitchy and prone to oversteer. It's called a sports car. As the driver of one it comes with responsibilities. It's not the car's fault it is a handful.