[AutonomousVehicles] Waymo Self Driving Vehicles Getting Stuck on Street in San Francisco

[Cornelius Butler]

Hi Everyone.
Way,p Se;f Driving Vehicles are gettomg stuck on a dead end street in San
Francisco. Article link and text are below.

Article Link:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726534/waymo-autonomous-vehicles-stuck-san-francisco-dead-end

Article Text:

Waymo’s autonomous vehicles keep getting stuck in a dead-end street in San
Francisco
13
“There are some days where it can be up to 50”

By Andrew J. Hawkins at andyjayhawk  Oct 14, 2021, 1:18pm EDT

Traffic is hell, but what if the cars clogging up the roadways are all
robots? That’s what some residents on one quiet street in San Francisco
have discovered, with a seemingly endless parade of autonomous vehicles
from Waymo driving down a dead-end street in the city’s residential
Richmond district, turning around, and driving away.

“There are some days where it can be up to 50,” resident Jennifer King told
KPIX 5 in this hilarious scene report. “It’s literally every five minutes.
And we’re all working from home, so this is what we hear.”

Residents are confused as to why the Waymo vehicles — Jaguar I-Pace SUVs
with rooftop sensors and high-tech compute systems inside — keep coming,
one after the other, sometimes two or three at a time. They aren’t picking
up or dropping off customers, despite Waymo recently announcing that it was
going to start shuttling passengers around San Francisco.

A spokesperson for Waymo chalked it up to one of the nearby presence of one
of the city’s Slow Streets, in which vehicle traffic is limited through
certain residential areas. As noted in the KPIX 5 video, the street the
Waymo vehicles keep turning down is adjacent to one of these Slow Streets. ,

“We continually adjust to dynamic San Francisco road rules,” the
spokesperson said. “In this case, cars traveling North of California on
15th Ave have to take a u-turn due to the presence of Slow Streets signage
on Lake. So, the Waymo Driver was obeying the same road rules that any car
is required to follow.”

As someone who covers the AV industry, I could also speculate about the
need for companies to train their vehicle’s artificial intelligence
software in all the elements of human driving, including messy maneuvers
like the dreaded three-point turn. But I’m really just having too much fun
watching these confused robot cars pile into this dead-end street over and
over again.

It called to mind a recent event in Phoenix, in which a fully driverless
Waymo vehicle got stuck at an intersection and then, when an extraction
crew showed up, tried to run away before completely blocking a three-lane
highway.

The obvious difference is that Waymo is still using safety drivers for its
tests in San Francisco. In the video, you can see Waymo’s safety drivers
turning the steering wheels, which suggests that the vehicles haven’t quite
mastered the turn.

The incident is garnering some unwanted attention, including from one guy
who runs a car company that’s under investigation for numerous crashes
involving stopped emergency vehicles and really shouldn’t be gloating about
things like this.

Update October 14th, 2:05PM ET: A Waymo spokesperson responded with a
statement after this story published.
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