While the Los Angeles area is plagued by fire stories, on city streets, autonomous vehicles continue to quietly drive on the roads. And this sometimes leads to some pretty funny scenes.
We are currently mainly talking about Los Angeles because of the fires ravaging the Hollywood neighborhoods. This is undoubtedly the season for which this anecdote, which occurred in the Californian city at the end of December, went relatively unnoticed. However, it illustrates quite well the paradox of the proliferation of autonomous devices which have been circulating in this American state for several years.
Indeed, if driverless vehicles and other autonomous delivery robots aim to make life easier for users, sometimes they can also complicate it and even cause accidents. In particular, we knew stories of collisions between vehicles with and without drivers, but the story that took place in Los Angeles on December 27 is a little different.
The bumpy encounter between a robotaxi and a delivery robot
In the West Hollywood district, For several months now, robots have been delivering food ordered by residents. These are designed by the company Serve Robotics and they are notably used by Uber Eats. Small in size, Serve bots move on sidewalks, like humans, and therefore use pedestrian crossings to cross the street.
On the road, however, autonomous taxis from Waymo have been available for several yearsa company owned by Google. The latter sometimes get talked about, not always in a good way, as with the user who recently almost missed his plane because of a bugged taxi. In the story that interests us, the Waymo taxi collided with the Serve bot, and everything was filmed.
Waymo taxi vs Serve bot: who is at fault?
The video leaves little doubt that Waymo’s autonomous taxi is at fault. We can see very clearly that the Serve bot crosses the pedestrian crossing correctly, even though the light is red for vehicles. Certainly, the taxi uses the rule of the American Highway Code which authorizes it to turn if there are no vehicles preventing it, but he obviously should have braked in the face of the obstacle in front of him.
On Reddit, different theories quickly appeared. And one of them is close to the truth, as the American media noted TechCrunch : the latter was able to speak with a Waymo spokesperson. He explained that the robotaxi had seen the obstacle, but had identified it as being “inanimate” : the fact that it was neither an animal nor a human would therefore have weighed in the balance regarding his attitude. Another point noted by observers who dissected the video: the delivery robot stops for a short time on the pedestrian crossing in order to adjust its trajectory to get on the sidewalk. Enough to further disrupt the vehicle arriving from the side.
The Waymo taxi, however, applied emergency braking which greatly limited the damage. : neither aircraft was seriously damaged and there were no injuries. Despite this, this kind of situation raises questions : while more and more autonomous vehicles and robots are coming to California, what about the liability of companies in the event of a collision? We imagine that startups working on the subject to avoid bad publicity in the future, but also protect their robots, which can be worth millions of dollars.
