Autonomous congestion of four Waymo self-driving vehicles
Advances in technology can be extraordinary, but they can also give rise to funny scenes. One of them occurred recently on the streets of San Francisco, where Waymo’s Jaguar I-Paces roam the city’s streets completely autonomously, acting as taxis for people who call on their service.
During our recent visit there, we were amused to see these vehicles circulating among all the others throughout the city, without any apparent problem. We’ve heard stories about glitches where they all have to park overnight (details a little further down), but from what we’ve observed, it works pretty well.
However, it is inevitable, comical situations can arise. The one that caught the attention concerns a small traffic jam which lasted a few minutes and which was filmed by a passer-by, visibly amused by the thing.
Taxi autonome en circulation | Photo : Waymo
What happens in the scene you can see below is that a Waymo vehicle comes up behind a delivery van that is blocking its lane. As he prepares to overtake him, he encounters another Waymo vehicle, which of course stops his race. The vehicles study each other to see what the other is going to do, and remain stationary. The irony is that behind each one another Waymo vehicle shows up, thus blocking traffic. Fortunately, the vehicle coming in the opposite direction from the one blocked by the delivery van eventually “understands” that it can move forward, which frees the traffic jam.
You should know that if people are inside the vehicles, they can call the control center for help and thus resolve the situation.
Other funny scenes have already been filmed in the past, including places where vehicles have to park at night. As you can see in the video below, the models get a little confused when faced with too much traffic, and at first, their instruction was to honk their horn after a few seconds in front of a dead end. The problem is that when 20 or 30 Waymo vehicles are in the same place and they all start honking, it quickly becomes cacophonous, and unbearable for the occupants of neighboring buildings, especially when the situation occurs in the middle of the night.
Fortunately, more fear than harm.
We will remember that an accident involving a General Motors Cruise Origin vehicle left one person dead on this date last year. A pedestrian had been struck by another vehicle (with a driver) and was thrown in front of a Cruise vehicle, which did not stop and dragged the individual a significant distance (20 feet) before stopping.
Permission to operate self-driving vehicles on city streets was then withdrawn from Cruise, which has since abandoned the region in favor of Waymo.
Passengers boarding an autonomous taxi | Photo: Waymo
