What seemed like a simple trip turned into an adventure of false starts and devious behavior after a San Francisco journalist attempted to hail a Waymo self-driving taxi to a small museum in New York. local.
San Francisco The residents are quite bored with their streets being used as testbeds for emerging technology. Robotaxi complaints are on the rise in the Bay Area, especially after two cars Traffic blocked on a busy weekend. Journalist Lyanne Melendez at ABC 7 was initially excited to make the first trip in a self-driving taxi. The plan was to pick up her son from the nearby Randall Museum. She expressed confidence in Waymo’s ability to drive safely, even though the car stopped to pick her up at the exact opposite angle half a block away.
Then the real problems started.
Melendez’s first ride broke down when her taxi stalled in the middle of the lane when the light was green. It took a few seconds and contact with the Waymo team to get the car moving again. This should have been a simple operation—in fact, one of the simplest human operations could do, but robotaxi screwed it up.
The next screws until the taxi took the wrong turn and dropped Melendez in front of a house with instructions for her to climb a very steep hill full of cacti and succulents and walk another 5 minutes to the museum. She was forced to call support, who asked her to move the car forward to find out its location. necessary to be. The taxi then drove around the block only to drop Melendez off in front of the house.
“If there was a driver here, I would say ‘Hey, you know, this is the wrong place! and I will guide him unless no one is here right now,” she says in the video. Sure, she points out, she can climb the steep hill and walk to the museum, but what about the physically weaker (those for whom self-driving cars are arguably the most useful) either have small children or carry a lot of groceries. And indeed, it is providing a difference service level than required.
In the end, Melendez drove his own car on the relatively simple route to pick up his son from the Randall Museum. Of course, you don’t have to be in a self-driving taxi for these new technologies to completely ruin your day. San Francisco residents have had a lot of fun being a sandbox for self-driving car developers. Taxis disrupted first responders, public transport was stranded, and cause traffic jams throughout the city.
Right now, the Taxis are limited in where and when they can operate, but those limits are also being lifted. San Francisco residents will have a chance to vote on July 13 on whether to allow self-driving taxis to operate 24 hours a day.
