Waymo driverless car goes viral after being spotted out for a drive
- Waymo is the leading name in the growing market for ride-hailing services with self-driving cars
- This Waymo self-driving taxi was filmed swerving for no reason
- Waymo cars are currently only available in Phoenix, AZ and San Francisco, CA
Published on May 23, 2024 at 7:16 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on May 24, 2024 at 6:31 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Tom Wood
Self-driving cabs are a thing, in case you didn’t know.
They’re already out there and already available to customers, albeit only within certain geographical limits.
But, as the latest incident shows, they’re still far from perfect.
Waymo is one of the leading names in this growing industry that Tesla is also about to join with the Cybercab.
It’s essentially like Uber but for self-driving cars.
You download the app, order a ride, and a self-driving Jaguar i-Pace will show up and take you from A to B.
For the time being, Waymo is only available in certain parts of San Francisco and certain areas of Phoenix, Arizona.
And it appears that it’s the one in Arizona that’s giving people – and the authorities – a few headaches.
Just last week, Arizona’s Family, a news outlet with a focus on the Grand Canyon state, reported that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is already investigating over 10 traffic violations and/or crashes involving Waymo vehicles.
According to the NHTSA, most of these incidents have been reported in Arizona.
In the clip here, you can see how the car swerves back and forth, struggling to stay in its lane for no discernible reason.
And this brings us to the problem here, because when a human driver does something stupid or dangerous or unexpected in a car, there’s an explanation.
It may be an explanation we don’t like, but at least there is one, and that means there’s some specific issue that can be identified and fixed.
In this case, it’s just a glitch, apparently.
The point is these cars are smart, but they’re clearly not smart enough.
Not just yet anyway.
Just a few weeks ago, a man went viral after making a Waymo car stop dead simply by wearing a t-shirt with a ‘STOP’ sign printed on it.
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