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San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

latimes.com

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Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#141
post #102
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, human drivers are not validated either to function correctly in those scenarios. Though it would certainly be nice if they were.

Individual humans can be arrested. The exact people found in violation can be held accountable on the spot in a manner that is proportionate and scales to exactly the responsible parties. What are you supposed to do with a car with no humans around causing a problem for people? Key it? Break the windshield? Wait around for a tow truck to move it? Revoke an entire fleet’s license to drive in the State of California ov…

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time for Zero Tolerance, if one of these do it seize it, and levy the robotaxi company and whomever built it with Huge Fines. Not "oh that will just be another expense", make it that those fines pierce the corporate veil and get to the executives and the millionaire shareholders. And now that I think of it, if there are any passengers, arrest them. That way they can sue the RoboTaxi company too.

You've got hydraulic cutters on board. If a robotaxi gets in the way of your fire appliance, chop it up.

And also bill the robo taxi company for the operation.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#143
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human did this, they would probably be arrested and lose their driver's license. Stuff like this is something you just can't do . But self-driving cars get away with it because we haven't figured out how to hold them responsible yet.

Simplest thing to do is to confiscate the vehicles and levy fines large enough that its in the financial best interest of these companies to ensure that basic road safety situations are at the top of their priority lists.

The state should confiscate or remove the vehicle, bill them for storage or for the removal operation and also fine the company and take it to court if something goes wrong because of them.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#144
post #102
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, human drivers are not validated either to function correctly in those scenarios. Though it would certainly be nice if they were.

Individual humans can be arrested. The exact people found in violation can be held accountable on the spot in a manner that is proportionate and scales to exactly the responsible parties. What are you supposed to do with a car with no humans around causing a problem for people? Key it? Break the windshield? Wait around for a tow truck to move it? Revoke an entire fleet’s license to drive in the State of California ov…

> The State can pass a law that gives immunity to anyone who breaks into a misbehaving unmanned autonomous car in order to disable the autonomy and take control of it

What do you do with vehicles without human controls? Mandate human controls?

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#145
post #144
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual humans can be arrested. The exact people found in violation can be held accountable on the spot in a manner that is proportionate and scales to exactly the responsible parties. What are you supposed to do with a car with no humans around causing a problem for people? Key it? Break the windshield? Wait around for a tow truck to move it? Revoke an entire fleet’s license to drive in the State of California ov…

> The State can pass a law that gives immunity to anyone who breaks into a misbehaving unmanned autonomous car in order to disable the autonomy and take control of it What do you do with vehicles without human controls? Mandate human controls?

Are those a thing yet? Like not just a prototype, but in service and on the road? But yes, probably, at least for the foreseeable future.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#146
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the situation is similar. The robotaxi is parked in front of you, you connect to it and move it away. The entire context is right there.

well honestly, if we're saying that the person being inconvenienced is the one who gets to take control, there's probably gonna be a lot of angry people driving these cars off of bridges or into ditches or something. Giving an incredibly frustrated person control of a separate car, though better for context, is probably worse for desired outcome.

How about the robotaxi company driving in respect to regulations and other's property, then we wouldn't have this discussion. Oh, it's technically not possible? Well, then don't drive them.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#147
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time it would take to pull out a phone and call a Cruise support line is already too long.

first of all it'd be a dedicated emergency line, like 911 to Operations center direct. Second of all, if that is not fast enough, then humans are insufficient too. You cant just magically get people to act (a lot of the time they'll do the wrong thing and fail to even recognize what situation they're in at the moment) Notice how bumper to bumper traffic is pretty bad for EMS, people do not know how to react.

Honking your horn and getting the person to pull away is pretty fast. By comparison it takes several minutes to get through to 911 where I live. Not to mention most humans would know better than to park in front of a fire department driveway or drive through caution tape.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#148
post #118

How do these companies not have a simulator built to help train cars for simulated non-standard scenarios? Have dogs, kids, fire trucks, caution tape etc and run them with 100k variations. And then do real world staged validation. Actually why are extensive real world mock scenarios not running 24/7? If a car does something bad, do mock scenarios around it. Please tell me they are doing these things because it’s craz…

They are. At least Waymo has published details about their closed course testing. Dunno about Cruise.

In that case, By the way cars don’t know how to approach fire trucks, fire hoses, and caution tape it’s is very apparent whatever they are doing in the closed is a failure or grossly inadequate

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I agree with the general concept, Scale up standard punishments to be in line with corporations. * Robotaxi violates traffic laws like blocking a fire engine? Fine of $10,000 * Robotaxi drive into an active crime/fire scene? $100,000 fine * Robotaxi actively hinder emergency services (ex parking on a hose)? Confiscate the vehicle. Corporations are the same anywhere, until a problem becomes too expensive, t…

I don't think these actions take place enough times for your numbers to have any impact on the robo taxis. At that point it wouldn't even be a slap on the wrist. You'd have to add at least 2-3 zeros before any action would be taken, and the action would likely be something else then what you are expecting. These things just don't happen often enough for this to ever be addressed without the original point of piercing…

> Since Jan. 1, the Fire Department has logged at least 39 robotaxi incident reports.

Assuming they are all the lowest "class" of incident with a $10k file each, that's $390,000 . A not insubstantial fine but maybe not huge impact. Though we know several of these incidents (because they were in the news) were of a more severe class. So lets assume that's half a million in fines at least.

So a million dollars a year in fines just to operate at limited times and in limited locations. Open that up to a lot more cars in a lot more places? Those fines will add up to be quite substantial.

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