EVEN LITTLE ELDERLY LADIES WILL FIND WAYMO SELF-DRIVING CARS FRUSTRATING
Be prepared to be honked at.
A lot. Seriously, your fellow motorists are going to be angry.
If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from my recent quick spin around San Jose in Waymo’s fully-autonomous Chrysler Pacificas, (besides, yes, modern technology really is amazing) it’s that their occupants — be they owners, test drivers or just passengers using the company’s much-anticipated self-driving taxi service — should be prepared for some serious abuse.
It’s not that Waymo’s minivans do anything wrong. Au contraire, they do everything right. A little too right, as a matter of fact.
In just one example of driving safety gone too far, they are, for instance, programmed to hold at a stop sign for three seconds.
That doesn’t sound like much of a delay when you’re reading it here, but take my word on this, sitting at a stop sign and being in the only vehicle in a long line of traffic to come to what would be legally considered a “full stop” is really going to, um, set you apart from the crowd. Did I mention we got honked at? Twice. In a ride that took less than four minutes.
Nor is this the only sign of the paranoia baked into the brain/ processor/hard drive of Waymo’s hybrid Pacifica. Left turns across intersections raise all manner of red flags, even in quiet residential Silicon Valley neighbourhoods where a speeding semi is about as rare as a Vote Trump lawn sign.
Even so, the Waymo slows midway through the turn, gathering itself while it ensures that nothing is going to jump out from behind the mailbox on the corner.
Now that might not sound like much, but such extraordinary caution can seriously upset other drivers, not to mention a few (Who? Moi?) less-than-patient passengers. One of the problems with Waymo’s testing, says Amir Efrati of TheInformation.com, is that some residents of Phoenix, where Waymo is conducting its most advanced testing, are voicing serious concerns about these doddering (self ) drivers. According to Efrati, the Waymo vans are having trouble with left turns and merging into heavy traffic, especially on highways.
Even more concerning, “the biggest issue is human drivers or pedestrians who fail to observe traffic laws,” says Efrati.
Yes, I suppose that there should be no surprise that our erratic and non-conforming behaviour — not coming to a complete stop, texting while driving and turning illegally — causes the programmed-for-logic Waymo prototypes to stop abruptly in ways human drivers don’t anticipate. Efrati compares their propensity to follow the strict letter of the law to student drivers. Actually, even worse, likening them to “ultimate student drivers” taking their first driving test.
The reason for Waymo’s paranoia is actually quite interesting.
Unlike pretty much everyone else looking to develop autonomous automobiles, Waymo’s self-driving robot is totally self-sufficient. That means no mapping information beamed to the computer, no V2V (that would be geek-speak for vehicleto-vehicle) communication alerting the Waymo on where other cars are. No V2X (vehicleto-infrastructure) coms either, letting future Pacificas know that the light up ahead is going to turn red or that the crosswalk button was just pushed. Waymo’s little robot is — in the one trait that it shares with human drivers — all on its lonesome.
In other words, a Waymo Pacifica relies almost completely on its onboard sensors — built in-house rather than outsourced, by the way — to see the road and the obstacles thereon. While that offers certain advantages, the largest being there will be no loss of information from the inevitable “dropped” connectivity, such total self-reliance does have certain limitations.
Knowing, thanks to V2V communication, that there’s a motorcycle up ahead about to speed through a blind intersection allows more time for our robotic driver to react than waiting for visual confirmation. Future V2V will, in theory, even alert your car’s computer (via monitoring the motorcycle’s brake-light circuit) if said fool is even trying to brake for the red.
Waymo’s contention is such systems are both unreliable and expensive. New 5G cellular systems may yet prove to be cheap and fast enough, but so far Waymo, at least, believes going it alone is the most reliable way of guaranteeing self-driving cars are the safety boon we’ve all been promised — even if it means adhering to traffic signs as if they’re the Ten Commandments.
If you’re still not grasping how thoroughly disruptive compulsive adherence to traffic laws will be, try this: Dust off your old driving licence text book and re-memorize all the rules of the road. Now drive around downtown Toronto — or better yet, downtown Montreal — adhering to every last one of those rules.
Let me know how that works out for you.