This is hilarious and I too would be furious if I lived there. But dear god isn't it also somewhat adorable if you allow yourself to anthropomorphise.<p>(EDIT: They're the ducks from Rick & Morty [1].)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZYyeNiGQJc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZYyeNiGQJc</a>
This is a nice low-stakes example of how we can't expect automated driving to just be "like people but with better attention spans and reaction times and no risky emotions."<p>To twist the idiom: We aren't making an improved apple, we're replacing apples with oranges.<p>There will be things that are kinda-alien to human expectations and conventional wisdom, novel problems, and differently shaped risk profiles that we haven't had to deal with before.<p>(Comment partially recycled from older submission)
> "We are aware that in some scenarios our vehicles may briefly honk while navigating our parking lots. We have identified the cause and are in the process of implementing a fix."<p>Making people wait for your bugfix/code change/deploy cycle when your little bug is unilaterally intruding on their lives and disrupting their sleep? This is just callous and irresponsible.<p>They really should have a procedure for immediately rerouting robo-traffic when problems like this occur, or just blocking off an area immediately when something like this is reported. I'm surprised something like that isn't part of the legal hurdles for getting a robo-taxi service approved.<p>Even in the current legal framework they have to be violating some sort of noise ordinance. (Speaking of which, can police not just stop and tow robo-taxis that are causing a disturbance? Shouldn't there be a mechanism for that, too?)<p>I wonder how many issues like this will need to happen before there's any legislation to make companies more responsible for the autonomous robots they deploy (what a sci-fi sentence!)
Hypothetically, if a situation like this were happening where self driving cars are causing a disruption in a particular area, could someone place traffic cones around the cars to prevent them from moving (and in the case in the article they'd presumably stop honking)?
Some lawyer could sign up several hundred people as plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit.<p>The other problem is that noise control bylaw officers seem to be on 9-5 schedules (don't ask how I know) rendering noise control bylaws effectively unenforceable at 4am.<p>I'm surprised the high rise neighbors haven't taken to slingshotting rocks off their balconies.
Still, I’d rather see empty Waymos bumbling around a parking lot than seeing empty Waymos clogging up our SF streets, and (observed twice recently) blocking pedestrian crosswalks.<p>Still, I wish Waymo had at fielded a vehicle smaller than an enormous, 5,000 lb, 400 hp Jaguar i-Pace SUV. That Jag is designed for 80-90 mph freeway cruising, not 15-30 mph urban driving.
Original source: <a href="https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-francisco-neighbors-say-repeated-waymo-honking-is-keeping-them-up-at-night/3622181/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-fran...</a>
It's funny to think about how they've kind of figured out self-driving (something many said would be impossible for decades) but they haven't figured out parking in their own lots without the self-driving cars honking at each other.<p>As a dev, I experience this sort of thing daily with bugs popping up. But I work on websites. It's just another ball game when we're talking about cars keeping people awake.
1) I'm interested to know what the patch look liked to fix this bug. The intended behavior is good (honking to warn that a car is about to back into you), but this edge case hadn't been considered.<p>2) If only it were this easy to patch bugs in human drivers.