Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking

This is hilarious and I too would be furious if I lived there. But dear god isn&#x27;t it also somewhat adorable if you allow yourself to anthropomorphise.<p>(EDIT: They&#x27;re the ducks from Rick &amp; Morty [1].)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AZYyeNiGQJc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AZYyeNiGQJc</a>

This is a nice low-stakes example of how we can&#x27;t expect automated driving to just be &quot;like people but with better attention spans and reaction times and no risky emotions.&quot;<p>To twist the idiom: We aren&#x27;t making an improved apple, we&#x27;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&#x27;t had to deal with before.<p>(Comment partially recycled from older submission)

&gt; &quot;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.&quot;<p>Making people wait for your bugfix&#x2F;code change&#x2F;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&#x27;m surprised something like that isn&#x27;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&#x27;t there be a mechanism for that, too?)<p>I wonder how many issues like this will need to happen before there&#x27;s any legislation to make companies more responsible for the autonomous robots they deploy (what a sci-fi sentence!)

If two self-driving cars want to flip each other off, maybe they should do it over radio waves?

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&#x27;d presumably stop honking)?

Sounds like something Douglas Adams would’ve dreamt up.

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&#x27;t ask how I know) rendering noise control bylaws effectively unenforceable at 4am.<p>I&#x27;m surprised the high rise neighbors haven&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcbayarea.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;san-francisco&#x2F;san-francisco-neighbors-say-repeated-waymo-honking-is-keeping-them-up-at-night&#x2F;3622181&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcbayarea.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;san-francisco&#x2F;san-fran...</a>

It&#x27;s funny to think about how they&#x27;ve kind of figured out self-driving (something many said would be impossible for decades) but they haven&#x27;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&#x27;s just another ball game when we&#x27;re talking about cars keeping people awake.

Do the cars actually listen for the honks?

1) I&#x27;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&#x27;t been considered.<p>2) If only it were this easy to patch bugs in human drivers.