 "Illegal U-turns, impatient lane change: Self-driving cars behaving like human drivers")
San Francisco residents say Waymo’s once courteous self-driving cars now behave more like “an aggressive New York taxi driver”, weaving through tunnels in zigzags, rolling through stops, and squeezing past other vehicles, according to a report. In September, police in nearby San Bruno, Calif, stopped a Waymo after seeing it make an illegal U-turn, highlighting how sharply the company has reprogrammed the cars to drive more “confidently assertively”.
When officers approached the vehicle, a Waymo operator’s voice began speaking to them, the Wall Street Journal reported. Police Sgt Scott Smithmatungol said, “They said they would look into it. They were really, really apologetic.”
Chris Ludwick, senior director of product management at the Alphabet-owned company, told the Journal that the vehicles have been recalibrated because overly passive driving was disrupting traffic on San Francisco’s crowded streets. “That was really necessary for us to actually scale this up in San Francisco, especially because of how busy it gets,” he said.
Some riders say they can feel the change. Pacific Heights resident Jennifer Jeffries, who has logged nearly 3,000 minutes in Waymos, told the Journal the cars now manoeuvre as effectively as an Uber driver, getting closer to other vehicles than she expects and slipping around obstacles that once left them stuck. “They will go around a car or get closer to a car than a human driver would,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll be in the back seat and I’ll be like, ‘Ooh that was really close.’”
Users divided over assertive new driving style
Others say the new behaviour can be unsettling. Pedestrian Marc Schreiber told the Journal a Waymo began accelerating through a crosswalk as soon as he cleared the front of the vehicle. “I was taken off guard,” he said. “My next thought was, oh they’ve changed the programming to be more aggressive.”
Ludwick told the Journal that the “driver is designed to respect the rules of the road.” He said the cars have logged 100 million driverless miles across cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix, and Atlanta, with 91% fewer crashes involving a serious injury or worse compared with human drivers.
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View AllSome residents say the bolder approach is a mixed development. Pacific Heights accountant Cossette Drossler told the Journal she has heard of Waymos performing “California stops”, when a driver slows at a stop sign but does not come to a complete halt before moving on. She said she does not want Waymos coming to a full stop on empty neighbourhood streets but is unsure she trusts the cars to judge when rolling through is actually safe.
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