What just happened? In what will be another blow for robotaxis and the self-driving industry as a whole, Waymo is being investigated by the government highway safety agency following numerous reports of the company’s vehicles being involved in crashes or potentially violating traffic laws.
The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said it has reports of 17 crashes and five possible traffic violations involving Waymo vehicles equipped with its 5th generation automated driving system (ADS). The agency says the ADS was either engaged in each incident or disengaged in the moments just before they occurred.
The reports include collisions with stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates, chains, and parked vehicles, and instances in which the ADS appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices such as lights. Some of the collisions occurred shortly after ADS exhibited unexpected behavior near these devices.
While some of the accidents were reported by Waymo to the NHTSA, as required when autonomous vehicles are involved in collisions, publicly available reports highlighted other incidents, including Waymo vehicles driving in opposing lanes with nearby oncoming traffic or entering construction zones.
As reported by The Verge, videos of Waymo vehicles driving erratically have been posted online over the last few weeks. One showed a car driving on the wrong side of the road to avoid a pack of electric unicycle riders.
Another video, filmed in Tempe, Arizona, shows a Waymo taking a left turn and driving into oncoming traffic, seemingly to avoid the jam of cars waiting at the lights.
@kilowattsapp Hello officer, sry i got a little confused #waymo #autonomous ⬠original sound – kilowattsapp
Waymo recently analyzed 7.13 million fully driverless miles in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, comparing the results to human drivers. It says the self-driving vehicles were 6.7 times less likely than human drivers to be involved in a crash resulting in an injury, or an 85 percent reduction over the human benchmark, and 2.3 times less likely to be in a police-reported crash, or a 57 percent reduction.
News of the probe is just the latest bit of bad publicity for self-driving and semi-autonomous tech. Waymo rival Cruise paused its operations last year after a woman was struck by a human-driven car, hurling her in front of a driverless taxi that ran her over and stopped with its rear tire still on her leg. The Cruise vehicle attempted a pullover maneuver after it stopped while the pedestrian was still under the wheels, dragging her another 20 feet.
Last month, the NHTSA opened a safety investigation into Ford’s BlueCruise “Level 2” driver assistance system following two fatal accidents allegedly involving the feature. There was also an NHTSA report linking Tesla’s Autopilot systems to nearly 1,000 crashes from the last few years, over two dozen of them fatal.
