A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 442 points –
A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco
theverge.com

A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco::A Waymo car was destroyed in San Francisco as a crowd began vandalizing it and ultimately set the car on fire. Nobody was in the vehicle at the time.

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This is exactly the kind of stuff I think about when people talk about autonomous cars being the future or the idea of your Tesla doing rideshare while you're not using it.

Indubitably, someday you'll get your car back and there'll be a big steaming shit on the seat.

The people riding are not anonymous so you know who did it, and the rideshare company will have insurance for those cases.

I'd be much more worried about drunk people barfing all over the interior, BTW.

The real issue that no one mentions is that it will be dark at night and cameras will not work very well. You will be able to identify every person who gets in, but not who spilled something all over the seat / floor. So you can't charge anyone for cleaning.

The next passengers will grind it into the fabric. When you get the car back it will be stained, and no insurance covers stains. If you think Uber will cover that with no proof of which customer did it, you are dreaming. This is one of the many things an Uber driver does (telling people "no smoking, drinking, eating, sitting on laps, etc.") that a self driving car won't do.

A self driving taxi will be like the back of the bus, where no one is watching. You don't want to know what's going on there.

  1. Infrared cameras

  2. Whoever booked the driverless taxi pays for the damage

You don't understand. There's no camera on the floor of the car. There are so many times that someone can drop something without even realizing it. You won't know which paying customer did it.

Someone can have a pen in their back pocket and be scribbling all over the seat without even knowing it. How will any camera catch small dark ink marks on a dark seat in the dark? Your eyes are so much better than that and even they won't catch everything.

You don't think drunk people have to shit?

I assume most of it will stay in the pants

If im drunk in someone elses tesla and i shit myself, im leaving the drawers in the car. Im not walking around in that.

Sure but damage is damage and you probably need your car to do something so who wants to deal with that instead of doing whatever is important and they're supposed to. In the US a car isn't optional and parking isn't free and readily available everywhere for long periods of time.

That's why you (theoretically would) earn money by renting it.