{"id":648429,"date":"2025-01-09T06:20:33","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T03:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/we-talked-to-the-guy-who-was-stuck-in-a-waymo-robotaxi-on-a-dizzying-loop\/"},"modified":"2025-01-09T06:20:33","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T03:20:33","slug":"we-talked-to-the-guy-who-was-stuck-in-a-waymo-robotaxi-on-a-dizzying-loop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/we-talked-to-the-guy-who-was-stuck-in-a-waymo-robotaxi-on-a-dizzying-loop\/","title":{"rendered":"#We talked to the guy who was stuck in a Waymo robotaxi on a dizzying loop"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A month ago, a video circulated around social media<\/a> of a Waymo robotaxi stuck in a roundabout loop \u2013 an isolated incident with no passengers in the vehicle, according to Waymo. <\/p>\n

App<\/a>arently, it wasn\u2019t a one-time thing.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, in another Waymo robotaxi headed for the Phoenix airport, Mike Johns, founder and CEO of AI consultancy Digital Mind State, also found himself circling a parking lot, unable to stop the car or get out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The videos were posted within a couple of days of each other. Waymo has not confirmed whether the incidents happened at the same time or if there were other similar loopy incidents, but says it issued software updates to fix the issue.<\/p>\n

Johns was stuck in the Waymo going through a loop for \u201cunder seven minutes,\u201d but he says it \u201cfelt like forever,\u201d particularly as he feared he would miss his flight and questioned whether the car had been hacked. It was his second time in a Waymo robotaxi.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A Waymo spokesperson confirmed the incident. \u201cThis event occurred in early December and has since been addressed by a regularly scheduled software update. The vehicle completed the rider\u2019s trip<\/a> and they were not charged for the ride.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Waymo customer support specialist called into the car without Johns\u2019s prompting, he told TechCrunch. The agent said she had received a notification that his car \u201cmight be experiencing some routing issue,\u201d according to a video<\/a> of the incident Johns shared.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To solve the issue, the specialist asked Johns to open his Waymo app and \u201ctap \u2018My Trip\u2019 in the lower left corner of [the] app,\u201d to which Johns responded, \u201cCan\u2019t you just do it? You should be able to handle it, take over the car, you don\u2019t need my phone.\u201d<\/p>\n

A fair question to ask, given that such a takeover is ostensibly what a remote assistant is for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have an option to control the car,\u201d she confessed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Waymo tells TechCrunch that its rider support agents are different from its fleet response team<\/a>, which is what the autonomous driving software (known as the \u201cWaymo Driver\u201d) taps for help if it encounters an unfamiliar situation on the road. <\/p>\n

Rider support agents, like the one Johns spoke with, can respond to outreach from riders \u2014 riders can get in touch through the Waymo app and a call button in the vehicle. They can also \u201cinitiate contact if the Waymo vehicle\u2019s diagnostics indicate such a need.\u201d But they don\u2019t interact directly with the vehicle\u2019s driving software.<\/p>\n

In the end, Johns says, following the support agent\u2019s directions in the app got the robotaxi back on course.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Johns said Waymo compensated him for the ride and directed him to its website to file a complaint. The company did not reach out to him immediately after the incident, but did so this week after his video got picked up by major news outlets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy biggest thing is in this digital age that we\u2019re in, we\u2019re so disconnected from the human factor,\u201d Johns told TechCrunch. \u201cI\u2019m all for AI. I\u2019m at that forefront between AI, automation, robotics, but there still is a human factor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Missy Cummings, a professor of autonomy and robotics at George Mason University and former senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says that this incident, though small, demonstrates a larger issue that AV companies should solve for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn any robotic system, there\u2019s a big red button somewhere that, if pressed, that thing will disengage,\u201d Cummings told TechCrunch, noting that the button could be hidden somewhere in the car that\u2019s difficult to get to. \u201cAnd I\u2019ll tell you that\u2019s a really important security measure going forward because what happens if the car\u2026has been hacked by someone and there\u2019s a passenger inside the vehicle? You definitely need the ability to remotely stop everything in the car so they can get out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Waymo told TechCrunch that, in fact, \u201cWaymo vehicles have a pull over button available to riders at all times,\u201d located in the app and on the passenger screen, but Johns said the support agent didn\u2019t tell him about this, and he didn\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n

Cummings also noted that asking the rider to be an active participant in the fix by using their app is \u201cerror-prone\u201d due to potential connectivity issues and non-user friendly apps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just blown away that she was trying to get him to go into his phone to bring some resolution to this when this is clearly an urgent situation that needs to be attended to right away,\u201d Cummings said. \u201cShe should have said, \u2018Look, pull up the left corner of the mat on the floor and you\u2019ll see a red button. Hit that button.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our Technology<\/a><\/span> category.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A month ago, a video circulated around social media of a Waymo robotaxi stuck in a roundabout loop \u2013 an isolated incident with no passengers in the vehicle, according to Waymo. Apparently, it wasn\u2019t a one-time thing. Around the same time, in another Waymo robotaxi headed for the Phoenix airport, Mike Johns, founder and CEO…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-648429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}