Arizona’s Driverless Cars Are More Dangerous Than Helpful

If you look back a century, you're likely to find fantasies of the kind of life humans would be living in 100 years. They predicted airships, moon colonies, and flying cars. The best we've got is untrustworthy self-driving cars.

How disappointed they must be.

What is Waymo?

Waymo is the kind of company you'd see advertising in the background of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. They are "the world's first autonomous ride-hailing service", which is just a fancy way of saying that they provide driverless Ubers. These seemed to be a massive innovation. We've been trying to develop driverless cars for years, and here they are, on a mass produced scale meant for everybody.

We may have jumped the shark a bit too early, however. Problems started popping up immediately with this service, whether they forget their directions, lack simple road awareness, or keep circling empty parking lots at night, their use has become more of a hassle than anything.

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Wrong Way(mo)!

The driverless car company has finally gone viral, though not in the way they hoped. Their car AI's incompetence was finally captured on video, and seen by millions as two Phoenix residents captured footage of an incident, and shared it to TikTok where it was promptly viewed, shared, and laughed at across the world.

The video shows the two girls in a car, staring down a Waymo that was going the wrong way down a street, before stopping in the middle of the intersection at Rural and Lemon. The car then turned to face down the two poor videographers, before slowly cutting across three lanes of traffic to correct its course. The course wasn't corrected, and the car kept driving the wrong way down the street in the middle of rush hour.

I know we want innovation, and we have the tools to do so, but let's take a page out of Apple's book and not release anything new until it's been tested properly and we know it won't fail. Yeah?

[Waymo]

[westcoastbakes via TikTok]