624
Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
624 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3209 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They're probably now programmed to honk if another car is in the way after some of their cars had to wait behind some driver way too long and customers were complaining. So now these cars are in the parking lot and slowly maneuvering to find a spot or to move to the exit, all at the same time because somebody has set up a schedule for the car to start at 4am and copied it to all vehicles. So at 4 am, they all want to go at the same time and block each other. Because now they are programmed to honk if they are blocked, they start honking at each other and you get what's in the article and video.
source: just seen too many unintended consequences of software engineering decisions
They appear to honk when a car is backing up within X feet towards them.
Yup. And the issue here is that the cars back into and out of the parking spots, and are also programmed to stop if they get honked at. So car 1 begins backing into a spot, car 2 honks, car 1 pauses and then begins backing again, car 2 honks again, repeat… And when you have 30 cars in a parking lot, all trying to find a parking spot, there’s a lot of backing up and a lot of honking.