Not exactly a warning to the world, a issue in the backlog, a legal requirement that when out of network access taxis exit the roadway and dont just sit there…
The day after California approved an expansion of driverless taxis, 10 of them came to a grinding halt on a busy San Francisco street, creating a gridlock that encompassed several blocks.
“Cell phones were overwhelmed, and as a result, they were not able to take control of these cars — which is a pretty frightening systemic defect,” Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (SFBV), told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter.
Both companies have repeatedly asserted their robotaxis are safer than human drivers, have not caused any deaths or life-threatening injuries over millions of collective kilometres driven and that real-world testing is critical to perfecting the technology.
“While we do not yet have the data to judge [autonomous vehicles] against the standard human drivers are setting, I do believe in the potential of this technology to increase safety on the roadway,” CPUC commissioner John Reynolds said in a press release.
“Collaboration between key stakeholders in the industry and the first responder community will be vital in resolving issues as they arise in this innovative, emerging technology space.”
What’s new, he said, is that Cruise, in a social media statement, blamed Friday’s glitches on “wireless bandwidth constraints” from the festival, which “delayed connectivity to our vehicles.”
"Cell phones were overwhelmed, and as a result, they were not able to take control of these cars
Worrying that we’re making everything wireless, yet don’t have the spectrum space to actually support that.
IMO take a page out of China’s book and build dedicated 5G networks for this class of vehicle, to give them any chance of widespread success in an even more wireless future
which is a pretty frightening systemic defect
Defect… I don’t think so, they’re working as intended. The cars can’t move safely and are unreachable on the network, so the safest thing would be to stay put?
Requiring an always-on connection isn’t feasible for vehicles. The breakdown here occurred in a major city with plenty of coverage and there are also many parts of the US with zero cellular coverage.
I assume the cars machine vision is done locally (“on the edge”) so stopping in the middle of the road is not the only option available for a “loss of connection” failure mode, and it is very undesirable. They could absolutly use their self driving and gps to navigate back to whatever box the company puts them in when they are not in use.