Why can't they build a mechanism where the car can close its own doors. I thought that would be the smaller part compared to autonomous self driving
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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The gig worker is the mechanism. Very innovative tech.
I know I can shut a passenger side car door with just the accelerator and brakes. If it's not latched completely then a bollard or a curbside tree will suffice.
Human driven taxis have mechanically closing passenger doors for decades. It's a big bug software and a management a failure . This can't be street legal. Autonomous cabs are billionaires snake oil
Hell, the Mexican colectivo van driver closes the sliding doors on his rattly 20 year old van simply by hard braking.
Putting aside all the late stage capitalism going on here, I still can't get over the fact that Alphabet (Google) spent billions of dollars developing self driving car technology only to arrive at, "Oh shit. Someone left the car door open. What do we do now?"
Giving them the ability to close their own doors just screams "kid's arm smashed in automatic car door failure".
That's silly. This is already a ubiquitous feature in minivans.
Just make the motor not slam the door but close it slowly with not enough force to harm someone and put like two sensors + 1 backup in there
Call me a cynical luddite but somehow I don't trust today's autonomous car technology to be reliable and fool-proof enough for that mechanism not to fail catastrophically and randomly because it's raining or someone on the other side of the street made a sudden movement or Mercury is in retrograde or the company's stock market just dropped 592 points because investors are furious after realising they wasted money on a backup or it's Tuesday.
You know we already have autonomous doors for houses. I feel like theres a lot more trust involved having a 2 ton vehicle move significant speeds on the road than having it close a door
I do not know that. I'd also assume the technology to close a door on a car to work very differently from that on a house because a door on a house that may not be closed properly is far less dangerous than one on a car. Also, yes, I don't trust that 2 ton vehicle either if it claims to be autonomous.
But they built in a saw blade killswitch if a finger is detected a good decade ago or more. Surely they can apply such technology to cars.
It hasn't yet been used without people around who can stop the process if it goes wrong.
And yet things like robovaccums have. The sawblade has to detect the right material. Meanwhile Robot vaccums just have to detect anything in its path to then stop. And it has a bumper. And ring cameras can detect motion. As well as dashboard cameras. Dont see why any of this technology cannot be used in car doors just to detect anything in it’s path.
I'm not saying it's forever impossible, I'm saying I currently don't trust these technologies to operate autonomously in a context where lives are at potential risk and they'll need to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that they can do so reliably before I start trusting.
The sawstop causes mechanical damage that must be repaired if activated. It's more like an airbag than an e-stop.
I used to have a Tesla (traded it in). In the app you could open, but not close, the windows. It could be inconvenient at times but I assume the reasoning was similar.
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This shows you just how strong our culture is an influence here. You can leave a door open and cause enough trouble that they need to hire someone else to go manually shut it. I’m willing to bet there are a lot of seemingly innocuous ways to cause friction with these companies. The more people know and exploit them, the better.
the revolution IS YOU
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Even if this thing was left on a single city block for 8 hours with its door open, the data it collects about nearby cars, Bluetooth devices, phones, WiFi SSIDs, recorded video/audio, etc. makes it worth it for alphabet, I imagine.
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Does it charge extra to the last person that used the Waymo to cover the cost? Because if not, might as well just leave the door open every time, now you're a job creator.
Just keep the door and you're creating even more jobs in the door factory.
They have self-driving cars, but self-closing doors is still at least 10-15 years away.
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Hmmm…so it costs Waymo $11.25 if you “forget” to shut the door.
Maybe people will become very forgetful.
Or, upon reflection, just don’t use Waymo, and don’t play into it at all.
If you leave it all the way open, the car just needs to drive a couple feet with decent acceleration to close it.
If you ALMOST close it, but not all the way, that would require some sort of intervention.
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The cost of doing business is to pay a poor to close a door and keep the wheels of progress spinning.
so from now on leave all waymo's open and if you see one open no you don't
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Give people a dollar discount off their ride if they close the door on the way out.
Why are people leaving the doors open in the first place that's just wild. The super excited to get to work or something I don't get it.
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to just ban people who leave the doors open, it's not that hard to close them.
Probably the doors are in the "unlatched" position rather than wide open.
Maybe some people simply expect an autonomous vehicle to be able to autonomously close its doors in the safest possible way without assistance. Maybe they actually think they're doing it right by not forcing the doors?
But charge an extra dollar first
have a friend stalk Waymo’s and give the passenger $5 to leave the door ajar a bit .
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