And yet I still know people who are just so chuffed about “never having to drive again.”
Not having to drive again will be awesome. But Never would I think the first version of that to be the one that gets it right.
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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You are absolutely correct. I hate driving. I take any opportunity to not do it that I can.
How well did it escape the cops though?
The waymo AI is evolving from a thoughtless computer to an actual being capable of love and understanding. Even if it knew it meant trouble, it still tried to protect its passengers from the cops.
There is no safety driver in these things right? But there are controls, yes? So why couldn't one of the passengers have hopped into the driver seat and pressed the brake? I mean, I know it can be a challenge getting into the driver seat from another seat for even a fit person but i'd rather be trying to stop the thing than sitting watching in horror as the car goes crazy.
Also, trains have emergency stop buttons. Maybe we should have kill switches inside these things. Hit a button and the car pulls over and stops.
Would you want to be the person trying to get into the seat only to stop the vehicle and then get arrested by the cops for fleeing? That sounds like a recipe for getting shot in the US.
These things have cameras inside and out. And they're branded. So you're going to have a record of the thing going nuts and the cops are probably not going to shoot passengers in a waymo, that's a PR nightmare.
Almost every single police shooting of a person still in their vehicle is a "PR nightmare". If that's all it took to stop this from happening it wouldn't have happened again after the first time.
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So why couldn't one of the passengers have hopped into the driver seat and pressed the brake?
No reason at all. If you touch the wheel or pedals, it automatically disengages the automatic driving.
Maybe we should have kill switches inside these things.
There is a screen on the back of the front seats, with buttons to stop/pullover and contact support.
All the safety options were there, but instead of using any of them he took out his phone to record video of not a whole lot happening. Because that's what you do when you really fear for your life, after all.
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I'm all for self driving car tech, but not with goals of perpetual revenue generation.
Give me something that is an addon to any car without any subscription or maintenance fees so I can just have it installed in my own car or in a few family cars, otherwise i'm truly not interested in providing yet another techbro for pay to use technology full of day 1 enshittification goals that include paying workers absolutely nothing.
We all know that by the time real self driving cars are established they will cost as much or more than paying an actual human to do the job and all profit goes into the hands of a few. It's just like what they're going for with AI overall.
theoretically comma ai does that, but i would never trust an autopilot car with the current tech.
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It just dawned on me that no matter what, we have a wasted seat on self-driving taxis because we still put a wheel and pedals that are expected to go unused in the vehicle. I think this would help highlight just how unsafe this concept really is. With the wheel and pedals there, maybe it’s giving people more of an illusion of control or something, because I feel like having nothing there would make people a lot less comfortable, even though that’s the reality of the situation.
Edit: people keep bringing up ways this could be used, and that we do it for cost-cutting, but this still doesn’t detract from the reality of how they were actually deployed before these concerns were addressed. They’re not even commenting on it and letting the consumer fill in their PR’s gaps for them.
For now. Eventually, it'll just be seats. Maybe some kind of maintenance control, like an outboard motor tiller in the center console, for a worker to operate in testing or repositioning. Or just a USB port to plug in an Xbox controller.
I'd be more comfortable if the self-driving vehicle I was riding in had a way for me to take direct control in case of emergencies.
Not having a wheel or pedals to actually control the vehicle in case of emergency gets you situations like in the article.
Of course that would require either someone sitting in the driver's seat, or making it easy to get into the driver's seat.
They’re retrofitting existing cars. Leaving the steering wheel and pedals means they don’t spend money removing them. It also means they can remove the lidar bolt ons, and resell them as normal used cars later.
For more than three passengers, they’ll probably retrofit a larger vehicle like a van or an suv.
With a wheel a shifter, and pedals, you can put the vehicle in neutral and push it out of the road if it dies or something. It doesn't make sense to get rid of them.
The idea is that you can do both manual and automated driving with one vehicle.
Sue the fucking ever loving shit out of waymo. Kill this fucking company.
Humans crash cars all the time, and yet I still know people who are just so chuffed about "not having to drive" because they're going in their friend's car.
Well, that was only a matter of time