Waymo has been testing its self-driving vehicles in San Francisco for the final decade. However an obvious change to the autos’ routing has brought about a lot of them to make a beeline for a dead-end avenue in a quiet a part of San Francisco, inflicting residents there to surprise what on earth is occurring.
A latest CBS report visited the road — fifteenth Avenue north of Lake Avenue in Richmond — to see if it may work out why so a lot of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are exhibiting up, turning round, after which driving proper out once more.
You see, it’s not simply the occasional Waymo automotive that’s making an look. One resident mentioned that as many as 50 of the self-driving autos can present up within the house of a single day, rumbling alongside the highway “actually each 5 minutes.” When the CBS crew was on web site, it noticed a number of Waymo vehicles turning up on the similar time, inflicting the autonomous autos to attend in line whereas each carried out a multi-point flip earlier than driving out the identical approach it got here in.
Some people within the native space have even approached the vehicles’ human security drivers to ask why the autos have taken a liking to this explicit avenue.
However the drivers don’t appear to know, telling the puzzled locals that the automotive seems to be programmed that approach, and that as a security driver they’re simply doing their job by sitting behind the wheel and going the place the automotive takes them.
Even Elon Musk, chief of electric-car firm Tesla whose autos embrace numerous driver-assist options, tweeted a response to the weird state of affairs, saying merely: “Haha.”
A Waymo spokesperson informed the BBC that its autos sometimes make a detour in response to the presence of one of many metropolis’s so-called “sluggish streets”, that are designed to cut back visitors in some residential areas, including: “The Waymo driver was obeying the identical highway guidelines that any automotive is required to observe.”
However it nonetheless appears odd that, regardless of San Francisco’s massive measurement and abundance of streets, so many Waymo autos are persevering with to trundle into this explicit dead-end avenue.
“Undoubtedly they’re exploring one thing on this little piece of land,” one bemused resident mentioned.
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