What to do when your Waymo holds up a Secret Service motorcade

What to do when your Waymo holds up a Secret Service motorcade ft.com

32 points•cjs_ac•7 days ago•22 comments•

#service #secret #waymo #motorcade #service motorcade #waymo holds #secret service #secret service motorcade

22 comments

beachy7 days ago

I feel that abandoning your car at an intersection and fleeing the scene in front of armed officers as a presidential drive by was about to arrive - in Dallas of all places - could have had far worse consequences.

idontwantthis7 days ago

Yeah I'm not sure if I would have had the guts to get out or if I would have just curled up on the floor of the vehicle and preyed.

readthenotes17 days ago

It's the secret service. Safe the runner is safe unless she's a prostitute or you happen to trip.

boredatoms7 days ago

Hopefully this highlights the total absurdity of the motorcade in the first place.

Just use a helicopter, block one street for the takeoff/landing

SoftTalker7 days ago

Or the absurdity of autonomous cars that can find themselves in situations where they don't know what to do, and so just stop?

toast07 days ago

Road vehicles stop all the time for all sorts of reasons.

Safely coming to a stop because the conditions are unexpected is the right thing to do for an autonomous car.

Slow response by exception handlers is more of a problem.

phoronixrly7 days ago

As opposed to what?... Floor it? Just stopping is the safe default* that should be practiced by more human drivers, too.

*) In the general case especially within cities. There are exceptions - for example on roads with high speed limit like euro highways, where stopping for non-emergency reasons is banned anyway.

bryanlarsen7 days ago

Freezing and not moving is also a very human panic response.

mswphd7 days ago

helicoptors are a much more dangerous way to travel though? this is already true in the best of times/when you aren't anticipating a possible attack on the passengers.

wat100007 days ago

Law enforcement yelling at a powerless customer while the responsible people sit obliviously in an office thousands of miles away. What a perfect microcosm of our times.

creatonez7 days ago

> “I need this vehicle to be out of here NOW, or it will be crushed,”

Sounds like the proper response is "my car has been disobeying me for the past 30 minutes, so crushed is fine" and then get out

darepublic7 days ago

I wonder if they could have manually set the car to neutral and then pushed it out of the way?

SoftTalker7 days ago

Any sort of "let the passenger take control of the vehicle" functionality would cause all kinds of chaos.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

22 comments

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