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The way this has apparently been handled saddens me. I worked for Cruise, a Waymo competitor. A Cruise vehicle famously had a very unfortunate accident and Cruise government relations employees famously tried to cover up the worst details when reporting it to the CA DMV. Of course the cover-up was discovered and guess what? Cruise lost their license and not long after lost all their funding and shut down.
Self driving cars are a new technology that makes a lot of people nervous. For it to succeed those nerves need to be acknowledged and settled. This is life and death for the business and technology!
Also, Waymo's customers (and really all of us sharing the road with them) are very much providing Waymo a huge service as early beta testers. They need to be treated extremely well right now. It is not the time for Waymo to be trying to keep things quiet, dismissing concerns, and making half assed restitution for problems. Again, This is life and death for the technology and your company, Waymo! Every bit as important as the engineering work you are doing. Please don't screw this up
I am surprised the trunk didn't open, and I’m very surprised that Waymo support could not turn the vehicle around. I’ve had a Waymo alert me when I left something in the back seat; I’m surprised it did not do the same for the trunk.
I think the person should report this to either the California DMV or CPUC, as well as the local airport authority.
For autonomous vehicles, I think people need to ‘normalize’ leaving one of the doors open until all people & cargo are out of the vehicle. The vehicle may complain, but it’s not going to drive off.
Probably a strike system of some kind -- most rideshare platforms handle deliberate misuse that way. Though whether Waymo can distinguish intentional from accidental here is less clear. The sensor data would tell them something, but inferring intent from door-open duration is a different problem.
The trunk sensor failing silently with no alert is the kind of thing that gets filed as a known issue and then quietly deprioritized until someone screams loud enough.
That’s funny, I’ve actually used the same algorithm but with taxis in general, for having the same exact issue as the person in this article… but with a real driver.
(All of this assuming it’s safe to keep a door open!)
This is a general fear for me whenever I take a taxi or something like it: i always remind the driver of my luggage in the back when we arrive and ask them whether they can help me get it.
This past week I took a Waymo and had difficulty exiting. It seemed like someone may have enabled the child locks. I'm overall very positive on the service, but this kind of issue needs to be addressed by the company.
If I steal your luggage, do you expect to be paid to get it or that I return to you?
Waymo should have white-gloved this and sent Larry Page himself to deliver the luggage. This is horrible PR. Airlines will send you their luggage if misplaced. One day Waymo will drive-off with your toddler and ask you to file for adoption if you want them back.
The gotcha is the trunk sensor — it's supposed to confirm the door is open before driving away. Used Waymo regularly in SF and had a close call once where it started moving while I was still unloading. They could absolutely dispatch one to deliver it back.
Why can’t they just put back into a car in the back seat or whatever and send it off to him? Seems strange to make it so difficult when they surely have a vehicle sitting right there in their depot that could do the job as soon as the customer is back home.
No, it doesn't. It used to be when the airline lost your bag they would get it to you no matter what. They own their mistake, and make it right to the best of their ability. In the most egregious case I can recall, delivering skis and poles 4hr+ from the airport into a remote mountain village ca. 2003. This is how you build trust in your brand--when you fuck up, you take ownership and make it right. You don't just shrug it off and throw a gift card on the floor like "take it or leave it idgaf".
How do we help you (and anyone else who thinks this is reasonable) to understand that it's absolutely not. Sure, it could be worse, but it also could be much better.
Not that I'd trust a self-driving car anyway, but if I were in his situation I would absolutely take the free ride there and back to get my stuff. It would be even more "massively wasting someone's time" to wait for them to do something else otherwise, which would entail a lot more risk.
IIRC "at their own expense" vs "complementary rides" isn't really the issue -- it's the time cost. Free transport still means he has to arrange his schedule around their mistake, not the other way around.
Try getting a Lyft driver to pull over mid-trip because you left something in the trunk. You'd face the same runaround. This isn't a driverless car problem specifically; it's a ride-hailing dispatch problem that happens to look worse without a human in the car.
Self driving cars are a new technology that makes a lot of people nervous. For it to succeed those nerves need to be acknowledged and settled. This is life and death for the business and technology!
Also, Waymo's customers (and really all of us sharing the road with them) are very much providing Waymo a huge service as early beta testers. They need to be treated extremely well right now. It is not the time for Waymo to be trying to keep things quiet, dismissing concerns, and making half assed restitution for problems. Again, This is life and death for the technology and your company, Waymo! Every bit as important as the engineering work you are doing. Please don't screw this up