Feds Probe Waymo Driverless Cars Hitting Parked Cars, Drifting Into Traffic

upstart writes:

Auto-safety regulator is investigating 22 reports of Waymo cars malfunctioning:

Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into construction zones-all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Monday.

To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving system. Seventeen incidents involved collisions, but none involved injuries.

Some of the reports came directly from Waymo, while others "were identified based on publicly available reports," NHTSA said. The reports document single-party crashes into "stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains" as well as instances in which Waymo cars "appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices."

The ODI plans to compare notes between incidents to decide if Waymo cars pose a safety risk or require updates to prevent malfunctioning. There is already evidence from the ODI's initial evaluation showing that Waymo's automated driving systems (ADS) were either "engaged throughout the incident" or abruptly "disengaged in the moments just before an incident occurred," NHTSA said.

[...] Earlier this year, Waymo voluntarily recalled more than 400 self-driving cars after back-to-back collisions in Arizona. While Waymo relies on machine learning to "interpret complex object and scene semantics" that ensure self-driving cars safely navigate roads, Waymo has saidit's mostly focused on responding to varied weather patterns or less predictable movements of emergency vehicles and is still learning how unpredictable navigating the road can be.

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