Comment by zombittack

3 days ago

I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving. Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. Absolutely stupid for a city or state government to approve autonomous systems in their municipalities without first enacting very strict and very punitive laws around these systems. This goes for surveillance, sidewalk delivery bots, and especially driverless cars.

I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.

46 comments

zombittack

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nullishdomain  2 days ago

> I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.

I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.

> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.

> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.

> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.

[0]: https://kdvr.com/news/local/waymo-drives-through-denver-farm...

mech4bg  3 days ago

>Luckily, no one was hurt.

It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.

  • spankalee  3 days ago

    This exactly. The car didn't drive into people: it followed a vendor truck into a place it shouldn't have gone, apparently slowly exited the area.

    It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.

  • jonaustin  3 days ago

    > drove into a farmer's market

    > wasn't...endangering people

    There's a bit of a disconnect there.

    • mahboi  3 days ago

      The first comment is like saying I drove into a building when I entered my garage.

    • UltraSane  3 days ago

      A self driving car can drive places it isn't supposed to be while ALSO very carefully avoiding colliding with anything.

    • Revanche1367  2 days ago

      "Endangering" is an exaggeration based on what actually occurred it seems. What the car did was technically in violation of traffic regulations but it was careful to not hit anybody or cause significant damage to people's property as it did so. This is essentially no different than a careful driver ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) a sign restricting them from entering an area, but still driving through the area successfully without doing any harm. Technically, traffic rules were broken, by mistake (an algorithmic one most likely) in this case, but there were no lasting effects.

      People make mistakes like that all the time, and sometimes they still get ticketed for that kind of thing, and other times they get a simple warning or don't get any form of rebuke at all. How many of us have never accidentally gone into a one-way traffic lane from the opposite side and managed to still drive through and get back on track without killing or maiming anybody? It's unlikely anybody would get charged with a crime for this, nor should they over a simple mistaken rule violation that did no harm.

sib  2 days ago

Earlier this year a 92-year-old woman drove into our local Asian supermarket, killed three people and injured at least six. No criminal charges were filed. At least they pulled her driver license.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/westwood-99-ran...

I don't say this to suggest excusing autonomous car companies from bearing liability, but just for context.

Perhaps we should not make the regulations too punitive on the AV companies as that would reduce the speed of replacing bad human drivers who currently cause 40,000 deaths a year in the US.

infecto  2 days ago

> I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.

I would be shocked if that was the case.

pj_mukh  3 days ago

A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].

When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.

[1]:https://abc7news.com/post/80-year-old-san-francisco-driver-k...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLLkGaKX7NI

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8gMd9XZJyg

  • mlmonkey  3 days ago

    I happened to be in that area of West Portal on that fateful day (damn you, Noe Valley Bakery!) I did not see it happen, but went to see what that noise was all about. The images of that scene from that day still haunt me; they are very vivid. It was a terrible, terrible accident and may that old witch Mary Lau spend an eternity in hell.

  • gruez  3 days ago

    >A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail.

    And that's an easy case to prosecute too, because the driver clearly broke laws beyond just "crashing into people":

    >when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.

  • janalsncm  3 days ago

    > Two years ago, the family of four was on their way to the San Francisco Zoo with their two young children when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.

    Horrifying. Life is short, enjoy what you have.

  • 1shooner  3 days ago

    > is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.

    Why?

    • pj_mukh  3 days ago

      Process A is killing 40,000 people per year.

      Process B has killed none to do the same job.

      I'm sure per mile driven, there is an "acceptable death rate", but should we atleast wait till the autonomous cars are on the board to make that a priority?

      4 replies →

stephen_cagle  2 days ago

I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.

A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.

michalhosna  3 days ago

How is that different from a malfunction of human-operated car?

There are drive-by-wire cars on the road. ABS systems can disable breaks.

If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?

9991  3 days ago

> Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime.

This is bananas. Cops are not experts in the law. I'm sure a competent district attorney would be able to throw somebody in jail for this.

hbn  3 days ago

Did you want the cops to arrest the car?

  • temp84858696945  3 days ago

    Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction, start legal proceeding against the company. Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.

    • JumpCrisscross  2 days ago

      > Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction

      When we start taking idiot drivers' licenses away, sure. Otherwise this is a silly overreaction with a calculable cost in human lives.

    • soco  3 days ago

      Are you referring to the actual case mentioned here, where a car passed slowly through a market and... that was all what happened?

    • azan_  3 days ago

      Aren’t waymos actually much safer and have less incidents per mile compared with human drivers? (Yes, they are and yes they do)

  • fuzzfactor  2 days ago

    These may be little, but they are Jaguars.

    And cops do sometimes want a higher performance police cruiser than average in case a runaway speeder needs to be apprehended.

    Probably going to eventually need an autonomous one of these for some police departments:

    https://gmauthority.com/blog/2026/09/california-highway-patr...

    No driver needed but you still need to have a Robocop inside to get out and write the citation :)

    In the old days this kind of thing was often referred to as a "police interceptor".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW8-1SYvDTI

    If the violation is serious enough the autonomous predatory tow trucks will hear it on the radio then show up promptly to whisk the vehicle away, as usual. Plus in this case the driver is detained and the vehicle is impounded in the same stroke :)

    After that it would only be fair that they would have to not only pay bail to the court, but also towing & storage fees before being released, like for any normal driver.

    And if they skip bail, they're going back in the slammer :0