What would you do if you were stopped at an intersection and someone put a traffic cone in front of you? Sit there for the rest of your life blocking everyone behind you, or move it/drive around it? Same for literally every example that deviates from the happy path, no matter how minor. Construction work, something fallen on the road, a delivery van stopped on the side, temporary street closures. These cars are nowhere close to being intelligent enough to handle city driving, and won't be for a very long time.
They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to handle this specific situation?
Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wide variety of other methods to obstruct sensors.
> Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm
That does raise the question of what kinds of adverse situations an AV should have specialized hardware or software to handle. Maybe they should have a robotic arm! I dunno, probably not, but maybe!
A less silly example might be if the car breaks down. When a human driver is in the car, they can put the car in neutral, get out, and push it to the side of the road, out of the way of traffic. An AV will just sit there, blocking traffic, until a tow truck can arrive (which in most places can take 45 minutes or more). Granted, in this case, I don't think there is anything an AV can do. But I think these sorts of things are worth thinking about.
I'd be interested to know how Waymo/Cruise currently sense and respond to catastrophic failure. A blown tire? Brake failure? Broken timing belt?
Which isn't to say that humans respond especially well to these things, but at scale, AV should be able to handle them not just as well as humans do but much better.
If we can have it give a little shake or window knock to the car in front of me, stopped at the light that's turned green, checking texts - consider me on board!
Putting cone on self driving car is vandalism and should be punished accordingly. Self driving companies have footage of people doing it. Is SFPD looking for these people? Self driving companies shouldn't need to be able to deal with criminals trying to actively disable it. These cars weren't designed to drive in a warzone. Most businesses are not able to operate when criminals try to actively interfere with its operations. Some basic level of law and order is required for modern society to exist.
Vandalism in California requires "maliciously damaging, destroying or defacing someone else's property". A cone on a hood does none of those things.
It might be some other crime, but we can't slap people with charges that won't stick in a court of law.
The counterpoint to the argument is that you shouldn't be deploying deadly machinery on public roads with no ability to handle common issues and expecting it to be a problem for the SFPD/CHP.
It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away. Would most people try to shake it off while driving away, or stop in the middle of traffic? What's actually the right thing to do, both as a person and as an AV?
More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles, intentionally to confuse or disrupt the driver? Or should they be punished?
> It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away.
Hah, good call. I'm thinking that if I was at a traffic light or stop sign, and it wasn't a major road with other lanes of cars and lots of traffic whizzing by, I'd hop out, move the cone, and go about my day. If I didn't feel safe, I'd accelerate slowly enough so as not to shake off the cone, and move to the side of the road and deal with it there.
> More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles
No, it absolutely shouldn't. In the case at hand, what if one of these AVs with a cone on it ended up blocking traffic and delaying an ambulance or fire truck, causing someone to die? I get that this is a protest movement, but I wouldn't want that on my conscience. And people protest in all kinds of ways that aren't legal (often called "civil disobedience"). People who do that should expect to suffer consequences, and accept that outcome as a part of the protest.
