A stray robotaxi from the Google sister company Waymo has caused a traffic jam at the car switch of a fast food restaurant in Los Angeles. The driverless car drove without a passenger into the Drive Thru lane of a branch of the chicken chain Chick-Fil-A-and stopped there. After half an hour of waiting, the car switch was closed so that Waymo could remove the vehicle, an eyewitness reported to the local broadcaster KTLA. On his video you can see how the Robotaxi initially tries to drive backwards out of the car switch track and then give up.
Waymo explained that the car had dropped a passenger at the restaurant – and then, surrounded by other cars, I could no longer leave the narrow parking lot. You update the software so that something like this will no longer happen in the future.
Carousel in the roundabout
Waymo is by far the most successful developer of self -driving cars. The company, which emerged from Google’s robotic car program, is active in several US cities and is now making around 200,000 trips with passengers per week. The vehicles navigate confidently through complex road traffic. However, they get some unusual situations that people could solve through communication with other drivers, for example. The robotaxis then often stop.
A Waymo car in San Francisco was observed how he blocked the passage in a parking space because he considered it too tight because of a large vehicle. Worse for the driver behind it: a little later he was blocked by another robotaxi, which also stopped. In another case, a Waymo vehicle was filmed, as was done in a roundabout without leaving it in a roundabout. Such situations are rare – but then cause trouble with residents.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 250410-930-429114/1
