Waymo is voluntarily recalling one of its robot taxis after it collided with a telephone pole in an alley to pick up a passenger. The Verge informed. The car was unoccupied and no one was injured.
In the accident on May 21, the Waymo car drove through an alley lined with telephone poles installed at street level, rather than on the side of the road, with a yellow line showing where to go. According to Waymo, while towing, it hit one of the poles at 8 mph and suffered some damage.
“There was never enough time to pick us up,” said passenger Jericka Mitchell, who was waiting for the car. 12News. Mitchell heard but did not see the accident.
The company has filed a recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after updating the software on its entire self-driving fleet of 672 vehicles. The update is intended to fix a bug that caused low damage to the pillar and ignored the hard edge of the alley.
This is only Waymo’s second recall. The first happened earlier this year when two of its autonomous vehicles crashed into the same pickup truck that was being towed. There, Waymo found that its software was unable to predict the vehicle’s movements due to a “persistent orientation mismatch” between the towed vehicle and the one pulling it.
Waymo is also under investigation for more than 24 incidents, including accidents and traffic violations. It was GM’s Rival Cruise involved in a more serious incident Last year, one of its robot taxis dragged someone who had been hit by another car several dozen feet down a San Francisco street. California then suspended his license to operate in the state, and as a result, Cruise stopped all robots transactions
