Mass robotaxi malfunction halts traffic in Chinese city

[Jilly_in_VA]

A mass robotaxi outage in the Chinese city of Wuhan caused at least a hundred self-driving cars to stop mid-traffic, sparking renewed debate around the safety of driverless vehicles.

Local police said initial findings suggested a "system malfunction" caused multiple vehicles to stop in the middle of the road on Tuesday.

Videos on social media have documented the outage, with one appearing to show it resulting in a highway collision, although police said no injuries had been reported and passengers exited their vehicles safely.

Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the police statement, posted on social media site Weibo, the cause of the incident is still under further investigation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvge91r9j80o

Can you imagine this happening on the LA freeway, or the Beltway? I can, and no thank you very mucj!

[RainCaster]

1. This is by design

For these cars to work right, they need a stable network that is up all the time, with latency and bandwidth specifications set by engineers, not the Communist Party.
The Internet in China goes up and down several times every hour by design. Cell phone mapping software used there is specifically designed to run in "offline" mode for this reason.

[Jilly_in_VA]

2. There is no such thing as a stable network

Even ours, which is probably the most stable in northern VA, goes down when there are high winds (which seem to be more frequent these days), heavy snow, or severe thunderstorms.

[RainCaster]

3. I'm serious- in China it goes up and down 3-4 times every hour

And it is all by design. The Party has decreed it be so. It plays havoc on VPNs, which is the primary reason for it being so, I surmise.

[Jilly_in_VA]

4. so does the internet in a lot of places here

Biden actually tried to do something about that during Covid, if you will remember...for the schoolkids in mostly poor or rural areas whose Chromebooks wouldn't work half the time because of no or abominable internet service here. A friend who lives in the same county I do (which is considered relatively advanced) had abominable internet and her boys were often in tears because they could not get their schoolwork done back then. It has, I think, been fixed, but no thanks to Shitler.