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Title: Tens of Thousands of US Emergency Workers Trained on How to Handle a
Robotaxi

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/14/2334...

Last year Amazon's robotaxi service Zoox held a training session for 20 Las
Vegas firefighters, police officers, and other first responders, reports the
Washington Post, calling it "a new ritual for emergency workers across the
country, as autonomous vehicles begin to spread beyond the handful of cities
that served as initial testing grounds..." Questions that came up included:
What can first responders do if the nearly 6,000-pound vehicle is blocking a
roadway? (Better to pull, not push.) What happens if the vehicle loses its
connectivity? (It's designed to pull over.) And can first responders manually
shut off the vehicle? (Not yet, but Zoox is working on it....) The vehicles'
operators claim they drive more safely than humans, but anything can happen
on public roads, and first responders need to know how to intervene if a
robotaxi is caught in a collision that traps passengers, catches fire or gets
caught doing something that demands a traffic stop... Alphabet's Waymo, which
has more than 2,000 vehicles completing hundreds of thousands of paid trips
each week across San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Phoenix,
Austin and Atlanta, has trained more than 20,000 first responders in how to
interact with its vehicles, the company said. Tesla didn't respond to a
request for comment on how many first responders the company has trained, but
a representative from the Austin Police Department confirmed that fire,
police and transit workers were trained on the company's Robotaxi before the
company launched commercial service in June. Tesla, Waymo and Zoox say their
vehicles can detect the lights and sirens of emergency vehicles and
automatically attempt to pull over. Waymo says its vehicles can interpret
first responders' hand signals.... The first responders appeared excited
about the potential of the company's artificial intelligence technology to
ferry visitors up and down the Vegas Strip without concern that a driver
might be inebriated. They were also wary of problems that might unfold:
Autonomous vehicles are electric, and when electric vehicles catch fire,
they're difficult to extinguish, the firefighters said. The first responders
also worried that a secondary air bag deployment could injure an emergency
responder, a common concern with conventional vehicles. And if a police
officer wanted to view the footage a Zoox vehicle captured on the road, would
the company be willing to share it? Turning over footage would require a
subpoena, a Zoox official responded. But "those who've been through the
trainings and have seen large-scale commercial rollouts say it's difficult to
anticipate all the potential issues in a specific market," the article points
out. Darius Luttropp, former deputy chief of operations for the San Francisco
Fire Department, told the Post last year that Waymo vehicles had blocked city
firefighters from leaving and entering firehouses, and also crashed into
their equipment. Lt. William White of the Austin Police Department told the
Post that more than once Waymo vehicles failed to recognize an officer on a
motorcycle with their police lights activated.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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