A cop pulled over a Waymo driverless car for going the wrong way, but he couldn’t ticket it.
A police body cam has captured an interaction between an officer and a Waymo driverless car. The Phoenix cop pulled the self-driving car over for driving on the wrong side of the road. However, the police officer couldn’t ticket the machine because, well, it’s a machine.
A construction site confused a Waymo driverless car, prompting police to pull it over after it drove against traffic
A Phoenix police officer pulled over a white Waymo driverless EV after it pulled a dangerous driving maneuver. The self-driving Jaguar I-PACE pulled into a parking lot under the Arizona sun.
Moments later, the police officer approached the driver’s side window, despite having no driver to ticket. “Yeah, there’s no driver,” the officer says on his body cam footage. Interestingly enough, the driverless Jaguar retracted its window for the officer. It then connected the officer with the vehicle support line.
“So, your car here drove into oncoming lanes of traffic,” the Phoenix cop told the support personnel on the call. The speaker responded, “Ok, I will go ahead and take a look at that right now.”
“It was eastbound in the westbound lanes, which is real bad.” It’s a bit of an understatement, but certainly true. Any vehicle, autonomous or not, is a serious safety hazard when driving against traffic.
In this case, the Waymo self-driving car was confused by the signage at a nearby construction site. Unfortunately, the confusion was enough to send the vehicle onto the wrong side of the road.
The Phoenix police officer talked to Waymo support services about the event. He asked if the company could review the onboard video to troubleshoot the vehicle. “And then I light it up and it takes off through the intersection,” the officer with the body cam says of the Waymo self-driving car. However, the autonomous EV did park itself in a nearby lot away from other vehicles.
Of course, a human driver would almost certainly get a ticket for driving against traffic. However, the police officer couldn’t write and issue a ticket to a driverless car.
