Los Angeles Incident Reveals Gap in Autonomous Vehicle Regulatory Framework That Nobody Thought to Close Until Someone Found a Person in a Trunk
Originally reported by Bohiney Magazine and cross-posted to The London Prat, where the editors have strong opinions about everything that follows.
LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles woman discovered a man hiding in the trunk of the self-driving Waymo vehicle she had summoned via app, an incident that is remarkable on several levels and that has produced a regulatory response whose urgency is directly proportional to how many people have learned that this is a gap in the autonomous vehicle permit framework. The gap is: autonomous vehicle operating permits in California do not currently require trunk occupancy detection, because nobody thought to specify this, because nobody anticipated that a passenger would summon a driverless vehicle, find a person already in the trunk, and be required to call customer service rather than a driver to address the situation. Customer service is not trained for this. The driver, had there been one, would have had options. The app had a form.
Waymo confirmed the incident and noted that passenger safety is the company’s highest priority. The company described the resolution as satisfactory without specifying the sequence between “woman discovers man in trunk” and “resolved.” Both parties are no longer in or near the vehicle. Law enforcement is handling the matter. The vehicle has presumably been cleaned, inspected, and returned to service, because the vehicle did nothing wrong. The vehicle drove from the origin to the destination using its autonomous systems. It delivered the passenger. The trunk was not the passenger compartment. The vehicle was not designed to distinguish between an empty trunk and an occupied one. This is now a known design consideration. It was not previously known to be a design consideration because it had not previously happened.
How Someone Gets Into a Waymo Trunk
Waymo vehicles are unlocked via digital key through the application. They can be accessed through the passenger doors. The trunk, in standard Waymo models, is accessible from the vehicle interior. Someone who gains access to the vehicle before the legitimate passenger — through application compromise, physical presence at the pickup location, or mechanisms not yet disclosed — could access the trunk before the vehicle departs. The autonomous driving system would not detect this. The system monitors road conditions, navigation, and passenger cabin sensors. The trunk is cargo space. The cargo space is now under review.
This is the nature of novel technology deployment at scale: the edge cases emerge from actual operation. You cannot anticipate every human behavior by modeling in advance. Waymo has millions of operational miles. The trunk incident is one data point in millions. It is also the data point that now appears in every regulatory discussion about autonomous vehicle safety frameworks, because regulators and the public have learned that the trunk is not monitored, and learned this from a news story rather than from Waymo proactively disclosing the limitation, which is the less good way for the public to learn things about safety-adjacent features of vehicles they are using.
The Regulatory Response
California’s Public Utilities Commission has confirmed that it is reviewing autonomous vehicle permit conditions in light of the incident. The review is expected to address passenger security protocols, trunk access design, and the gap between autonomous vehicle capabilities and the full range of human circumstances that occur in vehicles. Human taxi drivers manage these circumstances through judgment, improvisation, and the ability to pull over and call for help. Autonomous systems manage them through customer service escalation and regulatory review after the fact.
Separately, Waymo has confirmed that a baby was born in one of its vehicles — also outside standard operational parameters, also resolved satisfactorily, also prompting a review of protocols that were not designed to address obstetrics. The company is handling the full distribution of human life events with a customer service infrastructure that was designed for lost items and navigation feedback. It is adapting. The adaptation is happening faster than the regulation. According to the Los Angeles Times, CPUC’s regulatory timeline for permit updates has not been specified. The woman who found the man in the trunk has not spoken publicly. The man in the trunk has also not spoken publicly. The vehicle is in service. The Daily Mash covers autonomous vehicle regulatory frameworks with equal safety-consciousness.
The Design Implications
The Waymo trunk incident has surfaced a category of autonomous vehicle design question that the industry has not previously been required to address publicly: what happens inside the vehicle when something unexpected occurs, and who handles it? Human taxi drivers handle unexpected situations through judgment, improvisation, and the ability to pull over, call for assistance, and maintain a human presence that allows for real-time situation assessment. Autonomous vehicles handle unexpected situations by continuing to do the thing they are designed to do — drive — and referring everything else to customer service. Customer service is not designed for in-vehicle crises. It is designed for billing disputes and navigation feedback. The gap between what customer service can handle and what might happen in a vehicle moving through urban traffic is a design gap that the trunk incident has made concrete. The regulatory framework will address it. The vehicle will be retrofitted or the next generation will include sensors. But the discovery mode — a customer report, a news story, a regulatory review — is the mode that the industry currently relies on for identifying what the design needs to address. It is not the most proactive approach. It is the approach that exists until the proactive approach is specified, which is what regulations are for, which is why the regulations are being reviewed.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/