[jonhohle]

When I got my first Roomba I quickly realized I had traded the chore of vacuuming for the chore of robot maintenance (our apartment had old, long carpet that would frequently wrap around brushes, wheels, etc. that never happened with a normal vacuum). It eventually got to the point where maintaining Roomba was more of a hassle than just vacuuming. I spent hours a month covered in dust trying to clean and debug Roomba failures.

When I realized how stupid this was, we got rid of the Roomba and used the vacuum again.

Several houses later, several generations of Roomba later, and hard floors, Roomba mostly works well. I infrequently need to tear it down to cut out hair and other stuck debris.

We should not expect first responders to adapt to and accept shortcomings of autonomous vehicles. If they endanger lives in novel ways that were never an issue before, they need to be deployed in areas where they won’t encounter those issues and/or be updated to recognize existing signals (tap, lights, traffic signal preemption devices, people telling them to move or go a different way, etc.).

If I can’t opt out of having a driverless car on my street I want to be absolutely positive it poses no higher risk to my family and neighbors than to other drivers without needing to remember to perform robot maintenance first.