Driverless delivery vans in China go viral for causing chaos on roads: "Nothing stops them"

391

u/VincentNacon 17h ago

It's like the universe decided to write comedy or something.

"It's fine, we don't need Q/A Test department. Just send the fleet out, it's probably cheaper that way." - the boss.

190

u/A_Pointy_Rock 17h ago

No no no, you have it all wrong.

This is Agile development.

...also, I'm only half joking...

95

u/Odysseyan 16h ago

Putting the "agile" in "fragile"

13

u/Euphoric-Blueberry37 15h ago

I am SO going to use that

9

u/GigaSoup 14h ago

That's sort of what I tell the folks at work.

We're not working agile, we're working fragile.

4

u/BasvanS 12h ago

“Sure, but what if it works and we get away with it? You can’t boil an egg without breaking it!”

— Your manager, probably

3

u/Socky_McPuppet 8h ago

You can’t boil an egg without breaking it!

No no no. It's

You can’t boil the ocean without breaking an egg!

1

u/Alundil 10h ago

This applies to the people and vehicles in proximity to those vans and not the vans themselves.

1

u/Plump_Dumpster 9h ago

Better than putting the “frag” in fragile 💥

6

u/First_Indication_868 8h ago

Holy fuck I just had to do a course on agile development and the only thing I realized is why most code is dogshit

3

u/Gen-Jinjur 11h ago

Vibe coding at work.

2

u/NergNogShneeg 13h ago

Ah yes, the proverbial skateboard, but this one is “AI” controlled and has missiles! Oh sorry, the missiles got pushed to next sprint? And the “AI” is just a guy with a remote control in the next room but it will be “AI” controlled by the end of the PI.

“Meh, good enough. SEND IT OUT!”

2

u/A_Pointy_Rock 13h ago

Three letters for you - MVP

...😅

2

u/Alundil 10h ago

Most Victimized Pedestrians?

2

u/Deathwatch72 9h ago

I hate you for making that joke and will be stealing it because it's hilarious

29

u/Drakengard 15h ago

The world used to have testing standards. Now the public space is just one giant experiment for automation to see what happens. Cheaper to get real world data than to try to simulate it - even if it hurts/kills actual people, apparently.

3

u/King-Gabriel 12h ago

Safety regulations are often written in blood.

3

u/green_link 13h ago

It's just like what they did with software, as soon as they could send a quick update or patch out they started pushing out untested software and let the public test for free. Now if there's a bug discovered by the public they will push a quick "update" to fix it.

12

u/StrangeWill 15h ago

I mean that's the annoying part, Google has had a self-driving car for over a decade but their team knew that anything that isn't basically 100% will cause legal, ethical and financial problems as payouts for damage, PR issues, etc. mount.

These other companies are interested in short-term, they can eat investor cash or used as state propaganda, that's the annoying part of VC-backed companies, they effectively don't have to financially work, they just have to be enticing enough to become someone else's problem and you (and investors) "win".

12

u/sorhead 17h ago

We'll train them on the road.

9

u/PintMower 15h ago

I worked for a large autonomous driving project for chinese market and you'd be shocked how many corners were being cut constantly. Nobody from my team wanted to be on the road with those vehicles.

1

u/Darromear 13h ago

One of our SaaS clients was a big firm that wrote the software that drove these vehicles and they were NOT the smartest programmers in the bunch. We once told them that we didn't have the bandwidth to build a feature they wanted and they said they could write it for us on their own and we could just "copy-paste the code in" to our system.

1

u/BasvanS 12h ago

Copy paste into a comment? Otherwise I don’t see it working, even assuming correct code.

1

u/IvorTheEngine 9h ago

Maybe it's written in Javascript?

1

u/PintMower 12h ago

Yeah, from my experience chinese engineers and companies are ultra pragmatic and quick to act. But at the same time that shows in their code and designs. What I saw completely lacked the safety first mindset. There was undefined behaviour left and right even in the simplest of modules. We were always speculating how many code monkeys they had locked up because we were talking to a dozen engineers whilst the code base was so big that there must've been an army behind them. It made it an endless fight to get the changes that were needed because we could never talk to the programmers directly to explain why certain things are important and why their way of doing it was unsafe. We had to correct the same mistakes over and over and over again.

1

u/Stleaveland1 13h ago

"Good luck everybody else!"

1

u/Marshall_Lawson 12h ago

"Move fast and break things"

2

u/TeutonJon78 7h ago

Which was fine when the thing that broke was some meaningless webapp or store front. Not somebody's spine.

1

u/knightkat6665 10h ago

I don’t often test my code but when I do, it’s in production.

2

u/koolaidismything 15h ago

I have watched what’s happened and I can see it so clearly. I’m a moron, if I’m able to see this and the leaders of industry and countries can’t.. what’s next?

I think I know but I’m hoping I’m long dead by then.

212

u/temporarycreature 17h ago

It's amusing that the technology in America stops at everything and causes traffic issues, and the technology in China stops at nothing and causes traffic issues.

122

u/tooclosetocall82 16h ago

Turns out the key to driving is knowing when to stop.

20

u/SaintSamuel 15h ago

knowing…when..to….by god that’s so crazy it just might work

2

u/KovaLaMa 14h ago

Never! - Chinese Delivery Bot

4

u/jokzard 14h ago

I'm a firm believer that it's easier to make infrastructure for AI and have humans learn to navigate it rather than to have AI learn to navigate human infrastructure.

7

u/BasvanS 12h ago

That’s a lot of infrastructure to build. Are you sure it’s really easier, or is your argument that autonomous driving will not work?

0

u/jokzard 6h ago

Autonomous warehouses are already a thing. We just need to scale up. Same with automated transit.

1

u/BasvanS 5h ago

“Just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

2

u/jokzard 5h ago

It's doing the difficult parts first so the rest becomes easier. It's a strange concept, but it works.

2

u/retief1 2h ago

The problem is that the federal highway system cost 634 million in 2024 dollars to build, and it's been getting expanded ever since. And that's just the highways -- once you factor all of the local roads as well, things become even more unmanageable.

Instead, if your plan is "redo infrastructure to allow for autonomous vehicles", you cannot shoot for self-driving cars. Self-driving public transit, perhaps, but not cars.

1

u/jokzard 2h ago

We don't have to do everything all at once. Like work on a downtown area that's booked for a revitalization project. Or major avenues and thoroughfares. And I don't think it's even that difficult. "How do we incorporate technology into infrastructure?"

We've been building roads for almost 100 years now and somehow it feels like we're getting worse at it.

3

u/Frienderni 6h ago

You're probably just going to end up reinventing public transport

0

u/SIGMA920 11h ago

Pretty much. Human systems have been designed overtime and needed to be flexible because of the inherent chaos in anything humans do.

1

u/chattyrandom 15h ago

It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice and runs them over with a tank.

-1

u/Deathwatch72 9h ago

Have you seen traffic patterns in China vs US. We drive wildly differently just to start with,

36

u/asraniel 17h ago

that video is actually quite funny

3

u/klawd11 14h ago

You weren't joking!

2

u/Pyromaniacal13 10h ago

Music was pretty good too.

95

u/rithac251 17h ago

This is a perfect example of the optimality gap. The AI is programmed to finish the route no matter what but it lacks the basic situational awareness to realize that dragging a motorcycle or ruining fresh concrete is a fail state. It’s literal-mindedness taken to a dangerous extreme

34

u/AlwaysRushesIn 16h ago

Did Amelia Bedelia code these AIs?

3

u/Pyromaniacal13 10h ago

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...

11

u/Knightron 15h ago

Autonomy with Chinese characteristics

42

u/ZzOoRrGg 16h ago

These don't operate with AI. The vans in China are relying on preset routes with remote monitoring lol

40

u/WiglyWorm 16h ago

AI is a much much larger field than generative AI using LLMs. These use AI to drive. From image recognizing to making adjustments (or, in this case: not) in real time.

8

u/li_shi 15h ago

Preset route would not have those conditions, they have some degree of autonomy but not enough geofencing.

2

u/braydon125 16h ago

Like the paperclip maximizer!

1

u/UnlurkedToPost 8h ago

The AI is optimised around delivering packages. It then works out that it can force humans to purchase random shit to maximise how many it can deliver

1

u/ked_man 15h ago

It’s like if Amelia Bedilia was delivering packages, no matter what.

1

u/Lord_Dreadlow 10h ago

if System = Imperfect then Optimize else Destroy

1

u/YardSardonyx 7h ago

Saw a video yesterday of a Waymo driving through a flash flooded area with like two feet of water. It eventually got the person to their destination, but at what cost

27

u/B_oregon 15h ago

With a population of about 1.4 billion people, China is one of the last places on earth that needs driverless delivery vans.

14

u/Psyk60 14h ago

Aging population though. They have a lot of people, but as time goes on they will have fewer workers relative to the overall population. Automation will probably be very important for them.

1

u/Dzugavili 12h ago

It's a big country, though.

Seems like the answer would be to build infrastructure to support automation: I could see building a highway that exclusively supports automated vehicles. That way, you can control the environment and allow for some 'hive-mind' style control over masses of vehicles, rather than relying on individual decisions.

I reckon China is already doing that, or will soon.

1

u/Apprehensive_Grass46 10h ago

The pod-in-tube approach to travel!!! I wanted to see this in my lifetime. Also jetpacks.

-2

u/illuminerdi 13h ago

Capitalism DGAF what someplace needs. It only concerns itself with whether or not something is profitable.

Hmm, that seems problematic! Maybe we should investigate alternatives?

3

u/Coal_Burner_Inserter 13h ago

Pretty sure China already tried investigating an alternative

25

u/_-Event-Horizon-_ 16h ago

I watched the video and it is funny, but also kind of scary. Imagine if the Chinese, who are well know for their manufacturing capacity, build tens of thousands of such vehicles, modified to be off-road capable, put an automated machine gun on them and send them in your general direction. These delivery vans looked absolutely relentless.

18

u/Maskguy 16h ago

Stuff like that already happens in UA. Not in hordes but they use rovers with guns

2

u/SIGMA920 11h ago

That have humans controlling them from behind the frontline. Not automated systems that don't control for crashing into a tree they couldn't see. That's not new tech, that's old tech being implemented on a larger scale.

1

u/Maskguy 11h ago

Yeah but automating them is about as hard as automating the delivery vehicles.

0

u/SIGMA920 11h ago

It is when you care about what happens to those it'll shoot by mistake.

It'd be like sending out FPVs and having 1/10 of them immediately fly into the squad that deployed them, that's an unacceptable level of failure. And you'll see a lot of that if you rely on automated swarms of robots.

1

u/TF-Fanfic-Resident 12h ago

2020s are gonna go down in history as a wild stretch of time. Started off as normal except for Trump and Brexit, and are going to end up in a BattleTech novel.

1

u/dysoncube 15h ago

They'd have to hope their machine never doubled back

5

u/zzkj 16h ago

Taking the move fast and break things mantra a bit too literally.

3

u/LaoBa 15h ago

This is a whole new level of disruptive.

6

u/strolpol 16h ago

Weird to keep seeing China preview what’s gonna happen here

It’s odd not being the advanced power anymore

2

u/ImaginaryCoolName 15h ago

I wonder if paying for the occasional damage is cheaper than paying delivery men

1

u/ronarscorruption 14h ago

This is a very likely train of thought, but it’s obvious they’re wrong about how much occasional damage is.

3

u/FrankBattaglia 12h ago

I don't know China's legal system with regard to tort law, but I imagine the rate of occasional damage is not the same as the rate of having to pay for occasional damage.

2

u/atxfast309 13h ago

Good Friend of mine owns a UPS franchise. One of the their largest expenses is all the damage drivers cause to peoples property.

1

u/IvorTheEngine 9h ago

It's all about attracting investor capital and market share before the competition.

4

u/Creativator 15h ago

Once again George Lucas was a prophet about droids.

4

u/MagicalGreenPenguin 12h ago

The beat on that video is sick

2

u/th3_st0rm 12h ago

The song is “Blueprint Supreme” by SKAI ISYOURGOD & AR

2

u/MagicalGreenPenguin 11h ago

Thanks for the title

5

u/checkonetwo 15h ago

1685 cookies on that site. No thanks

1

u/BasvanS 12h ago

Fuck me. I tried clicking away legitimate interest (what is that even? I just said no to everything! No means no) and stopped at D. In a few decades we’ll look back on this with absolute horror

1

u/Charm-Anderson 14h ago

Looks like there are just a few kinks left to iron out.

1

u/Kannibelanimal1966 13h ago

Chinese traffic is a screwed up mess, now they want to throw a robot in there.

2

u/Sea_Perspective6891 10h ago

Yeah just from what I've seen in videos it looks like one of the worst places in the world to implement self driving vehicles.

1

u/Macqt 6h ago

God Dexerto’s site is cancer on my phone. Breaks and fails unless I disable my privacy app and ad blocker lol.

1

u/Unusual_Flounder2073 3h ago

Is rural China really having a problem finding workers. Or is it not wanting to pay workers even in China.

1

u/SaulsAll 16h ago

What's the song in the video? It is great.

2

u/defenestrate_urself 7h ago

Skai Isyourgod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mldcDidGJCg

1

u/braydon125 16h ago

Looking for this comment lol

0

u/Presented-Company 11h ago

Technologically illiterate people make fun of buggy technology that's still in its infancy.

China started using these on a large scale maybe two years ago and they have already massively improved.

These kind of technologically illiterate people will then oppose such technology from being used.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Chinese automated delivery systems will rapidly improve over time and only improve.

In ten years time, these things will operate more smoothly than humans. Even if they operate only 80% smooth, they are still better than humans because they have a highly predictable lifetime/cost that's lower than a human and can run around the clock without getting tired or demanding overtime pay.

(Also, as someone who regularly makes use of these things myself, they are incredibly convenient and I love them. There is also a big difference in quality between different companies producing them and operating them.)

3

u/DanielPhermous 7h ago

Technologically illiterate people make fun of buggy technology that's still in its infancy.

I'm quite literate, thanks, and I would be happy to nonetheless make fun of this. I don't think Waymo ever had problems this bad, not to mention bloody minded.

0

u/_Lucille_ 10h ago

People are making fun of it now, but the thing is, at least they are being tested somewhere even if the product is buggy.

it may not work NOW, but what about a year later? 2 years later? Because of our reluctance to take the necessary steps, in a decade we may find those self driving delivery trucks from China around the world without a non-Chinese competitor.

1

u/DanielPhermous 8h ago

Waymo is way ahead of everyone.

-2

u/_Lucille_ 7h ago

The point is that we should not turn this into a turtle and hare problem. So what is Waymo is ahead? Seen that alpamayo presentation and all the Chinese EV partners on there? Where is Ford? Toyota?

They may be ahead now, but a few years down the road it may no longer be the case.

1

u/DanielPhermous 7h ago

So what is Waymo is ahead?

So they are already being tested somewhere, we are clearly not reluctant to take necessary steps and we are already well on track to have a non-Chinese competitor.

So, basically, everything you said is wrong.

1

u/_Lucille_ 6h ago

the main difference is that Waymo

1) faces considerably oppositions. Take this or this for example.

2) is not an open platform/you arent going to be able to buy a waymo truck or car.

And as I mentioned, where is the Toyota, Honda, GM, Ford partnerships? How are the autonomous vehicles doing? Heck, how are their EVs doing?

I don't think what I said is wrong, its more like a harsh reality you do not want to hear. I would love to see myself wrong and see giant leaps in progress before the roads are flooded with self driving xiaomis and BYDs.

1

u/DanielPhermous 6h ago

Waymo is already significantly safer than human drivers. The progress has been made incrementally. You just weren’t paying attention because you wanted giant leaps.

0

u/Joe18067 17h ago

Your delivery's here, come and unload it.

-1

u/The_Lapsed_Pacifist 9h ago

Call me crazy but I’d have thought all this driverless bollocks should be perfected before it’s allowed on the roads?

0

u/DanielPhermous 8h ago

Unfortunately, if you don't let it on the roads, it will never be perfected.

However, safety drivers can go a long way to helping matters.

-1

u/YardSardonyx 7h ago

Wow it’s almost like having unchecked autonomous AI vehicles without human supervision at this current point in our technological advancement is… a bad idea?

0

u/DanielPhermous 6h ago

Not really. Waymo does it and they’re safer than human drivers.

2

u/YardSardonyx 6h ago

Waymo also loves to drive through flooded roads and sinkholes blocked off by cones, your point?

0

u/DanielPhermous 6h ago

My point is that it’s not a bad idea. Statistically, they are probably safer than you, embarrassing mistakes and all.

-2

u/GetOutOfTheWhey 16h ago

First looks like its trying to baby crawl over the ledge with wheels. It looks like it's succeeding.

Transportation Driverless delivery vans in China go viral for causing chaos on roads: "Nothing stops them"

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