Sometimes, they report the cars for signs of an illegal maneuver, like when in September, a driver operating the city's 45 electric bus noticed a Waymo trying to pass on double solid yellow lines at Stockton and Columbus, an intersection along its route. Or for a near miss-like, when, last December, a Waymo was caught by a city light rail train's video camera making a dangerous left turn at 'high speed.'
"Consumers don't have all the information at once," Griffin Li, the app's 19-year-old creator, told SFGATE. "They have to sort of make suboptimal decisions and spend more money. And this is just a way to help."
Anybody who's regularly driven in winter conditions knows the importance of keeping windshield washer fluid topped up. Keeping the salty grime stuck to your windshield and rear window to a minimum is crucial for visibility, especially in inclement weather. In the case of an autonomously operating vehicle, ensuring visibility for the vehicle's sensors could similarly be a matter of life and death. That's particularly true for Tesla's Cybercab ride-hailing vehicles, which rely entirely on camera feeds.
Kinetic's CEO Nikhil Naikal states, 'We have eyes, and when we need to correct vision, we go to an optometrist... In the same way, this is a digital prescription to correct the errors of the car's understanding of the world around it.'
