Incident 227: Waze App Allegedly Caused Tourists’ Car to End up in Lake Champlain, Vermont

Description: The tourists driving through Vermont blamed Waze for directing them into a boat launch in Lake Champlain, prompting the vehicle to slide into the water by the time the drivers realized their location in the dark and foggy weather.

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Alleged: Waze developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed tourists and Waze users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
227
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2018-01-12
Editors
Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
GMF, MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

7.3. Lack of capability or robustness

Risk Domain

  1. AI system safety, failures, and limitations

Entity

AI

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Unintentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident Occurrence+2
Tourists blame Waze app after driving into lake
Tourists blame Waze app after driving into lake
fox5sandiego.com · 2018

Some tourists driving through Vermont said they ended up in a lake and the blame the driving app Waze.

The app directed them to turn onto a boat launch at the icy Lake Champlain, 9News reported.

The tourists said it was dark and foggy and b…

Waze 'directed tourists to drive into lake'
dailymail.co.uk · 2018

Waze has yet to give an explanation as to why the app directed a group of tourists to drive into Lake Champlain earlier this month.

Tara Guertin of Connecticut loaned three of her friends into her car to take up to Vermont for a ski trip tw…

Yet Another Person Listens to GPS App and Drives Car Into Lake
nymag.com · 2018

In an episode of The Office come to life, a driver in Vermont steered his car right into Lake Champlain on Friday. The driver says he was using navigation app Waze, which apparently insisted that driving into the lake was the right way to g…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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