[bastawhiz]

This is the most interesting part, in my opinion:

> Waymo’s recall was deployed by the company’s engineers at the central depot where the vehicles return for regular maintenance and testing. It was not through an over-the-air software update, like some of Tesla’s recent recalls.

I'd be interested to learn more about why the updates are manual, and also whether the map data is fully local to the vehicle. Tesla obviously does the polar opposite of this, and it seems to have at least some degree of success, but Tesla's approach has always seemed like it would be subject to some bad potential failure modes in my mind.

How much data does this amount to? Gigs? Terabytes?

On the same note, I'm curious about what data gets pulled from the map versus sensor data. The car seems to have used map data instead of sensor data (unless I'm misunderstanding?). Whether there's a curb seems to be exactly the sort of thing you could rely on sensors for, mostly because you also already need to look for obstructions which necessarily can't be in map data.

[xnx]

It's a shame there are so many trade secrets involved, because it would be especially fascinating to get more details on their entire system everything from advanced topics like how they blend ML with traditional rule-based logic to how they manage data like maps (versioning, distributed updates, etc.)

[ra7]

Agreed. They publish some impressive research on https://waymo.com/research/, but are very tight-lipped about many things. I've always wanted to know how they maintain maps and what their in-vehicle compute hardware looks like. They don't want to share anything beyond high level blog posts.

[unshavedyak]

Maybe it's about validation, not necessarily update data. They do seem to take safety more serious than Tesla does.

[AlotOfReading]

It sounds weird to say, but updates being applied only in-garage doesn't mean they're not going over the air. However, updates can include software for between dozens and hundreds of individual processors. That makes them quite large. The real data pigs are driving logs and map data though, which are usually serious storage constraints in autonomous vehicles.

[bastawhiz]

Yeah, I can definitely understand that it's probably far faster (and cheaper, and reliable) to transfer the data in the shop with a USB cable in both directions.

In fact, it's probably fastest to have a small bank of hard drives that you can physically pull from the vehicle and swap out for a fresh one. You could probably pack a few hundred TB of storage into a unit that could fit in a briefcase and have it loaded with fresh map data and lots of room for logs.

[AlotOfReading]

You've possibly misinterpreted what I said. To gesture vaguely some more, it's not necessarily about what's fastest, but rather what involves the least human intervention. Wish I could be more clear.

[choppaface]

Could be a lidar failure, or potential failure, that needed a firmware update to address.