[jtchang]

How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?

[vlovich123]

> While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets. We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.

Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.

[jeroenhd]

Sounds like their disaster recovery plan was insufficient, intensified traffic jams in already congested areas because of "backlog", and is now being fixed to support the current scale.

The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.

[vlovich123]

What about San Francisco allowing a power outage of this magnitude and not being able to restore power for multiple days?

This kind of attitude to me indicates a lack of experience building complex systems and responding to unexpected events. If they had done the opposite and been overly aggressive in letting Waymo’s manage themselves during lights that are out would you be the first in line criticizing them then for some accident happening?

All things being considered, I’m much happier knowing Waymo is taking a conservative approach if the downside means extra momentary street congestion during a major power outage; that’s much rarer than being cavalier with fully autonomous behavior.

[kotaKat]

DR always stands for "didn't realize" in the aftermath of an event.

That's what they're learning and fixing for in the future to give the cars more self-confidence.

[shafyy]

They probably do, they just don't give a shit. It's still the "move fast and break things" mindset. Internalize profits but externalize failures to be carried by the public. Will there be legal consequences for Waymo (i.e. fines?) for this? Probably not...

[browningstreet]

What Waymo profits?

They're one-of-one still. Having ridden in a Waymo many times, there's very little "move fast and break things" leaking in the experience.

They can simulate power outages as much as they want (testing) but the production break had some surprises. This is a technical forum.. most of us have been there.. bad things happened, plans weren't sufficient, we can measure their response on the next iteration in terms of how they respond to production insufficiencies in the next event.

Also, culturally speaking, "they suck" isn't really a working response to an RCA.

[atherton94027]

Waymo cars have been proven safer than human drivers in California. At the same time, 40k people die each year in the US in car accidents caused by human drivers.

I'm very happy they're moving fast so hopefully fewer people die in the future

[shafyy]

Both things can be true. They can be safer, but at the same time Waymo can still externalize stuff to the public...

[arcfour]

Who cares? Honestly?

[fragmede]

"Move fast and break things" is a Facebook slogan. Applying it to Google or Waymo just doesn’t fit. If anything, Waymo is moving too slow. 100 people are going to die in seven days from drunk drivers and New Years in the US.

How's that for a real world trolley problem?

[shafyy]

The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws, as the recent example of Helsinki has shown. That and better public transportation infrastructure. If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.

[arcfour]

> The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws

This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"

> If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.

I honestly wonder how leftists manage to delude themselves so heavily? I'm sure a bunch of politicians really have my best interests at heart. Lol

[Animats]

If the onboard software has detected an unusual situation it doesn't understand, moving may be a bad idea. Possible problems requiring a management decision include flooding, fires, earthquakes, riots, street parties, power outages, building collapses... Handling all that onboard is tough. For different situations, a nearby "safe place" to stop varies. The control center doesn't do remote driving, says Waymo. They provide hints, probably along the lines of "back out, turn around, and get out of this area", or "clear the intersection, then stop and unload your passenger".

Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition? After some number of seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop condition. Apparently here they overloaded the control center. That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that. That's good for scaling.

[michaelt]

> For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition?

Almost certainly no - you don’t want the vehicle to enter a tunnel, then stop half way through due to a lack of cell signal.

Rather, areas where signal dropouts are common would be made into no-go areas for route planning purposes.

[gorfian_robot]

relying on essentially remote dispatch to resolve these errors states is a disaster