[thebruce87m]

Thousands of Waymos recalled after robotaxi swept into a creek https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2011dl4xo

> It follows an incident on 20 April in San Antonio, Texas, where an empty Waymo vehicle entered a flooded road and was swept into a creek.

Nobody in it but sounds serious enough.

[manwe150]

That title sounds so much more dramatic than it seems it actually was. I imagine headlines like: “Billions of python 3.14.4 programs were recalled today when a bug was found in the core itself. No word yet on whether the successor product, Python 3.14.5, will avoid a similar fate. How long will we tolerate being used as test subjects in the developer’s risky games?”

[burkaman]

How would you phrase the headline? I think it's pretty accurate, they have pulled thousands of vehicles out of service and completely stopped service in two cities, and the reason is literally that one of their cars was swept into a creek (in addition to other flood-related incidents). I can't think of a way to make the headline any more clear.

This isn't like other software "recalls" where the result is just an over-the-air update or a request to bring your car to a dealership when you have time, in this case they have actually physically removed the recalled vehicles from the road.

To use your analogy: if a bug in Python caused the PSF and package managers to actually make 3.14.4 unavailable and companies started taking Python services offline until a fix was found, yes that would be a really big deal.

[manwe150]

> This isn't like other software "recalls" where the result is just an over-the-air update or a request to bring your car to a dealership when you have time, in this case they have actually physically removed the recalled vehicles from the road.

But that is what it was: the remedy in the recall was an over-the-air update and was already universally applied several weeks time before the recall was actually formalized.

Also seems linguistically complex, since the dictionary meaning of recall is an "official order to return item to a manufacturer", but Waymo doesn't sell the vehicle itself.

[burkaman]

Ok I see the issue, at the time the BBC article was written they hadn't paused service yet. That remedy you're referring to didn't work though, so now they have completely paused service in two cities.

> Waymo has now paused service in two cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week.

> Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

> But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company said those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.

I still think the BBC headline is fine, but I guess if you aren't familiar with this usage of "recall" then you could be misled.