[dhbradshaw]

To me this doesn't seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges.

Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.

The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.

[grumbel]

I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.

[burnte]

In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to drive through deep water.

[ehnto]

There is a pretty big difference between a citizen driving their car into danger, and a service provider driving their car into danger with you in it.

You wouldn't accept that from a taxi driver either. Pausing the service is the right move.

[burnte]

I completely agree pausing service is the right move. I'm not defending Waymo. More laughing at my fellow ATLiens.

[QuercusMax]

We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!

[SR2Z]

To be fair if you take Elon Musk at his word the Cybertruck is supposed to have hermetically sealed powertrain components and be capable of exactly this.

[mschuster91]

The powertrain is one thing, the more critical issue is the car's structure, including the ventilation system, all sorts of gaps - and also, all hollow spaces, in which you need to balance weep holes (to prevent water condensation and subsequent rusting or weird issues regarding temperature changes) against the ability for external water to end up there at all.

Getting that right is a very expensive job and that's why you usually only see true (i.e. no visit to a shop needed afterwards) wade ability on large military vehicles and custom RV builds.

[burnte]

I saw that just a day or two before wednesday! Hilarious timing.

[Muromec]

As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets

[bluGill]

Why?

Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).

Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.

[klik99]

You’re spot on.

I’ve lived in Atlanta for many years, grew up with family in northeast, so I know how to drive in snow and have seen how Boston, New York and Atlanta all deal with it. Atlanta has a very very small fleet to clear snow and ice because the cost of maintaining a large fleet just isn’t worth the low frequency they’re needed. So it’s common for bad ice to shutdown the city for 1-2 days. That’s a valid trade off.

Every once in a while Atlanta would get a bad one and people would start complaining about needing a bigger fleet, then a couple weeks after it’s over just forget about it.

[ghaff]

And, in the north, you have snowstorms. I'm glad to not be in a situation where you were pretty much expected to drive into office jobs every day whatever the conditions any longer. But that used to be the case barring the rare state of emergency.

Yes, there were certainly plows. But driving was still somewhat dangerous and you saw cars off roads on a regular basis. Driving into work on one of those daysz, I picked a pregnant woman off the median of a road whose car had gotten stuck.

[ssl-3]

Streets flood sometimes. Shit happens.

And when it does happen: A Waymo should not fucking drive through it.

I remember once when the mall in my hometown flooded. It was at the top of a hill.

IIRC: The top of that hill received something like 6" of rain in less than 15 minutes, in a very "Fuck you in particular" sort of way.

The vaguely-greater surrounding area was fine. It was a very localized event.

They were not prepared for this. It was a mess.

And gosh: The streets near there flooded, too. The drainage systems were simply not up to the task.

It had never happened before, and it has never happened since, but: Quite clearly, it happens.

(I don't understand your deflection here, at all. If your main point is that "If cities were designed better, then the deficiencies of autonomous cars wouldn't be a big deal for those autonomous cars at all" then I might reasonably conclude that you're just not particularly observant of the world.)

---

edit: People also screw things up. We (people) drive through flooded roads sometimes -- we even do it on purpose from time to time, even though the guidance is to avoid it.

Some other times, we get surprised by flooded roads. Especially at night, they can be hard to detect. We screw things up. We take risks. Sometimes, those risks even work out OK.

But back in context: Waymo. Waymo is an autonomous taxi cab. It works on regular public streets, and on a long-enough timeline: Some of those streets will be flooded.

I probably never want my taxi driver to try to ferry me through a flooded roadway, whether it has a human brain or a computer brain calling the shots.

(I did get to spend a week getting ferried ~daily through flooded roads in a Jeep once in an unrelated flood, but by a high-ranking deputy Sheriff was (who would not become confused by a power outage[1]), and this Jeep was a proper cop car with the lights and the logos. We had some mutual problems that needed solved that involved public safety, and both of us were being paid to solve those problems. That worked fine, I knew what I was getting into before we set forth, and we'd have had extraordinary support if anything went very wrong.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412

[ethbr1]

That's like saying one could expect New Orleans not to flood during hurricanes.

There are problems.

There is money you can throw at those problems.

And there are some problems that are rare & low impact enough that it's not worth throwing money at them.

See also: keeping snowplows in Atlanta.

[namibj]

Yeah you can start by not building _more_ in the flood plain. And if you do, then don't build architecture that is incapable of just accepting the temporarily higher ground water. We know how to basement just make the basement high enough to tower over the flood. Oh, no cheap ground-level storefront windows? Welp, guess those have to be elevated above sufficiently voluminous drainage channels (the former streets).

[ethbr1]

Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs.

One of the things that annoys me most about non-engineering mindsets is not looking at problems from a multivariate optimization perspective.

There are problems, and then there are always more variables to be balanced to optimally solve them than people expect.

The critical additional ones, more often than not: time and money.

[burnte]

On one hand, sure, but on the other, Earth doesn't care what we expect. And humans don't build rationally most of the time. Most cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.

[lapetitejort]

Every time a city thinks flooding problems are fixed, nature invents a bigger storm

[oatmeal1]

Flooding we experience is largely due to destruction of wetlands that used to act as a buffer for excess water during storms, and paving over land for cars making the surface impenetrable.

[wil421]

Not in the articles example.

[Muromec]

Laughs in Dutch

[quickthrowman]

It would be a massive waste of resources to build out every city with a drainage system capable of handling any amount of rain. Houston had ~30 inches of water dumped on it during a somewhat recent hurricane, designing and building infrastructure for that level of storm is not realistic. I’m not familiar with storm sewer capacity design, but I’m confident they aren’t designed to flawlessly handle a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 year event.

[Marsymars]

It's not even amounts of rain that are necessarily the problem.

In my area, big rainstorms sometimes include hail, and if some of the hail/debris is big enough to block sewer grates, then the deluge of water will quickly sweep hail and other debris into the partial blockage until the grates are thoroughly clogged.

I'm not sure how you could adequately design against that while not having storm water grates that are hazardous to people/animals/etc.

[fragmede]

Tell that to Fukushima.

[chao-]

>one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets

In some cities, certain streets are designed to flood during heavy rain, and are an integral part of routing the water away from neighborhoods and businesses, and into the drainage systems.

[ryukoposting]

SV is the most cloistered place I've ever seen. I'm comfortable assuming that nobody in any position of power at Waymo ever thought to themselves "gee maybe the weather is different in this new city we're deploying to, perhaps we should test that"

[jlebar]

As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.

Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.

Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.

[viking123]

How many years for Waymo to work in Mumbai?

[robotresearcher]

I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious.

The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard.

In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.

[jsrozner]

Yeah maybe we should just stop doing that and invest in public transit infrastructure instead.

[simondotau]

Public transit is a function of city design, less so much the presence of public transit. If you can’t walk to a stop, or if your destination isn’t reasonably accessible from that network, it won’t be used for that trip.

While it sucks for many other reasons, autonomous vehicles are actually a very good solution to public transit in most American cities. What I envisage is a dense grid of virtual bus stops in N square miles surrounding a rapid transit stop. You hail using an app, and a minibus (8-20 pax) adjusts its route to collect you and get you to that rapid transit station. The inverse happens for people arriving at that station, where routes are planned as the train approaches, so people heading to the same general area can be directed to the same minibus.

[SR2Z]

Who is "we?" The cost to develop self driving cars is not exactly being felt by society at large.

It certainly isn't stopping anyone from improving public transit, but it seems like you believe it's this and not any one of a bajillion actual factors to blame.

[mschuster91]

Last mile is still a thing. We need long distance public transit, regional public transit, local public transit (buses, trams, cable cars, ...) and we also need hyperlocal public transit (taxis, autonomous vehicles/"peoplemovers").

[timmmmmmay]

if you want people to use public transit, you need to make it not be a mobile homeless shelter. otherwise everyone who can afford to will insist on a private transport

[charcircuit]

Roads are public transit infrastructure.

[robotresearcher]

These are companies. They can invest where they please.

Call your government reps.

[bitpush]

True. While we're at it, let's not fixing roads as well. Also electric cars. Also what's the deal with space exploration? Fix what's on earth first please.

[jfim]

There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.

At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.

So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.

[chippiewill]

I used to work for an AV startup.

One of my favourite things to see were the random encounters that our data annotators would flag up.

Unusual agricultural vehicles, large to-scale images on the sides of vehicles, cars facing backwards being carried by a vehicle transporter.

It's a wildly long tail of things that automated vehicles need to handle.

[fwip]

A flooded road is a very predictable event, though.

[mulmen]

Is it? I have been driving for 25 years and never encountered one.

Waymo seems to accept they can’t predict everything so they built a system that’s safe enough to operate in the real world and learn from experience.

[hnthrow0287345]

My guess is this was brought up but getting the product out there was more important to the business so it got ignored.

Now that it's a problem for them, they get to hide behind an "oops sorry, let's fix the really obvious thing now", almost like taking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to malicious levels.

This jives with CRUD software in general, where people are not usually rewarded for preventing future issues and instead rewarded for waiting until it's a visible problem and then fixing it.

[pinkmuffinere]

This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.

[zardo]

Surely Waymo can afford a test track.

[pinkmuffinere]

They can, and I bet they have! But they cannot afford a test track that accurately reproduces every condition exactly as it will be encountered in the real world. At some point, it is judicious to test with real-world conditions, and simulating only gets you so far.

[krackers]

They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

[brookst]

IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.

[riknos314]

No simulation is perfect, so ideally you have a feedback look constantly looking at new real-world data as it comes in and finding where the simulation has errors, and updating the simulation to improve the correlation between the simulation and the real world over time.

My guess is they did have flooded street sims but the correlation was much lower than expected, or the details of the situation being simulated (lighting, building locations, how dirty the water is, ...) were sufficiently different from the situation that was encountered that the sim based training didn't generalize to the new context.

[pj_mukh]

"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "

I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.

Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.

P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.

[marcosdumay]

It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.

But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.

[thrownthatway]

> It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets

No one who works for them thought of flooded roads.

That’s reassuring.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

They were only in Arizona for a long time...

[forgetfreeman]

Assuming the rest of the continent is like Arizon also seems comforting...

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Well fortunately the rest of the planet is a lot more similar to Arizona than Venus or the moon of the bottom of the Ocean, and they're already doing quite well in like 25 other markets, so...

[rawgabbit]

Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?

This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.

[jmalicki]

It has lidar and radar, not just vision.

[gensym]

Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.

[Ekaros]

To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.

Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.

[jmalicki]

A merely wet road (1mm of water) and one with 10cm can be hard to distinguish. If you avoid the former, you can't operate in rain at all.

[sumeno]

Just because there are real world failures doesn't mean they didn't do simulations. It could just mean the simulation didn't account for something different in the real world.

The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...

[fauigerzigerk]

So what you're saying is that something far worse happened here. They did test for flooded streets but some slight difference caused the model to fail in real life.

To be fair, there will always be something that fails. So the more important question is probably the frequency and severity of those failures.

[outside2344]

The fact that they aren't a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.

[antonymoose]

It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.

[throwaway2037]

    > it’s a surprisingly common occurrence

That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.

[trollbridge]

I’ve lived in a place where it flooded every year or two. It floods regularly where I live now too.

Locals know which roads to avoid and not to drive into a flood.

[ranger207]

I just moved from an apartment right next to where this Waymo got stuck: https://old.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/1tj00sl/flooding_i... and I can say that that particular intersection floods about every time it rains hard. That being said, yesterday's rain was particularly heavy and I hadn't seen that intersection flood that bad since before Waymo started being rolled out here

[thrownthatway]

Floods aren’t a usual even.

Have you ever even been outside?

[vrighter]

testing cannot prove the absence of bugs. It can only prove that you didn't find any, which is a completely different thing

[EA-3167]

It’s been clear for a while to anyone without money riding on this that the relatively “easy” part fooled a lot of people into assuming that the last push to full self driving wouldn’t be radically greater challenge.

[Sharlin]

An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.

[nottorp]

That's the reality. For both them and Apple.

By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?

[pants2]

They have done a lot of testing in Pittsburgh which has some of the craziest roads and intersections anywhere, so I'd assume yes

[warumdarum]

Medieval italian towns?

[pants2]

haha you got me there, can hardly even consider those as roads!

[dybber]

Roundabouts with with 5-10 bicycles going in and out from the different roads all the time during rushhour (Copenhagen, Denmark)? I would love to see them looking for people’s tiny hand gestures and not just get stuck in our traffic over here.

[nottorp]

I've driven in the Netherlands once for a week. Now I have nightmares involving bicycles.

[rkuykendall-com]

Take a look at `2313 NW Military Hwy # 100, San Antonio, TX 78231`

This is an intersection I myself felt daunting my first few years driving. It is within Waymo's San Antonio coverage, and they seem to be handling that just fine.

However, they had to pause them recently related to a lost car, due to, drum roll please... flooding.

[jimbo808]

The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.

[fhub]

I'm glad a very wealthy company is investing in hard tech R&D. Irrespective of the projected financial outcome.

[BurningFrog]

I think Google can handle paying for any number of $250k cars to get a good share of the future of transportation.

I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.

[spaceman_2020]

I’ve heard that 10-20 years self driving spiel since Uber launched

I was also promised that I’d be 3d printing my shoes and living in the metaverse and AI will make me magical new products

All I really got was an endless social media feed

[BurningFrog]

This argument proves too much. That some technical progress arrives slower than predicted does not mean no progress ever occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

[lnsru]

This was thought decades ago too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project Compared to 1994 we have now endless computing power and yet no reliable self driving car is available on the market.

[BurningFrog]

My Tesla is quite reliable when self driving!

[atherton94027]

Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.

[cyberax]

The cost of Waymo cars is immaterial right now. They are not production models, they are test mules. So you might as well make them nice-looking.

Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.

[dmix]

Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.

They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever

All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models

[spacebanana7]

Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.

You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.

[dmix]

That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.

Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk

[cyberax]

They don't actually _need_ to do any of that. They can just license the technology to automakers and local operators.

[thehappypm]

All cars require a workforce to maintain though.

[JimTheMan]

Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!

[jimbo808]

Not comparable at all. Autonomous driving isn't obviously a viable business. It's not because computer programs can't drive well, it's because the and workforce infrastructure required to maintain and operate the expensive fleet may be less efficient than a human maintaining their own vehicle.

[beering]

Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?

[jimbo808]

I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.

[wasmitnetzen]

Are you also implying that people who maintain vehicles for a living do a worse job at it than the owners doing it themselves? I would say the opposite is true.

Plenty of companies around the world have well-maintained fleets of vehicles. Trucking businesses, bus companies, train companies, even some taxi companies with salaried drivers, ...

[spaceman_2020]

You also have to be some completely isolated sociopath to not see the very obvious political and economic risks if this does indeed become successful

No amount of lobbying will help you win against a million drivers suddenly out of work

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Well, washing machines were once the size of washing machines; and they still are.

[qsera]

Some technologies scale, some don't, at all. Your point is moot.

[YinglingHeavy]

They will lose to Tesla cabs, due to price and not having full control of their supply chain.

[decimalenough]

Tesla has a grand total of 39 unsupervised cabs operating. Waymo has literally 100x more with 3800 and growing.

https://robotaxitracker.com/?provider=tesla

[sarchertech]

> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.

This is also a huge disadvantage because any flaws in the software that don’t show up in a slow rollout will be present in every single car.

It’s a contrived example, but say a new billboard campaign rolls out that causes every car to immediately veer away from it.

[KennyBlanken]

Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That's been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.

Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn't do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being 'pulled over.'

These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it's the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.

[krupan]

My friend, have you seen the standard that human drivers are held to? One accident, one infraction should probably cancel your driver's license, at least for some amount of time, but we just say oops, pay $150 and keep going.

Do you know how many people die in car accidents each year? More than are killed by guns (you know, tools which are designed for killing people). It's insane that we let humans drive at all. Waymo's safety record is fine.

[saghm]

> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.

Sure, because human drivers famously have to be taught with each new generation that driving into six feet of water is a bad plan.

[geoffpado]

As someone who grew up in a flood-prone area… yeah. Yeah, they do. Sometimes more than once per person.

[snakeboy]

Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?

This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.

[adrianN]

I have seen plenty of videos online that suggest that this is a true fact.

[rob74]

To me it looks like it's a problem with the "default attitude" (can't think of a better name) of the Waymo driving software. When a human sees that the road surface ahead is in some unknown condition (flooded, covered in lava, whatever) they usually default to caution - better stop and check first. While Waymo apparently defaults to blithely driving ahead, after all its maps tell it that there's a road ahead and it didn't detect any known obstacle, so what could possibly go wrong?

[krupan]

That is so not true of humans or Waymos

[cm2187]

The final boss will be driving in Rome

[blackoil]

Come to an Indian city. You'll have cars, 2w, auto, cows coming from 7 directions everywhere.

[YarickR2]

Oh come on. Not even driving anywhere in Europe; higher difficulty levels would be Turkey , India, Russia, Egypt. Add countryside for extra points. Add harvest season in countryside for unique achievement. Add rainy/snowy season in countryside to master this game.

[utopiah]

Rome? How about Napoli or Palermo?

[shakna]

We already have a huge number of safety regulations for cars, that take into account all these various things. There's also insurance that covers flood damage and cars. These are the things that red flag something you need to test, if you want to take over driving the car.

This isn't a new challenge - it is a known one!

[ViewTrick1002]

> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.

That is not a given when dealing with "machine learning".

They will need to have metrics for all these scenarious and ensure when they solve the 20th problem down the line this one does not regress, but instead it becomes more and more generalized.

[acidhousemcnab]

Sounds like they need to employ more "neurodivergents" to make these robots work correctly, before they are all Silent Greened, and it is only the CEOs left bashing each other's heads in with rocks.

[Hnrobert42]

I'm not familiar familiar with this expression silent green. Do you mean Soylent Green?

[acidhousemcnab]

Yes sorry, typo.

[HDBaseT]

A human has to pass a test to be able to drive. A human (for the most part) doesn't just unknowingly drive into floods.

Why aren't we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.

[krupan]

I love when people bring this up. When was the last time anyone here had to pass an actual driving test, like where you have to physically drive a car? For me, age 16, which was more years ago than I like to count.

How many licenses do we revoke for violating traffic laws? Getting into a car crash? Injuring someone in a car crash? Killing someone in a car crash? Not nearly enough! We are so lax about driving it's insane. But you want to hold these robot cars to some much higher standard? I mean, ok, but how much higher? It's a really freaking low bar right now

[HDBaseT]

Less than 5 years ago, what's your point?

> "You want to hold these robot cars to some much higher standard"

No, I want to hold these cars to the same standard as humans. Humans very rarely, accidentally, drive into flooded water.

You have humans attempt to get through flooded roads all the time, that's another issue though.

[bitpush]

Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?

Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?

If it is just taking a regular DL test, then waymo, Tesla and others would be driving all across the US by now. They already have a higher standard

[HDBaseT]

Those are completely different scenario though.

We're talking about a piece of software being unable to determine if something is flooded or not. 99% of humans presented with the same visual ques would be able to determine its flooded.

This is what I'm waiting parity with. I don't see how that's an unfair ask, especially considering Atlanta floods fairly regularly, its not entirely uncommon.

[quickthrowman]

> Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?

If your car starts sliding, let off the gas, don’t hit the brakes, and countersteer into the direction of the slide to recover.

If you start hydroplaning you simply remove your foot from the gas pedal.

[jurgemaister]

> Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?

In my country at least: Yes.

Hydroplaning and driving on ice is part of the compulsory training, including driving on simulated ice on a special course.

[bitpush]

That's great. Would you your country's test covers 100% of the situations a driver might encounter?

Even without knowing the details, I can confidently tell you they don't.

Does it teach you how to recover the car when the tires blow out? How about it is raining? How to react when a car is coming straight at you in the wrong way? How about when a dog jumps out?

[HDBaseT]

Does Waymo know how to handle itself if the tires blow out?

[rajbot]

A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.

There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.

[qsera]

>A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.

Driving safe is not always about having faster reaction speed.

[NiloCK]

It's about many things, including reaction speed, visual awareness, specific expertise and informed decision making wrt braking or acceleration power. All of these are better in a modern self-driving car (I do not know whether Tesla falls into this category) than in a human.

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes.

[qsera]

Reaction speed does not matter if the driver can anticipate things before they happen. Actually I think what makes a good driver is ones ability to anticipate.

I don't think computers are anywhere near a human in that regard.

>visual awareness

A point cloud and some computer vision is not "visual awareness". Your statistics is also biased is of its source.

But in very controlled environments and for sedentary pace of driving, yes, self driving cars could be better than average drivers.

[NiloCK]

80-90% reduction, over the course of 170 million miles driven on the famously very controlled city streets of LA, SF, Austin and Phoenix.

On average, I wouldn't expect the regulatory agencies to be very friendly toward outright fraudulent reporting from Waymo. On the very outside, maybe these 80-90% reductions are optimistic roundups from 50-65% reductions. Or do you believe that Waymo is secretly running people down and scooping corpses into their trunks?

What is a sedentary pace of driving?

[cheesecompiler]

And to me it seems like you're justifying a lack of oversight and dangers of this technology for what purpose exactly? Why are you defending a corporation?

[krupan]

Are you talking about automobile technology in general? Human operated vehicles kill a lot of people each year. People get tiny slaps on the wrist for breaking the law on the roads, crashing into other cars, crashing into pedestrians. It's actually really hard to lose your driver's license. We can probably give Waymo a little leeway for driving into a puddle that's deeper than it estimated

[21asdffdsa12]

I can already see the horrified passengers in a robo-taxi going full "military-survival" mode, driving at rally speed over fast flooding back-roads, evaluating moral dilemmas like ("If i stop and pick up one more, i become a lorry on a rail at the next flood intersection").

Surprisingly good at things that get you otherwise killed. Like - it auto-backs up once it detects ground rumbles of the ground moving during a mud avalanche.

[indianbunghole]

*roll out

[autoexec]

> Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.

They should have done that flood training when they weren't putting people's lives at risk. It's not as if this was a situation that no one could have anticipated would arise. Over half of all drownings in a flood happen because of people driving into them. They're just lucky that they stopped service before they had more blood on their hands, but the fact that they were willing to experiment on the public first is concerning.

[ashdksnndck]

“More blood” seems to imply that somebody has already been hurt or died from Waymo driving into floods, but I don’t think that is the case?

[autoexec]

As far as I know, nobody has been hurt from floods while in a Waymo. They hide their safety data from the public though (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...) so it's hard to say for sure. They've certainly been involved in crashes, killed pets (I actually give them a pass on the bodega cat), run over elementary school children, etc. Waymo has said it's only a matter of time until they kill someone and they've got plans for how to handle deaths caused by their cars, but they expect the public to accept those deaths.

[RealityVoid]

This feels disingenuous to the extreme. Yes, chances are that some people will die run over by a Waymo. Put enough miles in one and someone will die eventually. Compare the numbers to human drivers. Would you, if they had LESS fatality rates than human drivers, say that the difference is "lives saved"? - I don't think you would. In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"

Especially your example with "run over elementary school children" is duplicitous. They showed how much less dangerous the impact from the Waymo was.

[autoexec]

> In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"

That'll depend on the circumstances. If someone is killed because of a mistake a human wouldn't have made (like driving into oncoming traffic or down a light rail track) it'll be entirely their fault. Even if they do something humans sometimes do but never should like running a red light I'd argue that it makes them unsafe. To our knowledge they've only been involved in one human fatality so far but it wasn't their fault so I don't blame them for that.

[swisniewski]

But humans do make mistakes like that (driving into oncoming traffic or driving down a light rail track).

For example, here’s a case where a human did it to avoid an ambulance:

https://www.click2houston.com/news/2012/09/18/10-injured-in-...

This guy says he was blinded by the sun:

https://kutv.com/news/local/trax-train-hits-vehicle-in-sandy

Sometimes people are drunk:

https://komonews.com/news/local/police-suspected-drunk-drive...

[estearum]

It is honestly kind of funny how clearly your comments read like motivated reasoning, and then one just looks at your username.

[themafia]

If your premise is "robotaxis are so much better than human drivers" then this is almost a disaster. This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather. It does not bode well for their expansion plans.

[Retric]

Better is an arbitrary statement. By number of jobs robots lose, by number of sexual assaults by taxi drivers they win. Pick the wights for very factors and you can select anything as the best in category.

Safer, cheaper, etc are less arbitrary.

[overfeed]

> This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather

You may be relieved to hear Waymo is rolling out to Portland, Oregon. It's not in the south, and with over 150 rainy days per year, it ranks among the rainiest US cities.

[kibwen]

Rain is one thing, but despite the rain Oregon is almost dead-last among all the states in terms of flood risk. It gets constant drizzles, not sporadic deluges.

[happyPersonR]

This guy knows what he’s talking about.

Born and raised in GA, it wasn’t until I moved to CA, the bay specifically, after college that I realized things like flood warnings multiple times a month and, flooded out roads during the summer weren’t just part of life lolll

My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”

When Waymo came here and also when Tesla started doing self driving (I drive a Tesla with FSD ) majority of the time, I was constantly seeing things that were GA specific that these systems were just clearly not trained to handle.

The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”

[overfeed]

> My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”

So it makes sense to first rollout to a place with frequent, lighter rain - no? As an outsider, Waymo's approach seems to be solving challenges step-by-step, and the criticism in this thread is asking why it hasn't already solved the hardest cases.

> The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”

I wouldn't be surprised if Waymos are confidently driving into flooded roads because they "know" where the markings are without sensing the markings. Lidar-based GPS + SLAM are now very good at calculating location, as long as features like buildings or trees are still present.

[fragmede]

You don't understand! Google is trying to do something difficult, and because they haven't solved all possible theoretical problems with it, they should just give up and go home and never try anything difficult ever.

[krupan]

I'm a Waymo supporter, but I hate to break it to you, Portland gets less inches of rain per year than most major US cities.

[autoexec]

I'll be relieved when I hear that they did it without killing anyone. Considering they didn't bother to work out how to handle floods before they put people's lives at risk everywhere else, it's not all that reassuring that they're now going to YOLO it in Portland

[NiloCK]

Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes [1].

We currently sit in the ballpark of 300,000 pedestrian deaths per year worldwide [2]. You should be relieved every time they deploy to a new city.

[1] - https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/more-than-a-million...

[WorkerBee28474]

Nobody has ever been killed by a Waymo. You're being dramatic.

[ranger207]

Well, only one Waymo got stuck in that flood, while at least two human-driven cars did, so by pure counting metrics they are better lol. But in my experience driving around them Waymos are much much better than most Atlanta drivers, not that that's a high bar

[toofy]

the real question if you’re attempting to imply what i think you’re implying should be:

how many human driven cars decided not to drive through vs how many waymo’s decided the same?

[mixdup]

I'm not sure why you would say there's no significant inclement weather in Atlanta. The flooding this week was not super common, but also not unheard of. It rains here a LOT in the summer

[xienze]

The part of that people aren't considering is that it's very common to get brief, intense thunderstorms that dump a lot of rain quickly. They won't flood the whole city obviously but there's _always_ pockets that have very short-lived, localized flooding on the roads. So it's not a "oh what are the odds of that happening" kind of thing.

[burnte]

Agreed, this happens here every year, it's why we built O4W park the way it is, and built many other drainage structures similarly. We have a real runoff problem. Waymo picked a great city to train the cars on weird weather and weirder roads. :D

[skybrian]

It's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.

[themafia]

I would assume that after the very first instance you would start moving to fix it. To be in a position where you have to roll back your plans doesn't seem like a simple "delay."

The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?

[overfeed]

> The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?

Since you're of the opinion that this is taking too long, what do you think is a reasonable time for a fix, and why? I'm assuming Waymo didn't have a team of flood-detection experts twiddling their thumbs waiting to be prompted into action.

[bluGill]

Human drivers are very very bad. Being better than humans is a low bar with plenty of room to be bad as well.

[__m]

It still seems to be a high bar to achieve

[bluGill]

How high the bar is isn't worth arguing about. The question is do self driving cars clear it?

Those who work on self driving cars say they have cleared it - but they have an obvious bias. Nobody independent has done a full study of this, so we have no particular reason to believe them, but we also shouldn't completely discount them (when the truth is in their favor everyone with a bias will tell it, and some people are even able to overcome their bias when the truth is against them)

[MagicMoonlight]

No they aren’t. Billions drive around every day with minimal collisions. Far more people get raped than hit by cars.