Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#191

Post by llbbdd » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

eodecker wrote: post #170

micromacrofoot wrote: post #46

they should probably put some sort of metal strip into the roads that a vehicle can follow reliably, future iterations could make continuous contact to the strip to deliver power to these vehicles, and this would also allow them to become larger by reducing fuel weight or even allow cars to travel very close together for efficiency gains

you are describing a train

That's the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it's some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#192

Post by QuercusMax » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:39 PM UTC

burnte wrote: post #175

grumbel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 dr…

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!

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#193

Post by jp0001 » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:40 PM UTC

My guess in the North East in the winter there will be similar stories.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#194

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

grumbel wrote: post #151

dhbradshaw wrote: post #123

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 hitch…

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.

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.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#195

Post by AngryData » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:44 PM UTC

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #34

jvanderbot wrote: post #5

Snark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.

Except the Waymo can do 150 mph bumper to bumper with other Waymos if you let them.

Under an idealized situation sure, but I could get a 150 mph train of cars following me 60 years ago too if anybody had a use for that.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#196

Post by srdjanr » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #187

ACCount37 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough". A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again. If you think t…

> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them. I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out ho…

I wouldn't call floods "very common"

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#197

Post by kibwen » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #155

themafia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#198

Post by kibwen » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

srdjanr wrote: post #196

autoexec wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them. I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out ho…

I wouldn't call floods "very common"

Any given person might only experience a single flooded roadway or two in their lifetime. But that doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people exposed to flooded roadways every year. Something can be individually uncommon and yet frequent in absolute terms.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#199

Post by autoexec » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

ashdksnndck wrote: post #186

autoexec wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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” 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?

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.

Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

#200

Post by notahacker » Thu, May 21, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #136

notahacker wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human accidents don't get treated as "just a part of life", serious human driving errors are often considered so egregious that the person making the error picks up a driving ban or even a custodial sentence. So it's actually entirely rational that the bar for companies to be able to ship software that makes those fatal errors without consequence other than an insurance payout should be higher (especially since when…

There are over 6 million auto accidents in the US per year. How many of them make the news? I'm willing to bet that most people don't even know about pedestrian deaths that occur a few blocks away from where they live, at intersections they walk through every day. Meanwhile the same people will read about how a self driving car got into a fender bender on the other side of the country and confidently proclaim "this t…

Sure, autonomous vehicles are new, experimental technology so they're inherently more newsworthy, and news reports aren't a substitute for data - though in this case it's a good illustration that AI can make errors humans would be less likely to even if it is objectively better than the average driver at parking and not speeding.

This not in any way refute my argument that would also be irrational to set the safety bar for autonomous vehicles as "marginally better than humans" , given that AI failure modes are distributed completely differently from human ones, a sufficiently serious edge case bug triggered only once every hundred million miles might make the autonomous system more likely to kill you than humans[1], and for that and other reasons its almost impossible to quantify whether a particular firmware update actually is safer than the average driver (takes around >10 billion miles to approach statistical significance if you're worried about fatalities rather than only weakly-correlated scrape rates, and then you've got to wonder whether the driving conditions are well matched). Especially if we're using that statistical argument not just to license the vehicles for road use but to absolve autonomous system developers of potential criminal liability for actions taken by their software, a luxury humans that wipe out pedestrians with similar driving aberrations wouldn't get.

[1]the US had 1.38 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles in 2023, skewed significantly upwards by DUI and other egregious driving behaviour. Less than half that in other countries with different road conditions and also more in-depth driver education. Humans have a lot of car accidents, but they also drive a lot of miles.