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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

techcrunch.com

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

#251

Post by mulmen »

fwip wrote: post #246
jfim wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A flooded road is a very predictable event, though.

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.

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

#252

Post by burkaman »

manwe150 wrote: post #206
burkaman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.…

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.

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

#253

Post by [deleted] »

ryukoposting wrote: post #232
burnte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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"

[deleted]

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

#254

Post by [deleted] »

mixdup wrote: post #173
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.

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

[deleted]

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

#255

Post by xienze »

mixdup wrote: post #173
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.

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

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.

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

#256

Post by buu700 »

fastball wrote: post #72
paxys wrote: post #13

Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.

This is why I personally feel like Tesla's approach is more likely to "win". The fundamental blocker to self-driving cars is not sensing / sensor fusion, it is intelligence. And the Tesla approach seems much more likely to achieve functional intelligence than Waymo's.

I like both approaches. The fact that both exist is a clear win for the rest of us as consumers.

Tesla's approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.

If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.

Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that's great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.

The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.

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

#257

Post by happyPersonR »

kibwen wrote: post #197
overfeed wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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”

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

#258

Post by dangus »

thereisnospork wrote: post #184
dangus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like re-reading this sentence a few times sends me right to the twilight zone of AI psychosis. It’s 2026 and self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a puddle and a flooded street, something a 3 year old can do. Google literally just got off stage telling us that AGI is almost here. Wake me up when this doesn’t feel like an NFT ape fever dream. And here we are talking about this like “oh gosh golly…

What 3 year old is judging the depth of a puddle before jumping in? Regardless, consider what you are saying: how can you seriously compare a computer to a (young) human and your response is disappointment that the AI doesn't quite measure up? If it's comparable to a child today it will be comparable to a teen in a decade!

Google is claiming AGI is around the corner, isn’t that supposed to be at least comparable to a 3 year old?

I assume you don’t have kids or know any kids if you don’t think they’re able to judge puddle sizes at age 3.

Why shouldn’t I make the comparison? Waymo is attempting to replace human drivers. That means it needs to make something smarter than humans at driving.

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

#259

Post by quickthrowman »

Muromec wrote: post #215
burnte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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.
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