Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

missionlocal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 468 posts

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#131

Post by MBCook »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107
MBCook wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing. They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.

> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking. > They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars. There are producti…

> But it's also not a disaster

Because it’s a power outage. If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died because these things were let on the road without planning what they should do in abnormal circumstances.

We’re lucky it’s not a disaster.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#132

Post by MBCook »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #118
andsoitis wrote: post #100

Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen. Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.

> Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen We have zero evidence a power outage wasn't foreseen. This looks like a more complex multi-system failure.

Does it matter?

Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe. And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens.

If you can physically get out of the way, you need to. Period.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#133

Post by AlotOfReading »

jerlam wrote: post #95
isodev wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s clear that both use cases are a must have during an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos shouldn’t be online during such times at all.

First responders get the highest priority of cellular networks even in non-emergency situations (FirstNet).

FirstNet is AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile have their own alternatives (FrontLine and T-Priority, respectively). QCI is a fun rabbit hole, because some of these networks share the first responder QCIs with certain business use cases.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#134

Post by AyyEye »

bigyabai wrote: post #124
pjc50 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also means that their claims of "autonomy" are fraudulent, like most "self driving" cars. A car which depends on powered infrastructure outside the car to drive is not autonomous.

Nearly all humans depend on powered infrastructure outside their car to drive it. You're describing a shortcoming of all 21st century navigation.

Tell that to all of the humans who were capable of driving, but blocked by a fake autonomous car that froze in the middle of the road.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#135

Post by MBCook »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #130
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #109

Neither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that’s really troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.

Waymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection is gone then this is no longer available, and one might speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if they are in a situation where remote help is called for and inaccessible. Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to stop operating autonomously and try to pho…

That’s clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious possible failure.

Things go wrong -> get human help

Human not available -> just block the road???

How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback.

I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran over something. But in a situation like this where the problem is fully external it should fall back to “park myself” mode.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#136

Post by AlotOfReading »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #105
tiahura wrote: post #86

How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?

> Is this because Tesla has more training data? Its human takes over. FSD is still Level 3. (Robotaxi, Tesla's Level 4 product, is still in beta. Based on reports, its humans had to intervene.)

FSD is level 2. Level 3 doesn't require the human driver to monitor the outside environment, only take over when requested. Tesla also doesn't report data from FSD under L3 reporting requirements anywhere in the US.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#137

Post by chroma »

cess11 wrote: post #103

I think I prefer trains and buses.

SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or exit there.

Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing for them, but it can be solved with software improvements. Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs, so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.

But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#138

Post by JumpCrisscross »

MBCook wrote: post #132
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen We have zero evidence a power outage wasn't foreseen. This looks like a more complex multi-system failure.

Does it matter? Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe. And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens. If you can physically get out of the way, you need to. Period.

> Does it matter

Yes. OP is inferring Waymo's internal processes from this meltdown. ("Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.")

If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a systemic problem. If, on the other hand, there was some weird power and cellular meltdown that coïncided with something else, that's a fixable edge case.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#139

Post by MBCook »

SoftTalker wrote: post #112
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked? We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.

A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.

It can do that with a normal driver too. Doesn’t make it ok for there to ever be a situation where they need to when the target vehicle/driver is just fine and capable of doing it themselves.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#140

Post by JumpCrisscross »

MBCook wrote: post #135
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection is gone then this is no longer available, and one might speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if they are in a situation where remote help is called for and inaccessible. Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to stop operating autonomously and try to pho…

That’s clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious possible failure. Things go wrong -> get human help Human not available -> just block the road??? How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback. I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran over something. But in a situation like this where the problem is fully extern…

> How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback

Barring everything else, the proper failsafe for any vehicle should be to stop moving and tell the humans inside to evacuate. This is true for autonomous vehicles as well as manned ones–if you can't figure out how to pull over during a disaster, ditching is absolutely a valid move.

Post reply on HN