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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

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

#161

Post by fragmede »

ACCount37 wrote: post #134
RationPhantoms wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I'll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don't want to) deal with malice.

"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety. A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best. Human drive…

Tesla's self driving will pull over if it detects the human driver has fallen asleep.

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

#162

Post by callbacked »

hamdingers wrote: post #115
bhelkey wrote: post #109

Maybe a dumb question, why do electric cars have issues with water? My understanding was that ICE cars have trouble because water get's drawn into the engine. Water in the engine causes it to stall. And the engine must have air in flow and out flow. An electric car doesn't need air in the same way (no oxygen to ignite with gasoline, no air to compress and expand). Shouldn't electric cars to much better at driving thr…

They can drive through surprisingly deep water, but you'd still rather avoid it for a lot of reasons. Dangerous loss of traction and risk of getting swept away, soaked passengers will want a refund, and a sopping wet interior will take the vehicle out of service for a while.

that and the seal for the battery enclosure can seize up after continuous drives through dirty water, the next passenger may not be so lucky and end up stranded once water breaches the battery pack

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

#163

Post by burkaman »

manwe150 wrote: post #62
thebruce87m wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?”

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.

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

#164

Post by ydse »

michaelt wrote: post #91
moomoo11 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how would a llm help maybe a little biological brain engineered to think it is a car with api access to the car hardware via the llm? imagine you get into the car and in the center console you just see a floating brain in vat like fallout

The driving ML model will take care of the next 10 seconds of driving, in a fast loop deciding what steering and throttle commands to give. The LLM will apply the high level reasoning needed to deal with longer time horizons and complex decisions, like deciding that the best way to reach the car wash 100 yards away is by walking.

Lmao what…

You sound like an econ prof: full of it and hand waving away with hypotheticals.

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

#165

Post by fragmede »

ydse wrote: post #159
etskinner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once all cars are autonomous, that day is certainly coming. Even before then, it's very likely we'll see platooning in the future, even if there are still some human drivers. Also, this already exists in some places. Look at a video of how to cross the street as a pedestrian in Vietnam: You literally just start walking across and people weave around you. Or look at driving in India and similar places. All I'm saying…

Right… any time now. If you want to write with such confidence perhaps you should share what the lottery numbers are?

Never is a long time though. Even if it takes 500 years for that to happen, it will still have happened.

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

#166

Post by brookst »

krackers wrote: post #153
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.

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...

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”.

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

#167

Post by antonymoose »

outside2344 wrote: post #152
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.

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

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.

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

#168

Post by fragmede »

ua709 wrote: post #67
steveBK123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evacuation you want to prioritized throughput - think of how little road space 100 people in a bus take up vs say 50 cars with 2 people each. Or even 25 cars with 4 people each.

If you have central control you might even be able to get away with changing the rules. i.e. most roads are now one-way leading out of the city. voilà we nearly doubled outbound throughput. Even just for commuting that would be awesome, not that it is happening anytime soon, but one can dream, especially while sitting in gridlock traffic.

Having the middle of five lanes change direction depending on the hour is fairly common. There's even a dedicated machine to move a concrete barrier to support this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IwBJPqyoB8

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

#169

Post by northerdome »

etempleton wrote: post #90

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going…

This is very much expected while the kinks are worked out. The reason Waymo is rolling out their vehicles in Atlanta in partnership with Uber is precisely for scenarios like this. Standard Uber service provides a backstop for when times when Waymos can't fulfill rides.

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

#170

Post by eodecker »

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
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