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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

#171

Post by antonymoose »

toast0 wrote: post #145
VoidWhisperer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario…

> atleast there might be less gridlock I've never lived in a hurricane area, but when I think of news coverage of problematic evacuations, they're showing people stuck on highways, not people stuck in urban traffic grids. It's a throughput problem. Computer controlled "car trains" with shorter following distances can boost traffic throughput, but I don't think that would be enough to make evacuation of large cities a…

I’m from a flood prone, hurricane prone area - there were some painful lessons from Hurricane Andrew, famously the hurricane tie system for buildings in Florida which quickly spread, but in South Carolina they also learned a very important lesson - reverse all lanes on the interstate so everyone can flee as quickly as possible. The “stuck on I-26” problem no longer exists. I’ve personally driven 100+ miles in “the wrong way” to evacuate. It’s quite fun. They also perform statewide annual drills to make sure all emergency staff can faithfully execute this reversal pattern.

Do other states not do this?

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

#173

Post by mixdup »

themafia wrote: post #131
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…

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

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by burnte »

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.

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.

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

#176

Post by throwup238 »

retrocryptid wrote: post #93
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.

That being said... it's actually somewhat uncommon for humans to drive into flooded streets. To the degree that people think it's notable enough to take videos and post them to social media. I don't have the data, but would be interested to see how many times per passenger mile travelled human-directed and remotely-operated vehicles like Weymos drove into flooded streets. I can appreciate the cameras and lidar on the…

It shows up on social media when it’s a rare event for that area. It’s uncommon but “happens all the time” here in California in the deserts every heavy rain either because locals forget how deep the flood control washes are, or because tourists just drive into them thinking its a straight road, despite all the signs and warnings posted around them.

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

#177

Post by burnte »

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

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

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

#178

Post by aerhardt »

fragmede wrote: post #143
aerhardt wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport. To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

The reason they can't do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.

What they told me and I can read online is that they don’t because they can’t operate on the Austin highways. Have you read anything that’s more detailed?

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

#179

Post by antonymoose »

asah wrote: post #61

hard part is that cars should drive through shallow water... but how to know the depth? given accurate mapping + realtime imaging, this should be possible albeit a Big Project(tm).

Assuming they can say the water ends at X and the water ends at Y could they not estimate the depth to a good degree of confidence? Roads have a degree of uniformity I would imagine makes this a solvable problem?

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

#180

Post by autoexec »

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…

> 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.

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