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

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

#261

Post by scoofy »

SoftTalker wrote: post #114

"San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off the roads unless they needed to travel." Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.

The word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an errand in the blackout, we didn't need to do it, but we wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including multiple disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it over, I would have stayed home.

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

#262

Post by addaon »

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.

> Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe.

Yes.

> And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens.

No. Fail-operational is not the only allowable fail-safe condition for automobiles. For example, it is acceptable for loss of propulsion to cause stop-in-lane — the alternative would be to require high-availability propulsion systems, or to require drivers to always have enough kinetic energy to coast to side. This just isn’t the case.

One can argue that when operating a fleet with correlated failure modes the rules should change a bit, but that’s a separate topic.

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

#263

Post by scoofy »

macintux wrote: post #231
MBCook wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is they’ve made it our problem. Look I like Waymo. I think they’re neat and I trust them far more than any of the other companies. But in my mind being able to handle stuff like this is just a requirement to be on the roads in any non-trivial number. Like if they had two vehicles in this happened then OK that’s a problem but it was two vehicles in an entire city. When you have enough on th…

Effectively they’ve turned any edge case into a potential city-wide problem and PR nightmare. One driver doesn’t know how to handle a power outage? It’s not news. Hundreds of automated vehicles all experience the same failure? National news.

I live in the affected neighborhood. There were hundreds of drivers that did not know how to handle a power outage... it was a minority of drivers, but it was a nontrivial, but nominally large number. I even saw a Muni bus blow through a blacked out intersection. The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that prevented potential injury, whereas the humans who failed, all fail in a way that would create potential injury.

I wish the Waymos handled it better, yes, but I think that the failure state they took is preferable to the alternative.

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

#264

Post by scottbez1 »

macintux wrote: post #231
MBCook wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is they’ve made it our problem. Look I like Waymo. I think they’re neat and I trust them far more than any of the other companies. But in my mind being able to handle stuff like this is just a requirement to be on the roads in any non-trivial number. Like if they had two vehicles in this happened then OK that’s a problem but it was two vehicles in an entire city. When you have enough on th…

Effectively they’ve turned any edge case into a potential city-wide problem and PR nightmare. One driver doesn’t know how to handle a power outage? It’s not news. Hundreds of automated vehicles all experience the same failure? National news.

Yeah, the correlated risk with AVs is a pretty serious concern. And not just in emergencies where they can easily DDOS the roads, but even things like widespread weaknesses or edge cases in their perception models can cause really weird and disturbing outcomes.

Imagine a model that works real well for detecting cars and adults but routinely misses children; you could end up with cars that are 1/10th as deadly to adults but 2x as deadly to children. Yes, in this hypothetical it saves lives overall, but is it actually a societal good? In some ways yes, in some ways it should never be allowed on any roads at all. It’s one of the reasons aggregated metrics on safety are so important to scrutinize.

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

#265

Post by scottbez1 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #217
MBCook wrote: post #93

From John Ripley on Mastodon: “Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators: Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.” I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK? I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more…

What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.

Latency makes this hard even with local connections, it’s essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore.

And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control with a highly and variably latent system is very hard/dangerous.

And in an emergency situation you’re likely to have terrible connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be sufficient for the complexity of the situation.

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

#266

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #199
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Waymo has a lesson to learn from. At what point can we be spared from having Waymos lessons inflicted upon us

> At what point can we be spared from having Waymos lessons inflicted upon us

Again, we had a real event happen. Not hypothetical. What was the actual cost inflicted?

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

#267

Post by markus_zhang »

cjsplat wrote: post #193

I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out. The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving. The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersectio…

I’m curious what’s the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that, or at least most of everyone. What’s the situation in SF?

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

#268

Post by smugma »

cjsplat wrote: post #193

I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out. The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving. The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersectio…

Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly.

And if you’re Waymo, it’s a short-term reputation hit but great experience to learn from and improve.

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

#269

Post by lokar »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #235
lokar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it was either? AIUI, it was the irregularity of the uncontrolled intersections combining with the “novel” (from the POV of the software) driving style of the humans. In dense areas during outages signaled intersections don’t actually degrade to 4 way stops, drivers act pretty poorly. The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters an…

> The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted. And my question is why did it halt instead of pull over?

How much to move once you decide things have gone off the rails is a hard question, but I’d assume they have put some thought into it.
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