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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

#281

Post by ranger207 »

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.

I just moved from an apartment right next to where this Waymo got stuck: https://old.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/1tj00sl/flooding_i... and I can say that that particular intersection floods about every time it rains hard. That being said, yesterday's rain was particularly heavy and I hadn't seen that intersection flood that bad since before Waymo started being rolled out here

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

#282

Post by KennyBlanken »

fragmede wrote: post #149
abfan1127 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jeep snorkels are for air intakes for engines. electric cars don't have air intakes. they have air cooling for batteries... I suppose you could snorkel those.

Depends on the EV. Some of them have liquid cooling for their battery pack.

All major production EVs do. About the only exception I'm aware of is the first generation Nissan Leaf. I don't know if they've since changed.

Toyota uses air cooling (from the cabin) for their hybrid batteries, as do others.

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

#283

Post by jlebar »

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"

As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.

Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.

Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.

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

#284

Post by ranger207 »

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.

Well, only one Waymo got stuck in that flood, while at least two human-driven cars did, so by pure counting metrics they are better lol. But in my experience driving around them Waymos are much much better than most Atlanta drivers, not that that's a high bar

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

#285

Post by micromacrofoot »

llbbdd wrote: post #262
micromacrofoot wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having a decent train system in a city can cut car ownership in half, it's a solved technology we've had for 100 years but pretty much no one builds it because it's not some private ownership tech hype bullshit

That's fine but you still have to get to/from the train station, which is a problem cars solve very well. All the better if the car drives itself. They complement each other which is why I find it so strange that discussion of trains shows up in these threads so often as though though they're some kind of panaceanic alternative that is being overlooked. > because it's not some private ownership tech hype bullshit I d…

You're speaking authoritatively but you don't even understand the basics of a lot of municipal train systems.

> they take up a lot of space that people can't walk on, that cars can't drive on, that isn't useful to park housing or commerce near

there are multiple cities that already have systems where all of this is true through various sections — Boston for example has the green line, which has rail embedded in streets that people often cross, cars drive on, and run center to streets that cars park on. Businesses near transit lines like this see increased foot traffic as people leave the train to walk home. People take groceries, bikes, furniture on trains... children use them to get to school, they're accessible the elderly and disabled. Many things that automated cars can not do.

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

#286

Post by KennyBlanken »

tintor wrote: post #125
ai-x wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought about this and I think it boils to how the model is trained. Tesla trains it models from actual drivers purely based on (input) Vision and (output) actuators - Brake, Steering, Accelerators. Human output is based on what they and the camera sees. So, it's a 1:1 match. If Waymo were to do that, it'll muddle the training set. The Lidar input may override camera input. I always struggled when Musk mentioned Li…

The biggest issue with using both camera and lidar is how to properly resolve conflicting returns from different sensor types.

That is vastly preferable to slamming into the back of an emergency vehicle because the cameras are dazzled by the strobes, or slamming into tractor trailers because the cameras were blinded by sunlight. Or slamming on the brakes because the car thinks a shadow in the road is a physical object...

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

#287

Post by pibaker »

paxys wrote: post #69
quantummagic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A frontal cortex isn't enough; there are plenty of corner cases that humans fail at too. The real test is if self-driving performs on par, or better than, humans in the vast majority of cases. If it saves 50,000 lives a year to go with self-driving, it's a net-win even if there are a few people who die in situations where they would have survived with a human driver behind the wheel.

Self driving cars are not going to be accepted if they have only marginally better success rates than humans. Just look at the news. Every minor self driving incident is endlessly magnified by the media while millions of human-caused accidents are just a part of life. That's just how our brains work. All major decisions are made primarily based on emotion, not analytics.

In the case of driving and flying a significant part is the passenger's agency. There are many common sense things you can do to reduce your own chance of crashing your car. Drive defensively, don't speed, don't drive drunk. There is very little a passenger in an AV or on an airplane can do to prevent things from going wrong. And it turns out we really don't like having no agency over our own travels and that's why we have such high safety requirements for airlines — but not general aviation — and now AVs.

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

#288

Post by Marsymars »

quickthrowman wrote: post #259
Muromec wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1…

It's not even amounts of rain that are necessarily the problem.

In my area, big rainstorms sometimes include hail, and if some of the hail/debris is big enough to block sewer grates, then the deluge of water will quickly sweep hail and other debris into the partial blockage until the grates are thoroughly clogged.

I'm not sure how you could adequately design against that while not having storm water grates that are hazardous to people/animals/etc.

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

#289

Post by sarchertech »

srdjanr wrote: post #196
autoexec wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them. I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out ho…

I wouldn't call floods "very common"

Maybe not in California but anywhere like Atlanta that gets 50 inches of rain a year has quite a few flooded roadways.

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

#290

Post by sarchertech »

bluGill wrote: post #229
autoexec wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Floods are the most common and widespread of all weather-related natural disasters...Flooding occurs in every U.S. state and territory, and is a threat experienced anywhere in the world that receives rain." ( https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/ ) If they were going to plan for any kind of dangerous weather, flooding should have been very high up on that list. People tend to take flash flood warnings…

They are still not very common. They happen more than other weather, but that still isn't common.

That depends on you definition of “flood”. But here we’re just talking about dangerously flooded roadways, and in many parts of the US those happen multiple times per year. Definitely common enough that you can’t just shut down your fleet anytime there is a danger of it happening.
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