Waymo, who's arguably the most competent operator by far, cannot handle Atlanta. But TSLA and its Potemkin village-like robotaxi service trades at 380 PE. Figure that one out.
Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
431–440 of 498 posts
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close. There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.
>A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close. Driving safe is not always about having faster reaction speed.
It's about many things, including reaction speed, visual awareness, specific expertise and informed decision making wrt braking or acceleration power. All of these are better in a modern self-driving car (I do not know whether Tesla falls into this category) than in a human.
https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs. That doesn't mitigate much. The mass of a paper and matchsticks "house" just isn't enough to resist it getting torn apart - if not by the wind, then by debris. The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit is steel bar reinforced concrete or very, very solidly built brick-and-mortar. But that is expensive to…
Explain to the class where the water is gonna get all that momentum from. Florida is flat. The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks. Between the requirements imposed by needing to resist hurricane winds and the slab ties it's "good enough" that there's a 99.9999% chance the building will stay on it's foundation long e…
> The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.
FEMA has a flood rating specifically for exactly this situation: V. They have this because it carries additional hazards beyond normal flooding seen with storms.
> Coastal areas with a 1% or greater chance of flooding and an additional hazard associated with storm waves. These areas have a 26% chance of flooding over the life of a 30‐year mortgage.
And here's a video about researchers at the Oregon State University's Wave Lab studying this exact thing:
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather You may be relieved to hear Waymo is rolling out to Portland, Oregon. It's not in the south, and with over 150 rainy days per year, it ranks among the rainiest US cities.
I'll be relieved when I hear that they did it without killing anyone. Considering they didn't bother to work out how to handle floods before they put people's lives at risk everywhere else, it's not all that reassuring that they're now going to YOLO it in Portland
Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes [1].
We currently sit in the ballpark of 300,000 pedestrian deaths per year worldwide [2]. You should be relieved every time they deploy to a new city.
[1] - https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/more-than-a-million...
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#435To 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.
Just because there are real world failures doesn't mean they didn't do simulations. It could just mean the simulation didn't account for something different in the real world.
The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure if your robot tax is correctly able to distinguish between a quarter of an inch of water on the road and 2 inches or more, which doesn’t seem to be the case currently.
Stupid question from a non-driver: How do humans tell the depth of a flooded road? Unless it is an insanely high flood (total change in landscape appearance), it seems difficult to tell the difference between 5cm and 30-60cm of flooding.
Having driving through floods before: you don't. You either know the road before and thus know it is safe (though sometimes is washes out and you are wrong!), or you watch others and then follow the same path they did. In a very few cases there are signs that tell you (I know of a couple places where the road just crosses a stream, and the signs tell you when it is no longer safe)
You also need to know your vehicle. Some cars can wade through deeper water. Sometimes a heavy SUV will get through where a light jeep will float away. Other times the light jeep will get through and the heavy SUV gets stuck in mud.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#437Earlier 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.
Just because there are real world failures doesn't mean they didn't do simulations. It could just mean the simulation didn't account for something different in the real world. The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...
So what you're saying is that something far worse happened here. They did test for flooded streets but some slight difference caused the model to fail in real life.
To be fair, there will always be something that fails. So the more important question is probably the frequency and severity of those failures.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#438An infinite number of comments about how good/bad/etc this is, and nobody seems to have noticed that it is literally a report of exactly one waymo getting stuck in flooded water that caused this.
I live in Atlanta. This was 3-4 inches of rain in 30 minutes, which is uncommon and was unexpected enough that the flash flood warnings were not issued until well after the flooding occurred.
The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood?
I know it's more than 1 because there were 4 cars people abandonded on my street alone! I'm not even on that flooded or busy of a street.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human drivers are very very bad. Being better than humans is a low bar with plenty of room to be bad as well.
It still seems to be a high bar to achieve
How high the bar is isn't worth arguing about. The question is do self driving cars clear it?
Those who work on self driving cars say they have cleared it - but they have an obvious bias. Nobody independent has done a full study of this, so we have no particular reason to believe them, but we also shouldn't completely discount them (when the truth is in their favor everyone with a bias will tell it, and some people are even able to overcome their bias when the truth is against them)
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#440To 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…
Sounds like they need to employ more "neurodivergents" to make these robots work correctly, before they are all Silent Greened, and it is only the CEOs left bashing each other's heads in with rocks.