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).
Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
61–70 of 498 posts
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#62Clearly they haven't actually had any serious problems getting stuck or anything because it'd be all over the news. I don't think they're barreling into foot+ deep water. I think they're driving into shallower "perfectly navigable but still deep" puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive l…
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?”
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#63Biblical.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#64I wonder how much of this is trouble perceiving water depth vs integrating that understanding into the larger driver model without creating regressions elsewhere.
In many situations, the depth of the water doesn't matter as driving into it will likely result in death.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#65Clearly they haven't actually had any serious problems getting stuck or anything because it'd be all over the news. I don't think they're barreling into foot+ deep water. I think they're driving into shallower "perfectly navigable but still deep" puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive l…
> One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are allowed to joke. We don't always need 'substantive comments'
It's not a joke if it doesn't make any sense, what good is a snorkle on an electric car?
That's...the joke. The humor is in the absurdity of recommending an addon to the car that utterly would not work and would look ridiculous. It's layered on the fact that Jeep snorkels look sort of ridiculous even on the vehicles they were designed for.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evacuation is a use case in my mind. Having a fleet of shuttles on command to move people in preparation of a hurricane would be a benefit. They would obviously need to put weather limitations during actual storms because no one should be driving in a hurricane.
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.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#68Driving 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.
They never advertised that they did. Its not even real true AI. They just struggle with new scenarios. People drive into floods too. They just don't get sensational articles written about it, just posted on reddit.
Taxi drivers with passengers don’t tend to though. At least not at the same rate.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#69Self driving will never handle all corner cases until they essentially have a frontal cortex. They probably need something like an LLM to help with very high level abstract situations, e.g. avoiding a hurricane like someone else mentioned in this thread.
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.
Re: Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
#70I wonder how much of this is trouble perceiving water depth vs integrating that understanding into the larger driver model without creating regressions elsewhere.
I feel like re-reading this sentence a few times sends me right to the twilight zone of AI psychosis.
It’s 2026 and self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a puddle and a flooded street, something a 3 year old can do.
Google literally just got off stage telling us that AGI is almost here. Wake me up when this doesn’t feel like an NFT ape fever dream.
And here we are talking about this like “oh gosh golly I wonder if this is some simple thing that could have been easily solved but they were trying to avoid regressions”
Get out of town, man.
I wish every dollar spent by investors on Waymo went into more frequent public bus service instead. A regular-ass bus with a human driver.