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 hitches from new situations.
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.
They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much
IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.
It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.
But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.
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.
We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!
It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.
> 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.
As far as I know, nobody has been hurt from floods while in a Waymo. They hide their safety data from the public though (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...) so it's hard to say for sure. They've certainly been involved in crashes, killed pets (I actually give them a pass on the bodega cat), run over elementary school children, etc. Waymo has said it's only a matter of time until they kill someone and they've got plans for how to handle deaths caused by their cars, but they expect the public to accept those deaths.
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
> 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 Wayno 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.
Rain is one thing, but despite the rain Oregon is almost dead-last among all the states in terms of flood risk. It gets constant drizzles, not sporadic deluges.
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
I would assume that after the very first instance you would start moving to fix it. To be in a position where you have to roll back your plans doesn't seem like a simple "delay."
The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?
> The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?
Since you're of the opinion that this is taking too long, what do you think is a reasonable time for a fix, and why? I'm assuming Waymo didn't have a team of flood-detection experts twiddling their thumbs waiting to be prompted into action.
Better is an arbitrary statement. By number of jobs robots lose, by number of sexual assaults by taxi drivers they win. Pick the wights for very factors and you can select anything as the best in category.
This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them.
Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going to be at AGI in a few years? I get people want these things to happen, but I just don’t see it happening any time soon. The whole tech industry feels built on what maybe, someday, possibly, could happen but most likely won’t, but we are all going to act like is a sure thing and is just around the corner.
Are there no responsible adults left at these tech companies?
The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".
A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.
If you think that "flooded roadway" is a case that's handled gracefully by every human driver, and it's the AI that's uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you.
Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of "water flood engine damage" cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of "is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out".
> 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 how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.
Any given person might only experience a single flooded roadway or two in their lifetime. But that doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people exposed to flooded roadways every year. Something can be individually uncommon and yet frequent in absolute terms.
I was (I think the search bar will prove this out) a pretty committed skeptic of driverless cars, but I've come around on them in some use cases. I'm not optimistic about them on highways. But they solve some important problems in regional/local transit.
We're contemplating standing up an EV shuttle service in Oak Park. It will fail. As I understand it, we've piloted non-EV versions of a shuttle service; they failed. The problem is that in small local areas, the staffing for a useful transit service is too expensive; that's because "useful" imposes constraints about responsiveness, coverage, and most of all hours of service, which mean the service won't pencil out with the ridership it'll get.
An autonomous vehicle transit service in our muni would probably work fine; it's a strict grid system with very low speed limits (AVs will, in our area, be strictly better drivers than the median human drivers --- this isn't a statement about human fallibility so much as an observation about scofflawry in our area). And if the product existed, we could afford it, because we wouldn't be paying fully loaded headcount costs for 2+ shifts of drivers at epsilon levels of utilization.
For whatever it's worth, I don't really have "autonomous vehicles" and "LLMs" in the same bucket in my head. I'm bullish on both, but for very different reasons. It usually doesn't occur to me to think of Waymos as "AI", though, obviously, they are.
I'm bullish on AI as a replacement for Uber from airports well behaved climates I frequent but bearish on how long it'll take to actually make a damn for me needing my car in Ohio until the mid-late 2030s at this rate. It's just so close and so far away at the same time.
This is very much expected while the kinks are worked out. The reason Waymo is rolling out their vehicles in Atlanta in partnership with Uber is precisely for scenarios like this. Standard Uber service provides a backstop for when times when Waymos can't fulfill rides.
I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I'll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don't want to) deal with malice.
"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.
A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.
Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad.
AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.
Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.
The option that doesn't exist in America is to get the bus.
Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.
The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.
We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.
Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn't dissapoint.
There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper 'windscreen'. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.
Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?
Maybe. But maybe not.
The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that 'pulled out on the bus', that was a highway maintenance issue.
There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and 'our' bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.
At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn't as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.
One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn't the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from 'traffic', as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.
I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.
Motorcycling used to be one of my biggest hobbies.
I live in NYC now. Drivers here are some combination of utterly selfish and mindlessly distracted. You can't even trust them to stop at red lights. It gives me a huge amount of pause riding here.
"Cars are dangerous, necessary in many places, but often driven by irresponsible people" is a huge problem that needs solving. Waymo seems to have been doing a pretty fantastic job at it.
And even if they couldn't figure out how to route around floods, floods are rare. They're still a net benefit to society.
Tbf, I think you’re just experiencing a downside of living in NYC. I’ve only ever been there as a tourist, but I wouldn’t ever dream of renting a motorcycle in the city for the reasons you mention.
For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate.
Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general.
I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)
AI as commonly discussed is just pretty-general intelligence that is very economically valuable. Not AGI outside of the true believers.
And can we discuss AI drivers and AI LLMs in the same paragraph? One is a special application of trying to emulate a very particular human embodiment, with all the sensory challenges. The other is a brain in a vat. Both can fail and flourish independent of each other, or at least I see little overlap.
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?
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.
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.
A decent welder should be able to turn out a trailer hitch <=> outboard motor bracket in under 15 minutes. It's not like you'll need much more than a modest fishing outboard to get through flooded spots.
You'd need to ensure every electrical connection is in a waterproof location which I'm pretty sure is not a thing for any standard car manufacturing. Cabins are also rarely watertight.
AFAIK your best bet is a diesel with a snorkel, and hope things have dried off before you need to restart the engine.
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.
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 Weymos don't give their remote operators a lot of good data about the depth of water on the road-way. As you point out, humans in cars often don't get this right. I think the humans that don't drive into deep water are the ones who a) give any amount of water on the roadway a big NOPE and b) people familiar with the local environment and use multiple visual clues to judge the true depth of the flooding.
As far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it's pretty uncommon.
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.
Ask the car, in the sense you can, why it drove into the water.
Then ask the human.
I'm not sure you'd walk away the idea that they have equivalent intelligence. The human at least knew the water was there and took a risk, the car, presumably, had no idea what was in front of it and drove into it anyways.
This is why I personally feel like Tesla's approach is more likely to "win". The fundamental blocker to self-driving cars is not sensing / sensor fusion, it is intelligence. And the Tesla approach seems much more likely to achieve functional intelligence than Waymo's.
While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind.
Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?
> such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions
Because this part is really hard, and that's why Tesla abandoned the fusion approach. You cannot possibly foresee all the conditions in which LIDAR or any active sensor will malfunction/return wrong data/return data that's only slightly off for that ONE specific time. And even if it doesn't, you need to trust it to not return noise. And when it does return noise, how do you classify it as noise?
Cameras are passive sensors - they get whatever light comes in and turn it into an image. Camera is capturing shapes that make sense to the neural nets: it's working. See all black/white/red/cannot see any shapes? Camera is not working, exclude it from the currently used set of sensors or weigh it less when applying decisions, because it's returning no signal (and yes, neural nets have their own set of problems).
EDIT: cameras also provide more continuous context: if 1 pixel is off, is clearly bright red in a mostly-green scene where no poles can be identified, the neural net will average it out and discard it as noise. If 1 pixel says "object" in LIDAR, do you trust it to be correct? Perhaps the ray just hit a bird or a fly, but you only see a point, it's a lossy summary of the information you need.
They could in theory. If they put at least as much emphasis on the AI side as Tesla does. Or if someone else cracked vehicle AI wide open and left it open for them to copy, and then they did exactly that, and found a way to bolt on their extra sensors in a useful fashion while at it.
As is, Waymo's playing it smarter than Cruise did, but they're not all in on AI yet. So I don't expect them to "leapfrog Tesla" in that dimension - and it's the key dimension to self-driving.
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 Lidar will make it ambiguous. It didn't make any sense to me why having a secondary failback sensor messes things. But, if you put it in the training data context, it absolutely makes sense.
This is an interesting viewpoint, but isn't it also solveable?
Just because the human in the scenario only took vision as input, why does that matter to the training data and the model? The actions are the same.
To put it another way, what about all the cultural context the human had, or the sounds, smells, past experiences at the same intersection, etc? Even Tesla can't record this, but I'm not sure that matters.
Because they don't have a fleet of millions of people labeling the data for them and paying for the privilege of doing so. Waymo has about 3700 vehicles. Tesla has millions. Waymo only operates in known environments and collects a very limited range of data. Tesla collects data everywhere that people drive their cars.
I got downvoted for saying this last time the topic came up but constraints focus a project. It’s best to start work with as few variables as possible, and only add new ones when absolutely necessary.
I'm working on a similar problem in computer vision and we're quickly approaching the point where our pure vision work is better than our Lidar supported track because we've had to deal with the constraints instead of having a crutch to lean on.
I agree, but these are also the exact constraints that lead to an early leader getting overtaken by a longer term, yet better set of plans. Not saying that's the case here, but given how much success Waymo has had so far, over really everything Tesla has produced, says quite a bit about the likelihood of the approach, even if it's not yet there.
Snark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.
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 like that would never happen, probably for the best.
The problem is they're not designed for that. They aren't spending resources on some master control networking system because in 99% of use cases that won't be useful anyways as most of the traffic being dealt with isn't other waymo's willing to communicate.
There might be some level of adoption where they would, but honestly we're back to "but what about trains/trucks?".
Half the problem with evacuations is people don't want to leave behind their stuff to get destroyed. You'd basically be better off getting a fleet of semi's with some quick and dirty cube system thrown up than a bunch of automated sedans.
Sort of. There is no built in support for evacuation methods, but the WayMo absolutely does use a master control system for network the cars. This is how the database of streets is kept and is why WayMo vehicles occasionally swarm private non through way ally streets when there is some glitch in the database that indicates private ways are available roads or an ally that looks like a through way turns out to have a fence between properties.
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 actually feasible. The highway system is simply not built for that use case. Especially since evacuation often occurs during inclement weather that reduces capacity.
AFAIK, most places try to figure out how to make shelter in place work, because mass evacuation is likely to end up with many people facing the weather event while on the highway.
You could theoretically do better with busses and trains, things, but there's likely not enough busses that are setup for long distance travel available: lots of municipal bus fleets are setup for alternate fuels which is great for emissions but makes it hard to travel to a neighboring state, because there may not be appropriate fueling opportunities on the way. Etc, etc.
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.
With human drivers: traffic light turns green. The first car starts driving. The 2nd car waits 2 seconds and then starts driving. The third car waits another 2 seconds (4 seconds total) and then starts driving. The fourth car waits another 2 seconds (6 seconds total) and then starts driving. etc.
With computers driving: traffic light turns green. All cars simultaneously start driving. It'd be like a train but without the efficiency.
Similarly, with human drivers: some jackasses drive into the box and the light turns red. Now perpendicular traffic is either fully blocked or must proceeed slower to maneuver around the jackasses. With computer drivers, they shouldn't intentionally break the law and they should have plenty of sensors to figure out that they cannot make it through the box.
Safety margins still will require some level of delay between cars that aren't mechanically linked. Even with perfect reaction times, the physics of driving (maximum acceleration rates, possible loss of traction) dictate this, it's a non-trivial control theory problem. Besides, it doesn't seem to be a goal of Waymo; I've seen lines of their vehicles before and they all behave the same way as in mixed traffic.
As a sorta informed outsider, conceptually this makes intuitive sense. But in practice, how does this work? It seems a lot of the intuition breaks down if we don't assume it's network (aka 1 vendor). Fundamentally it's a bunch of external actors where we cannot verify trust and in order to solve for the needs of the individual, suboptimal choices must be made. To put it another way, even if computers can drive cars, what _else_ needs to be in place for this vision?
Traffic is usually caused by adding inefficiencies across a system with little slack - someone brakes too hard or too early, and if all the cars are stacked up, that one brake event can ripple through hundreds of following cars, getting worse and worse because each person brakes more. Self driving cars can perfectly sync up and move like a train. Theoretically there could be no traffic on highways if all cars are self-driving. Rarely is a highway so full that there couldn’t be more cars (eg. The entrance ramps are backed up) which implies the issues are related to the driving flow and not the capacity of the street itself.
Ideally, robot drivers will some day be better drivers than humans in all road conditions. They'll be able to coordinate fast lane merges and busy intersections by subtly adjusting speed without vehicles having to stop.
Imagine a busy intersection where all the cars fly past one another at 40 miles an hour without stopping but none of them crash. Humans can't do this, but machines could, if, and when the technology gets there. To be clear, there's still a way to go.
Once all cars are autonomous, that day is certainly coming. Even before then, it's very likely we'll see platooning in the future, even if there are still some human drivers.
Also, this already exists in some places. Look at a video of how to cross the street as a pedestrian in Vietnam: You literally just start walking across and people weave around you. Or look at driving in India and similar places.
In principle the driverless cars are more able to organize fleeting, operating in a way that's not actually practical if you don't share a single guiding directive.
I don't know that you'd ever see this in practice, but it's much more practical in theory for almost identical machines running the same software than for a bunch of humans in a variety of vehicles who've maybe only half understood how to do this.
Also, for this specific problem we know humans are idiots. They should all be driving an agreed route to the agreed evacuation point, but some real humans will decide they know a shortcut, they want to drop past Jim's place, or whatever. Just as there's a difference between what the protocol says happens when you have to abandon an aircraft on the tarmac versus the reality that people will decide they want to self-evacuate and they need their carry on bags and chaos ensues and maybe people die.
Self driving cars don't panic and drive recklessly. I don't live in hurricane country, but most accidents around here are caused by drivers who are on their phones/spacing out or driving super aggressively.
Most traffic jams are caused by accidents or people slamming the brakes
Same reason there's less gridlock when people obey traffic lights and other rules of the road and don't brake randomly. If every car on the road drove itself then there would never be traffic.
Well, probably not the current generation of driverless cars. Those would be a nightmare. Contrary to what some want to believe self driving cars do random shit all the time.
But in the future, if there is a coordination standard among driverless cars, that could allow much higher density at higher speed. Coordination standards + higher density of self driving should reduce the self driving cars doing random shit too.
"assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid"
This is a big assumption.
This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can't be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.
It would be a failure. Turns out they do something stupid. People tested this in sf by calling a bunch of waymos at once for a prank, but I guess that is the best case example of what a panicked evacuation on the service might be like. It was like a ddos attack. They ended up gridlocking themselves and turned it into a real life version of one of those rush hour board games. No one got out of the little area they called the waymos in.
I doubt it's less actual throughput in most cases. In a place like Atlanta there's no place where it's bus after bus. The BRT line they built nearby is a bus every 10 minutes. Which being very generous to the bus usage is equivalent to like 5 cars a minute.
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.
Having the middle of five lanes change direction depending on the hour is fairly common. There's even a dedicated machine to move a concrete barrier to support this.
Guessing the depth of a puddle is not an easy task. Many untrained horses will refuse to step into shallow puddles. Then we also have human drivers driving into flooded road.
I wonder how much of this is trouble perceiving water depth vs integrating that understanding into the larger driver model without creating regressions elsewhere.
I don't think there's a good solution right now. You can't just go based on surrounding traffic because humans are also stupid and flood their cars all the time.
You could maybe use short-wave infrared cameras combined with ground penetrating radar, but it'll get real expensive so probably not commercially viable.
I think the only "good" solution is to have the car be overly paranoid, and if it detects water on the roadway that's bigger than some arbitrary diameter (to rule out mud puddles), then the car has to assume its a flood, stop, and escalate to a human or change the route.
Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings. Maybe we as a society need to top forcing everything to still operate normally during natural disasters. It's OK to shut things down when safety calls for it, and that applies to human drivers too. If areas are flooding, stay home.
> Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings.
FTA
> the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,”
> But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory.
Their fleet is constantly scanning the area with lidar, which is assembled into maps. If those maps are in 3d rather than a 2d road grid you can calculate puddles very accurately with no extra sensors:
- Find the edge of the water using vision or lidar
- look up the ground height at that position in your map data. That is the water level
- run a flood fill of the local 3d map starting from that point, with that water level. That gives you an exact shape of the puddle
- for any point on your planned path, you can now check if the point is in the puddle (per the flood fill above) and how deep the water is (difference between puddle's water level and ground height)
- use that either as a go/no-go for a planned path, or even feed this into your pathfinding to find a path with acceptable water level
The main limitation is that it assumes that the ground hasn't changed. It won't help in a landslide, or on muddy ground where other cars have disturbed the ground. But for the classic case of the flooded underpass or flooded dip in the road it should be very accurate
The vehicles have enough information to make the determination. Ground data is available in the point cloud and usually labeled as such. Water sometimes shows up in point clouds, sometimes it doesn't depending on conditions and wavelength.
If the apparent road surface is higher than the mapped ground surface, probably a puddle. If your point cloud has a big hole, also probably a puddle.
This assumes you aren't doing ground plane removal, of course. But it's quite likely that Waymo is using a heavily ML approach these days, and I can imagine the poor thing getting very confused if it's not an explicit training goal.
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.
What 3 year old is judging the depth of a puddle before jumping in?
Regardless, consider what you are saying: how can you seriously compare a computer to a (young) human and your response is disappointment that the AI doesn't quite measure up? If it's comparable to a child today it will be comparable to a teen in a decade!
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 through water?
They can drive through surprisingly deep water, but you'd still rather avoid it for a lot of reasons. Dangerous loss of traction and risk of getting swept away, soaked passengers will want a refund, and a sopping wet interior will take the vehicle out of service for a while.
that and the seal for the battery enclosure can seize up after continuous drives through dirty water, the next passenger may not be so lucky and end up stranded once water breaches the battery pack
Another reason water and ICE cars don't mix is the wiring harness. Even if you don't flood the engine, you'll be having trouble with the electrical for the rest of the car's life. (Or, at least, that's the conventional wisdom)
During the “winter”, sure, but it dumps rain during the same and there are flash floods occasionally. I agree with the parent comment that Miami is a great area to test - especially given that the bad weather is seasonal. They can run 24/7 during the good weather seasons.
Also, the drivers in Miami are a bit more unpredictable than the average driver around the country in my experience, so good challenge cases for self-driving development.
Unpredictable drivers aren’t a challenge compared to weather. They’re just 3D objects to avoid. That’s a solved problem.
The thing about weather is that with a fully automated fleet they can just stop and give up on driving instantly. Rain in Miami doesn’t tend to last very long except in specific storms like hurricanes. Waymo can just not operate during those times.
I’m very doubtful that a lot of these inherent problems with the technology are being rapidly solved. See: the article.
This is just part of the slog that autonomous driving was always going to be.
Many many years ago I happened to be in a conversation with one of the guys on a team that participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. It was only the second such race after the 2004 one, but arguably the one which set off the autonomous driving race we see today. (Sebastian Thrun's team came in 2nd.)
I went into the conversation thinking it was going to be an extremely challenging but tractable sensors + control-systems problem. But by the end of the conversation I was like, OMG this is going to be a long-haul slog of solving an unending stream of problems, some potentially even AI-complete (i.e. requiring human-level judgment.)
We mostly discussed why his and most other teams failed and the failures were so myriad and so technically intractable that I could not see a path to full self-driving for at least two decades. And all of this was offroad, so it didn't even approach the challenges of sharing human-occupied streets. I cannot remember any details unfortunately, but I remember that one car got stuck in a loop due to a problem that would have been trivial for a human to bypass... but that required human-level judgment. As an analogy it was something like a soft obstacle that could safely be driven over. But for the car to know that it would require a database and an "understanding" of all possible obstacles. An LLM could have helped, but back then they were still firmly in the realm of SciFi.
So the only feasible solution was to painstakingly identify all the edge-cases and work through them slowly, carefully, one-by-one. Which is what Waymo has been doing. This is also why when Elon made his "full self-"driving announcements I knew he had absolutely NO idea what he was talking about, and he was likely going to move fast and break people.
Flooded streets is just another "bump on the road" to full self-driving, but it seems we're actually getting there now. In retrospect, my 2-decade estimate was surprisingly accurate, I have no idea how I landed on that particular number!
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?
We get popup thunderstorms here and those often mean zero visibility conditions even without a flood. It's just part of life in the spring and summer with all that chaotic moisture coming off the Gulf. We might get a few minutes warning. If your robot can't handle that then you're going to have a bad time.
I think another way of framing it is "Waymo pauses Atlanta service due to weather conditions", which doesn't sound at all unreasonable to me. It's no different from "Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm" or whatever.
I think that self driving cars won't ever be able to handle every condition out there, and so there's probably a time when the system will be paused / shutdown when conditions aren't safe to drive in. Honestly, I wish we could do this with human drivers for that matter, too, but some will press on even when they shouldn't...
Well except that there were incidents of cars getting stuck in floods with passengers before they paused the service.
A closer analogy would be ""Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm after 3 planes slide off the runway due to ice"
Absolutely I think there will be a disconnect between when people think they should be able to drive somewhere (ie to work in a no-visibility blizzard) and when ideal self-driving cars would allow themselves to operate. Maybe society will adjust to be more flexible to natural conditions, or maybe people will get frustrated and drive themselves into the poor conditions as always.
Self 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.
Human accidents don't get treated as "just a part of life", serious human driving errors are often considered so egregious that the person making the error picks up a driving ban or even a custodial sentence.
So it's actually entirely rational that the bar for companies to be able to ship software that makes those fatal errors without consequence other than an insurance payout should be higher (especially since when fatal error rates can only be estimated accurately over the order of millions of miles, driverless systems are more prone to systematic error or regression bugs than the equivalent sized set of human drivers, and the cost and appeal of autonomy probably means more experienced drivers get replaced first and more journeys get taken)
There are over 6 million auto accidents in the US per year. How many of them make the news? I'm willing to bet that most people don't even know about pedestrian deaths that occur a few blocks away from where they live, at intersections they walk through every day. Meanwhile the same people will read about how a self driving car got into a fender bender on the other side of the country and confidently proclaim "this technology isn't safe, I'm never going to use it".
Sure, autonomous vehicles are new, experimental technology so they're inherently more newsworthy, and news reports aren't a substitute for data.
This has nothing to do with the fact it would also be irrational to set the safety bar for autonomous vehicles as "marginally better than humans" , given that AI failure modes are distributed completely differently from human ones, a sufficiently serious edge case bug triggered only once every hundred million miles might make the autonomous system more likely to kill you than humans[1], and for that and other reasons its almost impossible to quantify whether a particular firmware update actually is safer than the average driver (takes around >10 billion miles to approach statistical significance if you're worried about fatalities rather than only weakly-correlated scrape rates, and then you've got to wonder whether the driving conditions are well matched). Especially if we're using that statistical argument not just to license the vehicles for road use but to absolve autonomous system developers of potential criminal liability for actions taken by their software, a luxury humans that wipe out pedestrians with similar driving aberrations wouldn't get.
[1]the US had 1.38 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles in 2023, skewed significantly upwards by DUI and other egregious driving behaviour. Less than half that in other countries with different road conditions and also more in-depth driver education. Humans have a lot of car accidents, but they also drive a lot of miles.
Humans don't handle all corner cases. People can be slow to react to completely novel or surprising situations. There will be corner cases where humans generally do better than a machine, but the simple rule to slow down and come to a halt if things look too weird or confusing will almost always be the right answer.
Ideally, driverless cars will one day be better drivers than humans and this will save tens of thousands of traffic deaths per year. Holding up progress because cars will be confused in extremely rare or improbable situations will cost more lives than it saves.
Not only are people slow to react to unusual situations, but this is taken advantage of by city designers to force people to slow down.
Random planters in the middle of the road? Streets that narrow and then widen? Drivers start slowly creeping along, which means they are less likely to injury pedestrians.
I think self-driving cars will only become better once they can do all the learning in real time and on-board. Otherwise, they will only be as good as the data they trained on - which is ultimately real meat driver data and a derivations of said data.
They will add flooded streets to the training simulation and this problem will go away. Eventually, the corner cases not in the training simulation will be so corner they basically never happen. Waymo can be incredibly successful without dealing with "surprise clown parade" or whatever.
The driving ML model will take care of the next 10 seconds of driving, in a fast loop deciding what steering and throttle commands to give.
The LLM will apply the high level reasoning needed to deal with longer time horizons and complex decisions, like deciding that the best way to reach the car wash 100 yards away is by walking.
they should probably put some sort of metal strip into the roads that a vehicle can follow reliably, future iterations could make continuous contact to the strip to deliver power to these vehicles, and this would also allow them to become larger by reducing fuel weight or even allow cars to travel very close together for efficiency gains
That's the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it's some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.
Clearly 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 like a high end chauffeur.
> 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.
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?”
How would you phrase the headline? I think it's pretty accurate, they have pulled thousands of vehicles out of service and completely stopped service in two cities, and the reason is literally that one of their cars was swept into a creek (in addition to other flood-related incidents). I can't think of a way to make the headline any more clear.
This isn't like other software "recalls" where the result is just an over-the-air update or a request to bring your car to a dealership when you have time, in this case they have actually physically removed the recalled vehicles from the road.
To use your analogy: if a bug in Python caused the PSF and package managers to actually make 3.14.4 unavailable and companies started taking Python services offline until a fix was found, yes that would be a really big deal.
I thought Weymo's were supposed to be "supervised" by humans in the Philippines. Maybe driving in circles in the suburbs and driving into flood waters happens only when the cars are out of mobile data range? Did Weymo pay their mobile phone bill? Does the (somewhat) autonomous system on the car decide when to flag a human for help? I would have expected a human to be watching all the time. Are they experiencing labor problems in the Philippines? Maybe Weymo doesn't want to pay their remote operators as much as the remote operators want to get paid?
What are the chances that google just shuts down waymo once they get whatever they need from it. Weren't there other ambitious projects under google that had a similar fate?