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.
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 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 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.
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.
Born and raised in GA, it wasn’t until I moved to CA, the bay specifically, after college that I realized things like flood warnings multiple times a month and, flooded out roads during the summer weren’t just part of life lolll
My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”
When Waymo came here and also when Tesla started doing self driving (I drive a Tesla with FSD ) majority of the time, I was constantly seeing things that were GA specific that these systems were just clearly not trained to handle.
The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”
> My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”
So it makes sense to first rollout to a place with frequent, lighter rain - no? As an outsider, Waymo's approach seems to be solving challenges step-by-step, and the criticism in this thread is asking why it hasn't already solved the hardest cases.
> The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”
I wouldn't be surprised if Waymos are confidently driving into flooded roads because they "know" where the markings are without sensing the markings. Lidar-based GPS + SLAM are now very good at calculating location, as long as features like buildings or trees are still present.
You don't understand! Google is trying to do something difficult, and because they haven't solved all possible theoretical problems with it, they should just give up and go home and never try anything difficult ever.
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
The part of that people aren't considering is that it's very common to get brief, intense thunderstorms that dump a lot of rain quickly. They won't flood the whole city obviously but there's _always_ pockets that have very short-lived, localized flooding on the roads. So it's not a "oh what are the odds of that happening" kind of thing.
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)
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
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.
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.
That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.
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
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”.
No simulation is perfect, so ideally you have a feedback look constantly looking at new real-world data as it comes in and finding where the simulation has errors, and updating the simulation to improve the correlation between the simulation and the real world over time.
My guess is they did have flooded street sims but the correlation was much lower than expected, or the details of the situation being simulated (lighting, building locations, how dirty the water is, ...) were sufficiently different from the situation that was encountered that the sim based training didn't generalize to the new context.
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!
To be fair if you take Elon Musk at his word the Cybertruck is supposed to have hermetically sealed powertrain components and be capable of exactly this.
The powertrain is one thing, the more critical issue is the car's structure, including the ventilation system, all sorts of gaps - and also, all hollow spaces, in which you need to balance weep holes (to prevent water condensation and subsequent rusting or weird issues regarding temperature changes) against the ability for external water to end up there at all.
Getting that right is a very expensive job and that's why you usually only see true (i.e. no visit to a shop needed afterwards) wade ability on large military vehicles and custom RV builds.
Yeah you can start by not building _more_ in the flood plain.
And if you do, then don't build architecture that is incapable of just accepting the temporarily higher ground water. We know how to basement just make the basement high enough to tower over the flood.
Oh, no cheap ground-level storefront windows? Welp, guess those have to be elevated above sufficiently voluminous drainage channels (the former streets).
> 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 build.
If people are going to build cheap houses, it makes sense to spend a little bit more on adding the hurricane ties (it's not like they're expensive or difficult to use). It might not be perfect, but it's surely better than just relying on gravity.
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 enough for something else to be the problem.
> 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:
Once again, this sort of reddit-esque penchant for projecting general guidance and engineering standards into specific situations misses the mark.
Someone in a subdivision that's a few miles inland with a mangrove swamp between it and the ocean anyway has to care about New Orleans style flooding, not "what sea state is my picture window rated for" flooding.
Like there's a reason that Florida building code just says tie it down and call it good. It's just not necessary nor economically worthwhile to try and make structures shrug off the surf. Sure, literally on the coast type stuff will get rekt (most of that stuff is concrete now though) but the average modular home subdivision doesn't need special requirements above and beyond what it takes to shrug off the wind.
When it comes to wind loading the code is basically a fight between evil civil engineers who want the state jackboot to force you to buy their service and the hardware makers (Simpson and the like) who'd prefer you reference a conservatively pre-computed table and install that much of their hardware.
There are many reasons to shit on Florida but their building code is pretty top notch (and this makes it expensive but everything has tradeoffs).
> It's uneconomical to hurricane-proof all housing in Florida.
Given the yearly news about record breaking destruction... I'd say it is uneconomical to build in Florida at all. The only thing keeping some regions (in addition to FL and other hurricane hotspots, add California for fires and potentially earthquakes) afloat is politicians bribing populations by promising government bailouts or by forcing insurance companies to offer coverage by law even if it is extremely expensive.
The amount of waste and human suffering generated because of these perverse incentives is staggering.
The news tends to exaggerate a bit (quite a bit) for effect. Where the storm hits is devastating, but a mile away can be basically fine. So percentage wise very little of Florida gets destroyed, but of the part that gets flattened, it may be entirely destroyed. Same thing can happen periodically near virtually any body of water or stream. But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance instead of being out of nowhere like flooding
Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).
Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.
I’ve lived in Atlanta for many years, grew up with family in northeast, so I know how to drive in snow and have seen how Boston, New York and Atlanta all deal with it. Atlanta has a very very small fleet to clear snow and ice because the cost of maintaining a large fleet just isn’t worth the low frequency they’re needed. So it’s common for bad ice to shutdown the city for 1-2 days. That’s a valid trade off.
Every once in a while Atlanta would get a bad one and people would start complaining about needing a bigger fleet, then a couple weeks after it’s over just forget about it.
And, in the north, you have snowstorms. I'm glad to not be in a situation where you were pretty much expected to drive into office jobs every day whatever the conditions any longer. But that used to be the case barring the rare state of emergency.
Yes, there were certainly plows. But driving was still somewhat dangerous and you saw cars off roads on a regular basis. Driving into work on one of those daysz, I picked a pregnant woman off the median of a road whose car had gotten stuck.
On one hand, sure, but on the other, Earth doesn't care what we expect. And humans don't build rationally most of the time. Most cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.
Flooding we experience is largely due to destruction of wetlands that used to act as a buffer for excess water during storms, and paving over land for cars making the surface impenetrable.
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 1000 year event.
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.
And when it does happen: A Waymo should not fucking drive through it.
I remember once when the mall in my hometown flooded. It was at the top of a hill.
IIRC: The top of that hill received something like 6" of rain in less than 15 minutes, in a very "Fuck you in particular" sort of way.
The vaguely-greater surrounding area was fine. It was a very localized event.
They were not prepared for this. It was a mess.
And gosh: The streets near there flooded, too. The drainage systems were simply not up to the task.
It had never happened before, and it has never happened since, but: Quite clearly, it happens.
(I don't understand your deflection here, at all. If your main point is that "If cities were designed better, then the deficiencies of autonomous cars wouldn't be a big deal for those autonomous cars at all" then I might reasonably conclude that you're just not particularly observant of the world.)
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edit: People also screw things up. We (people) drive through flooded roads sometimes -- we even do it on purpose from time to time, even though the guidance is to avoid it.
Some other times, we get surprised by flooded roads. Especially at night, they can be hard to detect. We screw things up. We take risks. Sometimes, those risks even work out OK.
But back in context: Waymo. Waymo is an autonomous taxi cab. It works on regular public streets, and on a long-enough timeline: Some of those streets will be flooded.
I probably never want my taxi driver to try to ferry me through a flooded roadway, whether it has a human brain or a computer brain calling the shots.
(I did get to spend a week getting ferried ~daily through flooded roads in a Jeep once in an unrelated flood, but by a high-ranking deputy Sheriff was (who would not become confused by a power outage[1]), and this Jeep was a proper cop car with the lights and the logos. We had some mutual problems that needed solved that involved public safety, and both of us were being paid to solve those problems. That worked fine, I knew what I was getting into before we set forth, and we'd have had extraordinary support if anything went very wrong.)
>one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
In some cities, certain streets are designed to flood during heavy rain, and are an integral part of routing the water away from neighborhoods and businesses, and into the drainage systems.
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"
This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.
They can, and I bet they have! But they cannot afford a test track that accurately reproduces every condition exactly as it will be encountered in the real world. At some point, it is judicious to test with real-world conditions, and simulating only gets you so far.
There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.
At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.
So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.
You haven't been driving for 25 years anywhere east of the Mississippi river if you've never encountered road flooding. Accepting they can't predict everything sounds reasonable. Failing to account for a routine occurrence is negligent.
I haven't encountered one as a driver either, but I'm pretty sure "Don't drive into roads with water on them" was a basic safety question on the permit test.
My guess is this was brought up but getting the product out there was more important to the business so it got ignored.
Now that it's a problem for them, they get to hide behind an "oops sorry, let's fix the really obvious thing now", almost like taking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to malicious levels.
This jives with CRUD software in general, where people are not usually rewarded for preventing future issues and instead rewarded for waiting until it's a visible problem and then fixing it.
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.
I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious.
The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard.
In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.
True. While we're at it, let's not fixing roads as well. Also electric cars. Also what's the deal with space exploration? Fix what's on earth first please.
They depend on public investment to build and support road infrastructure. If one accepts your point of view, these companies depend on massive government subsidies. Or perhaps they should pay for the construction and upkeep of the roads their vehicles use.
All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods through taxes.
if you want people to use public transit, you need to make it not be a mobile homeless shelter. otherwise everyone who can afford to will insist on a private transport
Who is "we?" The cost to develop self driving cars is not exactly being felt by society at large.
It certainly isn't stopping anyone from improving public transit, but it seems like you believe it's this and not any one of a bajillion actual factors to blame.
Public transit is a function of city design, less so much the presence of public transit. If you can’t walk to a stop, or if your destination isn’t reasonably accessible from that network, it won’t be used for that trip.
While it sucks for many other reasons, autonomous vehicles are actually a very good solution to public transit in most American cities. What I envisage is a dense grid of virtual bus stops in N square miles surrounding a rapid transit stop. You hail using an app, and a minibus (8-20 pax) adjusts its route to collect you and get you to that rapid transit station. The inverse happens for people arriving at that station, where routes are planned as the train approaches, so people heading to the same general area can be directed to the same minibus.
Last mile is still a thing. We need long distance public transit, regional public transit, local public transit (buses, trams, cable cars, ...) and we also need hyperlocal public transit (taxis, autonomous vehicles/"peoplemovers").
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.
Well fortunately the rest of the planet is a lot more similar to Arizona than Venus or the moon of the bottom of the Ocean, and they're already doing quite well in like 25 other markets, so...
~80% of the population of the US lives east of the Mississippi, where road flooding is a dirt common event. Waymo's been smart so far to cherry pick markets that cater to their vehicles obvious limitations. That doesn't exempt them from criticism for failing to account for routine conditions in new areas they've chosen to move into. Additionally "doing quite well" is incoherent given it's been 17 years and Waymo is still unprofitable.
It’s been clear for a while to anyone without money riding on this that the relatively “easy” part fooled a lot of people into assuming that the last push to full self driving wouldn’t be radically greater challenge.
Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?
This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.
Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.
"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "
I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.
Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.
P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.
To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.
Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.
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.
> 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.
This feels disingenuous to the extreme. Yes, chances are that some people will die run over by a Waymo. Put enough miles in one and someone will die eventually. Compare the numbers to human drivers. Would you, if they had LESS fatality rates than human drivers, say that the difference is "lives saved"? - I don't think you would. In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"
Especially your example with "run over elementary school children" is duplicitous. They showed how much less dangerous the impact from the Waymo was.
> In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"
That'll depend on the circumstances. If someone is killed because of a mistake a human wouldn't have made (like driving into oncoming traffic or down a light rail track) it'll be entirely their fault. Even if they do something humans sometimes do but never should like running a red light I'd argue that it makes them unsafe. To our knowledge they've only been involved in one human fatality so far but it wasn't their fault so I don't blame them for that.
These people, even the drunk guy, weren't cruising down the tracks without a care in the world. They either stopped on tracks or were pushed onto them.
I was skeptical about the guy who claimed to be "blinded by the sun" and searched for more info only to find that people get hit by the light rail in Sandy Utah with alarming frequency. Not even just in cars. Pedestrians, people on bikes, people in wheelchairs, I'm starting to think it's cursed.
Oh come on. Not even driving anywhere in Europe; higher difficulty levels would be Turkey , India, Russia, Egypt. Add countryside for extra points. Add harvest season in countryside for unique achievement. Add rainy/snowy season in countryside to master this game.
> 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.
This is also a huge disadvantage because any flaws in the software that don’t show up in a slow rollout will be present in every single car.
It’s a contrived example, but say a new billboard campaign rolls out that causes every car to immediately veer away from it.
Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That's been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.
Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn't do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being 'pulled over.'
These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it's the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.
The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.
Not comparable at all. Autonomous driving isn't obviously a viable business. It's not because computer programs can't drive well, it's because the and workforce infrastructure required to maintain and operate the expensive fleet may be less efficient than a human maintaining their own vehicle.
Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?
I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.
Are you also implying that people who maintain vehicles for a living do a worse job at it than the owners doing it themselves? I would say the opposite is true.
Plenty of companies around the world have well-maintained fleets of vehicles. Trucking businesses, bus companies, train companies, even some taxi companies with salaried drivers, ...
No, I'm implying that people who maintain their own cars do it more efficiently. The simple stuff like cleaning has to be done by someone. It's not about doing a "worse job," it's about doing a more expensive job.
Waymo is replacing human drivers with a capital-intensive fleet business, a substantially more expensive vehicle, and still a large number of remote assistance staff, fleet operators, safety engineers, incident response, operations staff, etc.
But I'm not saying they can't beat a human driver, I'm just saying it hasn't been proven that they will. It may only be that the highest demand markets will provide a sufficient enough utilization to make it economically viable.
Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.
Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.
They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever
All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models
Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.
You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.
That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.
Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk
That's great. Would you your country's test covers 100% of the situations a driver might encounter?
Even without knowing the details, I can confidently tell you they don't.
Does it teach you how to recover the car when the tires blow out? How about it is raining? How to react when a car is coming straight at you in the wrong way? How about when a dog jumps out?
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.
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.
> 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.
Sure, because human drivers famously have to be taught with each new generation that driving into six feet of water is a bad plan.
Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?
This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.
To me it looks like it's a problem with the "default attitude" (can't think of a better name) of the Waymo driving software. When a human sees that the road surface ahead is in some unknown condition (flooded, covered in lava, whatever) they usually default to caution - better stop and check first. While Waymo apparently defaults to blithely driving ahead, after all its maps tell it that there's a road ahead and it didn't detect any known obstacle, so what could possibly go wrong?
> 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.
That is not a given when dealing with "machine learning".
They will need to have metrics for all these scenarious and ensure when they solve the 20th problem down the line this one does not regress, but instead it becomes more and more generalized.
I can already see the horrified passengers in a robo-taxi going full "military-survival" mode, driving at rally speed over fast flooding back-roads, evaluating moral dilemmas like ("If i stop and pick up one more, i become a lorry on a rail at the next flood intersection").
Surprisingly good at things that get you otherwise killed.
Like - it auto-backs up once it detects ground rumbles of the ground moving during a mud avalanche.
An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.
We already have a huge number of safety regulations for cars, that take into account all these various things. There's also insurance that covers flood damage and cars. These are the things that red flag something you need to test, if you want to take over driving the car.
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.
An 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.
> 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?
This is the important point here. Human beings are highly apologetic towards other human beings, but not so much towards machines. At the same time, the expectation towards machines is much higher.
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?
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.
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.
It's not too dissimilar from the Figure demo that was done on X/Twitter recently. Everyone was pointing out what a lackluster demo that was and here I was thinking the total opposite, it worked for 8 hours with no sexual harassment training, KPIs, management oversight, breaks or co-worker chatting. That's the worst job it'll likely ever do. We just witnessed the floor of it's capabilities.
My hope/vision with robotic cars is we make cities more human-friendly/accessible. I want revitalized/bustling downtowns of bikes/bodies and not, what some cities are, which are glorified parking lots. I want to be less alone as an american. I would a physical sense of community injected back into my veins.
> "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.
Citation needed. I have never seen independent analysis of the data. You might be right - I've even suggested similar before. However you might be wrong.
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.
> What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride.
You lost me here. It is too much virtue signalling to bear. Did we also "lose working class pride" when factories became (largely) automated? We did not.
Perhaps there is a better way to phrase it? One that does not sound so weird.
Still, in the case of the robotaxi (or robobus :)), the pride can potentialy be felt by the people who are responsible for their autonomous programming, right?
Though obviously not when they drive into floods en masse. :)
Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.
Even on two lane roads: if an idiot overtakes into oncoming traffic there is usually just enough space for three vehicles next to each other. Can a Waymo move sharply to the right so there are two cars on each side with the overtaking idiot in the middle and all just fit on the road? I had to do that maneuver at least twice.
Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?
Can you open the Windows and get out if the thing decides to drive into a lake?
I don't know, currently defensive driving is the better option.
> Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.
Few people drive defensively. I try to, but I'm human: I get distracted. I sometimes forget to follow the rules that I know well. I have no clue what new rules might have been added/changed since I took drivers ed years ago. Just like everybody else.
I can't do anybody about the guy who tailgated me today until there was just barely enough of a gap to get around and then he swerved over, but one mistake on his part... At least I was in a newish car which would protect me, if it wasn't supposed to rain today I'd have been on my bike in that area...
Its funny because (at least years ago) accidents would get posted on /r/idiotsincars , and like clockwork everyone would pile on the idiot in the car.
However sometimes the dashcam would be from a motorcyclist, and the video would get posted over in the motorcycle sub as well. There, no one would talk about the idiot, and everyone would shred the motorcyclist for poor defensive driving.
The takeaway is that most regular drivers think that they are totally powerless on the road, and have no ability to avert any situation arising from someone else.
Motorcyclists die if they don't learn this skill, so they tend to be pretty sharp defensive drivers.
> Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?
Yes, actually, that's an advantage of a Waymo over a regular car. I believe they have a perfect record against carjackings despite several theft attempts. The Waymo computer isn't easily intimidated at gunpoint.
What do regular drivers do during a carjacking? They get carjacked. There are about 30,000 incidents per year in the US.
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.
If you live in a city like Atlanta that gets significantly more rainfall that Seattle but concentrated into fewer rainy days, you’ll see flooded roadways multiple times per year.
It’s funny as someone from the North East who’s always lived around rivers I assumed uncommon means once or twice a year. Not disagreeing they are uncommon, nor suggesting driverless cars are never going to happen. Just marveling at how different two individuals understanding can be of the same word.
"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 way less seriously than tornado or severe thunderstorm warnings. I guess that people think of dangerous floods as being something much more obvious and dramatic than a street puddle just one foot deep, but flooding is no joke.
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.
My experience with them is they only last a short time, and there is almost always an alternate route so you are not shutting anything down, just slowing things down a little.
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.
People can't really tell. I would say you can be safest by assuming all visible flooding is too high, especially if you can't clearly see road markings.
A lot of people do monkey-see-monkey-do: observing other people driving through water and then trying to follow. Some people just go slowly until it feels too sketchy and then try to back up.
People inevitably get stuck.
The really big issue is when the road is lower in some spot and you don't expect it.
For example, in my city there is a road that will be perfectly clear until you hit a small section that's a low spot at an underpass. Cars driving too fast hit that section during a heavy rain and quickly get flooded/stranded.
It helps if you know the area and the road and what landmarks are around to give you a clue. Signs, poles, bridges etc. can tip you off to how high the water level is. You can pull over to the side of the road grab a stick and poke at it to get a better idea. The water will often be deeper at the edges.
Another common but unreliable tactic is to wait for someone else to try their luck and see how they manage. Some cars and trucks will do better than others. If you do take your chances aim for the middle and go slow. Still water after a storm is dangerous enough (you can't tell what's below the surface) but I'd never take chances with visibly moving water. Even shallow water moving quickly can knock you off your feet or push your car around.
If you have any doubts at all the best thing to do is to turn around and find another route. If you drive in an area long enough you get to know which areas are prone to flooding and which roads are usually safe.
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.
Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly.
In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?
His point is that humans are prone to the same error. The flooded engine damage doesn't come from humans recognising the danger of a flooded road and choosing not to attempt it.
No one cares about flooded engines that Google has to pay for. They care about a taxi that might kill them.
You have to compare this to the number of taxi and Uber drivers who will drive into moving water with passengers on board while a passenger is telling them to stop.
> A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".
"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla
Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.
... which is different from the child whose body got folded in half by someone looking at their phone?
I think "good enough" ends up being okay. I _like_ driving. I would do manual mode often still just because I enjoy it. But I'd be completely fine with the option of autopilot in good conditions. Reality is that 99% of the time, my commute is boring and in good conditions. I don't need a self driving mode that can handle a blizzard when I'm in stop and go traffic and it's 20c outside.
This is much harder for Waymo since there isn't as easy of a manual override mode... But in my car? rip it.
Luckily I basically already have it. Adaptive cruise covers most of my cases well enough, but I wouldn't mind something with a bit more control (turning, etc.)
I'm waiting for independent analysis of the data. According to those with access to data - but also with reason to lie with statistics - waymo is enough better overall than humans that I'm not comfortable with any human driving on any public road. If you like to drive then do it on a private track/course where your mistakes won't kill other people.
Of course the real data is hidden from me and nobody I trust to be independent has seen it and is talking.
I haven't seen the data, but I have sitting strong reason to believe that roads with no cars on them cause fewer motor vehicle accidents than ones with any distribution of human and/or autonomous vehicles, so I'm not comfortable with any cars driving on any public road. If you like cars to drive, than have them do it on a private track/course where your mistakes won't kill other people.
Alternately, we could recognize that figuring out where to draw the line for a diverse group with varying behaviors is pretty hard, and any possible place you try to draw it will be strictly less safe than where I might say to draw it instead, unless you're willing to ban cars entirely. I'm guessing you'd say that banning cars entirely isn't realistic, which I'd be forced to agree with, but if you follow up by suggesting that we just ban humans instead, I'll be very interested to hear your realistic plan for how we deal with the fallout of shutting down millions of restaurants and stores that aren't near public transportation, preventing ambulances for bringing people to hospitals, and transporting goods to anywhere that's not directly on a rail line.
Of course, I have an incredible bias on the conversation on whether humans should be allowed to drive, so you might not be able to trust me. Specifically, I haven't driven for over a decade, have never owned my own car, and don't even have an active license anymore, so I don't particularly care about the idea of people liking to drive. It's probably worth it to mentally adjust what I said above to be a bit more sympathetic to human drivers based on that.
If a child is "folded in half" by someone looking at their phone, no one accepts that as "good enough", and there is a direct action: the driver responsible will lose their licence and likely end up in prison. If it happens often enough, laws are changed.
What happens when a Tesla does the same thing? Besides them lying and hiding information I mean. What remedial action is taken to reduce that specific risk from reoccurring?
>If a child is "folded in half" by someone looking at their phone, no one accepts that as "good enough"
But of course we do. Yes, we punish the individual driver that did it, but we still allow humans to drive cars. We accept the fact that driving a car carries sone risks, but we value the convenience of getting to our destination easily more than we value lives of those kids that will get killed from time to time.
> Yes, we punish the individual driver that did it, but we still allow humans to drive cars.
Yes because bad drivers aren't representative of all drivers. You also missed the part where laws are changed, safety laws are strengthened.
Oh wait. You're American aren't you.
In most of the world, laws are put in place to protect people. The Cybertruck for example, cannot be legally driven (regardless of not being for sale) in many countries because it doesn't meet pedestrian safety standards.
In my home state it's a finable offence to touch or even have your phone sitting in your lap while driving a car, and they've put detection cameras in place to enforce these laws.
So maybe define who you mean by "we" before claiming that people think kids being mutilated by negligent drivers of either the robotic or fleshy kind, is "good enough".
> In my home state it's a finable offence to touch or even have your phone sitting in your lap while driving a car, and they've put detection cameras in place to enforce these laws.
Okay, but what about the hundreds of clones of this driver who have identical education, behavior, no sense of individual identity to attribute their actions to separately? Certainly we don't wait for every one of them to kill a child before doing something more drastic than firmly instructing them "killing children is bad!"
> ... which is different from the child whose body got folded in half by someone looking at their phone?
Fair enough, we can apply the same standard: just like the humans who drive like that aren't allowed to drive anymore, the autonomous software that drove the car like this also should be forbidden from operating vehicles. I'm sure you agree that a vehicle operator that's this reckless shouldn't be allowed back on the road just for taking a few classes or being taught a few specific techniques like "killing children or drowning passengers is bad!", so we'll be much safer going forward by just keeping off the road indefinitely. It's for the children, of course!
> what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day
What a silly comment. Waymo is operating in San Francisco, Houston, and Orlando. All of those get lots of rain. Specifically, SF gets lots of "small rain" and Houston and Orlando are more likely to get short bursts of heavy rain.
The irony of people who are against self-driving cars for safety reasons: They are already much safer than regular drivers -- accidents and deaths per millions of kilometers driven. Also, the software is continuously improving. Are regular drivers also continuously improving at the same rate? If anything, they probably get modestly better from 20s into middle age (40s/50s), then begin to decline with age.
Well, they've clearly done a good job of learning how to deal with the weather in those places, so it's unfortunate that Florida never has any severe weather that can cause flooding for them to have learned from before rolling out to Atlanta
The false equivalence of emotional maturity with being able to chase production is really telling.
When people think of autonomous driving as a solved problem it evokes something very specific. It means vehicles can drive on their own, without guidance. Until you solve AVs you don’t have a claim to present whatever you actually have as such. There’s no “good enough” for AVs, you’ve either solved them or you haven’t.
Yeah, while the "average" person might be able to gracefully handle these situations there's still a lot of people who do things that to me seem obviously silly and avoidable.
Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.
Floods might be an edge case in the Bay Area, but if you're trying to drive along the Gulf of Mexico it's probably something you're going to want to plan for. I'm not sure that adding an override will help by the time your car is submerged in six feet of water.
> 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.
This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.
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. :)
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?
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.
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.
VLAs (vision-language-action models), which are offspring of LLMs, and their versions that are more suitable to edge devices are being used in self-driving to add common sense to path planners ("don't drive through a police standoff", things like that).
I'm not aware of any self-driving widely available ten years ago. I just took my Model Y over Highway 1 in California without requiring human intervention (other than when I chose to pull the car over).
Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn't absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility.
But, given ten years ago this didn't exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn't seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective.
Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort?
EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.
Robots vs cars? Robots are much much safer. One is a killing machine going 100km/h, other one is a slow moving thing. You don’t need fast reaction for a robot. Tesla should’ve started with robots first and then self driving.
> And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them.
I guess that's what you get when you test your cars far 20 years in a state that's almost perpetually in a state of drought.
On the other hand, as someone who grew up in New England, laughing about news stories of highways in warmer states getting backed up because of an inch or two or snow wasn't an uncommon occurrence, so maybe having trouble driving during unfamiliar weather is just a sign that they're learning to drive like humans too well
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
E.g If the driver brakes because they saw a pothole, and Lidar captures someone biking 200m away on their own path, it may mistakenly put more weight on brake causation to the 200m away object (because large moving object) vs the pothole.
I'm exaggerating, but I hope you get the point. It isn't even conflicting sensor signals about the pothole, but conflicting information about the causation. With vision only there is no conflict for the training data. This was my Aha moment. Multiple Sensors are absolutely important for fallback and extra safety, but screws up training that are based on Human Drivers
I think Elon himself doesn't understand this and hence can't articulate it, while just repeating whatever his ML engineer has said.
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...
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.
> 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 don't know. Cost might have been part of it but I also recall hearing that he thought since humans can drive with two eyes and no LIDAR then the car should be able to do the same thing.
Sensor fusion isn't free. Lidar requires more power consumption and more onboard compute. Cycles that could be spent on "intelligence" are instead being spent on sensing.
I like both approaches. The fact that both exist is a clear win for the rest of us as consumers.
Tesla's approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.
If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.
Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that's great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.
The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
This goes for humans just as well. Humans get stuck. That waymo paused their op to avoid bad press and then get bad press BECAUSE they were being careful is enormously stupid for everyone involved.
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)
You also have to consider the bouyancy of wheels and body panels not yet filled with water which will kill traction, or if the water is moving it doesn't take a lot to push vehicles around.
Most cars crossing water don't get stuck because the intake is blocked by water but because they either floated or get pushed away by the flow (or slammed into the water hard enough to break stuff). If you maintain forward movement and dont float most cars will keep going in water 4-6 inches above the intake height because of the wake and bubble of the engine compartment. You only really benefit from a snorkel if you are offroading through water where there may be unseen holes because submerging your entire engine and drivetrain that deep is still a horrible idea even with a snorkel.
Also if you don't have a direct motor on each drive wheel you still have to worry about water entering differentials and transfer cases even if the electronics are perfectly sealed.
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.
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.
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
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!
Google is claiming AGI is around the corner, isn’t that supposed to be at least comparable to a 3 year old?
I assume you don’t have kids or know any kids if you don’t think they’re able to judge puddle sizes at age 3.
Why shouldn’t I make the comparison? Waymo is attempting to replace human drivers. That means it needs to make something smarter than humans at driving.
The point that it is a reasonable comparison: being able to reasonably compare the performance of a lump of silicon to a human being at a complex task in the real world means the Overton window has shifted, massively, from say 5 years ago.
You compared it to a child, not a toaster. In a few years to a few decades I'm sure you will whine about how Waymo cant even measure up to Michael Schumacher and they should just throw in the towel. I mean how pathetic is it that their AGI with its petaflops of compute can't even out drive some meat bag from the previous century?
I saw a Waymo for the first time IRL last week in Atlanta. It stopped on a narrow street for about 5 minutes to wait for the person to come out. The people in the cars behind it were not happy!
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.
You can create very sophisticated simulations all you want, but in the end, you can only test the accuracy of your simulation when you try the real thing
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?
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!
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.
I think I made a HN comment a few months/years ago about driverless cars having problems with floods across roads after watching a downpour in Kuala Lumpur flood half a street in minutes. The road was down to one lane and drivers in both directions took it in turns to use that one lane. That would be a difficult situation for a driverless car to handle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 - though in this case it's a good illustration that AI can make errors humans would be less likely to even if it is objectively better than the average driver at parking and not speeding.
This not in any way refute my argument that 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're missing the obvious. Waymo trains with human driver data, and idiotic humans drive into deep water constantly. Oh, you want Waymo's to drive better than humans?
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
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.
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.
> 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.
But that is what it was: the remedy in the recall was an over-the-air update and was already universally applied several weeks time before the recall was actually formalized.
Also seems linguistically complex, since the dictionary meaning of recall is an "official order to return item to a manufacturer", but Waymo doesn't sell the vehicle itself.
Ok I see the issue, at the time the BBC article was written they hadn't paused service yet. That remedy you're referring to didn't work though, so now they have completely paused service in two cities.
> Waymo has now paused service in two cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week.
> Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, 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,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
> 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. The company said those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.
I still think the BBC headline is fine, but I guess if you aren't familiar with this usage of "recall" then you could be misled.
> 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.
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.
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 don't want to own a car, but I do want privacy, and I do want to go directly from point A to point B without being on a train. I have absolutely no reason to want to board a train as an alternative unless I want to go very fast from A to a very far away B. That is a real problem that is being solved for, not just hype. Aspiring to be cattle isn't noble.
EDIT: Also - rail doesn't get built because they're expensive projects, 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. Autonomous vehicles slot nicely into infrastructure that exists already, that already has the advantage of being point-to-point.
If the goal is "improve transit", autonomous vehicles achieve that without directly competing with trains. If the goal is, for some reason, "less cars", they also arguably achieve that because you'd end up with less private ownership of cars. If the goal is "no cars", I have no idea what the point of that would be.
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.
yeah but guess where they're trying to get self driving cars to work: dense city centers — robotaxis aren't economical if they're driving an hour out to rural areas, so again... they're trying to turn a profit in an area that's best suited for trains
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?
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.
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.
It's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.
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.
Safer, cheaper, etc are less arbitrary.
> 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
Nobody has ever been killed by a Waymo. You're being dramatic.
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...
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.
This guy knows what he’s talking about.
Born and raised in GA, it wasn’t until I moved to CA, the bay specifically, after college that I realized things like flood warnings multiple times a month and, flooded out roads during the summer weren’t just part of life lolll
My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”
When Waymo came here and also when Tesla started doing self driving (I drive a Tesla with FSD ) majority of the time, I was constantly seeing things that were GA specific that these systems were just clearly not trained to handle.
The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”
> My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”
So it makes sense to first rollout to a place with frequent, lighter rain - no? As an outsider, Waymo's approach seems to be solving challenges step-by-step, and the criticism in this thread is asking why it hasn't already solved the hardest cases.
> The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”
I wouldn't be surprised if Waymos are confidently driving into flooded roads because they "know" where the markings are without sensing the markings. Lidar-based GPS + SLAM are now very good at calculating location, as long as features like buildings or trees are still present.
You don't understand! Google is trying to do something difficult, and because they haven't solved all possible theoretical problems with it, they should just give up and go home and never try anything difficult ever.
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
The part of that people aren't considering is that it's very common to get brief, intense thunderstorms that dump a lot of rain quickly. They won't flood the whole city obviously but there's _always_ pockets that have very short-lived, localized flooding on the roads. So it's not a "oh what are the odds of that happening" kind of thing.
Human drivers are very very bad. Being better than humans is a low bar with plenty of room to be bad as well.
No they aren’t. Billions drive around every day with minimal collisions. Far more people get raped than hit by cars.
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)
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
the real question if you’re attempting to imply what i think you’re implying should be:
how many human driven cars decided not to drive through vs how many waymo’s decided the same?
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.
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.
That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.
I’ve lived in a place where it flooded every year or two. It floods regularly where I live now too.
Locals know which roads to avoid and not to drive into a flood.
Floods aren’t a usual even.
Have you ever even been outside?
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
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
https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
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”.
No simulation is perfect, so ideally you have a feedback look constantly looking at new real-world data as it comes in and finding where the simulation has errors, and updating the simulation to improve the correlation between the simulation and the real world over time.
My guess is they did have flooded street sims but the correlation was much lower than expected, or the details of the situation being simulated (lighting, building locations, how dirty the water is, ...) were sufficiently different from the situation that was encountered that the sim based training didn't generalize to the new context.
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!
I saw that just a day or two before wednesday! Hilarious timing.
To be fair if you take Elon Musk at his word the Cybertruck is supposed to have hermetically sealed powertrain components and be capable of exactly this.
The powertrain is one thing, the more critical issue is the car's structure, including the ventilation system, all sorts of gaps - and also, all hollow spaces, in which you need to balance weep holes (to prevent water condensation and subsequent rusting or weird issues regarding temperature changes) against the ability for external water to end up there at all.
Getting that right is a very expensive job and that's why you usually only see true (i.e. no visit to a shop needed afterwards) wade ability on large military vehicles and custom RV builds.
As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
That's like saying one could expect New Orleans not to flood during hurricanes.
There are problems.
There is money you can throw at those problems.
And there are some problems that are rare & low impact enough that it's not worth throwing money at them.
See also: keeping snowplows in Atlanta.
Yeah you can start by not building _more_ in the flood plain. And if you do, then don't build architecture that is incapable of just accepting the temporarily higher ground water. We know how to basement just make the basement high enough to tower over the flood. Oh, no cheap ground-level storefront windows? Welp, guess those have to be elevated above sufficiently voluminous drainage channels (the former streets).
Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs.
One of the things that annoys me most about non-engineering mindsets is not looking at problems from a multivariate optimization perspective.
There are problems, and then there are always more variables to be balanced to optimally solve them than people expect.
The critical additional ones, more often than not: time and money.
> 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 build.
If people are going to build cheap houses, it makes sense to spend a little bit more on adding the hurricane ties (it's not like they're expensive or difficult to use). It might not be perfect, but it's surely better than just relying on gravity.
Do they not bolt the house to the slab in Florida? This is a main part of the inspection in Texas
They do. One req is continuous tension using approved connectors from roof down to slab.
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 enough for something else to be the problem.
> 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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2HSFJOzQQ8
Once again, this sort of reddit-esque penchant for projecting general guidance and engineering standards into specific situations misses the mark.
Someone in a subdivision that's a few miles inland with a mangrove swamp between it and the ocean anyway has to care about New Orleans style flooding, not "what sea state is my picture window rated for" flooding.
Like there's a reason that Florida building code just says tie it down and call it good. It's just not necessary nor economically worthwhile to try and make structures shrug off the surf. Sure, literally on the coast type stuff will get rekt (most of that stuff is concrete now though) but the average modular home subdivision doesn't need special requirements above and beyond what it takes to shrug off the wind.
When it comes to wind loading the code is basically a fight between evil civil engineers who want the state jackboot to force you to buy their service and the hardware makers (Simpson and the like) who'd prefer you reference a conservatively pre-computed table and install that much of their hardware.
There are many reasons to shit on Florida but their building code is pretty top notch (and this makes it expensive but everything has tradeoffs).
> The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit...
That isn't the goal, because the eyewall of a Cat 5 is minuscule in footprint compared to the surrounding wind bands.
Consequently, most houses are going to have to deal with those winds, for which timber bolted to slab + properly secured to roof is perfectly valid.
It's uneconomical to hurricane-proof all housing in Florida.
It's entirely possible (and has largely been done) to mitigate the bulk of hurricane wind impact (the lesser standard) for all housing in Florida.
> It's uneconomical to hurricane-proof all housing in Florida.
Given the yearly news about record breaking destruction... I'd say it is uneconomical to build in Florida at all. The only thing keeping some regions (in addition to FL and other hurricane hotspots, add California for fires and potentially earthquakes) afloat is politicians bribing populations by promising government bailouts or by forcing insurance companies to offer coverage by law even if it is extremely expensive.
The amount of waste and human suffering generated because of these perverse incentives is staggering.
The news tends to exaggerate a bit (quite a bit) for effect. Where the storm hits is devastating, but a mile away can be basically fine. So percentage wise very little of Florida gets destroyed, but of the part that gets flattened, it may be entirely destroyed. Same thing can happen periodically near virtually any body of water or stream. But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance instead of being out of nowhere like flooding
Why?
Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).
Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.
You’re spot on.
I’ve lived in Atlanta for many years, grew up with family in northeast, so I know how to drive in snow and have seen how Boston, New York and Atlanta all deal with it. Atlanta has a very very small fleet to clear snow and ice because the cost of maintaining a large fleet just isn’t worth the low frequency they’re needed. So it’s common for bad ice to shutdown the city for 1-2 days. That’s a valid trade off.
Every once in a while Atlanta would get a bad one and people would start complaining about needing a bigger fleet, then a couple weeks after it’s over just forget about it.
And, in the north, you have snowstorms. I'm glad to not be in a situation where you were pretty much expected to drive into office jobs every day whatever the conditions any longer. But that used to be the case barring the rare state of emergency.
Yes, there were certainly plows. But driving was still somewhat dangerous and you saw cars off roads on a regular basis. Driving into work on one of those daysz, I picked a pregnant woman off the median of a road whose car had gotten stuck.
On one hand, sure, but on the other, Earth doesn't care what we expect. And humans don't build rationally most of the time. Most cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.
Every time a city thinks flooding problems are fixed, nature invents a bigger storm
Flooding we experience is largely due to destruction of wetlands that used to act as a buffer for excess water during storms, and paving over land for cars making the surface impenetrable.
Not in the articles example.
Laughs in Dutch
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 1000 year event.
Tell that to Fukushima.
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.
Streets flood sometimes. Shit happens.
And when it does happen: A Waymo should not fucking drive through it.
I remember once when the mall in my hometown flooded. It was at the top of a hill.
IIRC: The top of that hill received something like 6" of rain in less than 15 minutes, in a very "Fuck you in particular" sort of way.
The vaguely-greater surrounding area was fine. It was a very localized event.
They were not prepared for this. It was a mess.
And gosh: The streets near there flooded, too. The drainage systems were simply not up to the task.
It had never happened before, and it has never happened since, but: Quite clearly, it happens.
(I don't understand your deflection here, at all. If your main point is that "If cities were designed better, then the deficiencies of autonomous cars wouldn't be a big deal for those autonomous cars at all" then I might reasonably conclude that you're just not particularly observant of the world.)
---
edit: People also screw things up. We (people) drive through flooded roads sometimes -- we even do it on purpose from time to time, even though the guidance is to avoid it.
Some other times, we get surprised by flooded roads. Especially at night, they can be hard to detect. We screw things up. We take risks. Sometimes, those risks even work out OK.
But back in context: Waymo. Waymo is an autonomous taxi cab. It works on regular public streets, and on a long-enough timeline: Some of those streets will be flooded.
I probably never want my taxi driver to try to ferry me through a flooded roadway, whether it has a human brain or a computer brain calling the shots.
(I did get to spend a week getting ferried ~daily through flooded roads in a Jeep once in an unrelated flood, but by a high-ranking deputy Sheriff was (who would not become confused by a power outage[1]), and this Jeep was a proper cop car with the lights and the logos. We had some mutual problems that needed solved that involved public safety, and both of us were being paid to solve those problems. That worked fine, I knew what I was getting into before we set forth, and we'd have had extraordinary support if anything went very wrong.)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412
>one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
In some cities, certain streets are designed to flood during heavy rain, and are an integral part of routing the water away from neighborhoods and businesses, and into the drainage systems.
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"
This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.
Surely Waymo can afford a test track.
They can, and I bet they have! But they cannot afford a test track that accurately reproduces every condition exactly as it will be encountered in the real world. At some point, it is judicious to test with real-world conditions, and simulating only gets you so far.
There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.
At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.
So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.
A flooded road is a very predictable event, though.
Is it? I have been driving for 25 years and never encountered one.
Waymo seems to accept they can’t predict everything so they built a system that’s safe enough to operate in the real world and learn from experience.
You probably haven't been driving in areas that flood then.
You haven't been driving for 25 years anywhere east of the Mississippi river if you've never encountered road flooding. Accepting they can't predict everything sounds reasonable. Failing to account for a routine occurrence is negligent.
I haven't encountered one as a driver either, but I'm pretty sure "Don't drive into roads with water on them" was a basic safety question on the permit test.
My guess is this was brought up but getting the product out there was more important to the business so it got ignored.
Now that it's a problem for them, they get to hide behind an "oops sorry, let's fix the really obvious thing now", almost like taking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to malicious levels.
This jives with CRUD software in general, where people are not usually rewarded for preventing future issues and instead rewarded for waiting until it's a visible problem and then fixing it.
I used to work for an AV startup.
One of my favourite things to see were the random encounters that our data annotators would flag up.
Unusual agricultural vehicles, large to-scale images on the sides of vehicles, cars facing backwards being carried by a vehicle transporter.
It's a wildly long tail of things that automated vehicles need to handle.
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.
How many years for Waymo to work in Mumbai?
I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious.
The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard.
In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.
Yeah maybe we should just stop doing that and invest in public transit infrastructure instead.
True. While we're at it, let's not fixing roads as well. Also electric cars. Also what's the deal with space exploration? Fix what's on earth first please.
These are companies. They can invest where they please.
Call your government reps.
They depend on public investment to build and support road infrastructure. If one accepts your point of view, these companies depend on massive government subsidies. Or perhaps they should pay for the construction and upkeep of the roads their vehicles use.
All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods through taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
if you want people to use public transit, you need to make it not be a mobile homeless shelter. otherwise everyone who can afford to will insist on a private transport
Why are usians still allowing homelessness?
Roads are public transit infrastructure.
Who is "we?" The cost to develop self driving cars is not exactly being felt by society at large.
It certainly isn't stopping anyone from improving public transit, but it seems like you believe it's this and not any one of a bajillion actual factors to blame.
Public transit is a function of city design, less so much the presence of public transit. If you can’t walk to a stop, or if your destination isn’t reasonably accessible from that network, it won’t be used for that trip.
While it sucks for many other reasons, autonomous vehicles are actually a very good solution to public transit in most American cities. What I envisage is a dense grid of virtual bus stops in N square miles surrounding a rapid transit stop. You hail using an app, and a minibus (8-20 pax) adjusts its route to collect you and get you to that rapid transit station. The inverse happens for people arriving at that station, where routes are planned as the train approaches, so people heading to the same general area can be directed to the same minibus.
Last mile is still a thing. We need long distance public transit, regional public transit, local public transit (buses, trams, cable cars, ...) and we also need hyperlocal public transit (taxis, autonomous vehicles/"peoplemovers").
There is a pretty big difference between a citizen driving their car into danger, and a service provider driving their car into danger with you in it.
You wouldn't accept that from a taxi driver either. Pausing the service is the right move.
I completely agree pausing service is the right move. I'm not defending Waymo. More laughing at my fellow ATLiens.
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.
> It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets
No one who works for them thought of flooded roads.
That’s reassuring.
They were only in Arizona for a long time...
Assuming the rest of the continent is like Arizon also seems comforting...
Well fortunately the rest of the planet is a lot more similar to Arizona than Venus or the moon of the bottom of the Ocean, and they're already doing quite well in like 25 other markets, so...
~80% of the population of the US lives east of the Mississippi, where road flooding is a dirt common event. Waymo's been smart so far to cherry pick markets that cater to their vehicles obvious limitations. That doesn't exempt them from criticism for failing to account for routine conditions in new areas they've chosen to move into. Additionally "doing quite well" is incoherent given it's been 17 years and Waymo is still unprofitable.
It’s been clear for a while to anyone without money riding on this that the relatively “easy” part fooled a lot of people into assuming that the last push to full self driving wouldn’t be radically greater challenge.
Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?
This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.
Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.
"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "
I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.
Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.
P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.
To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.
Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.
testing cannot prove the absence of bugs. It can only prove that you didn't find any, which is a completely different thing
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.
> 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.
“More blood” seems to imply that somebody has already been hurt or died from Waymo driving into floods, but I don’t think that is the case?
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.
This feels disingenuous to the extreme. Yes, chances are that some people will die run over by a Waymo. Put enough miles in one and someone will die eventually. Compare the numbers to human drivers. Would you, if they had LESS fatality rates than human drivers, say that the difference is "lives saved"? - I don't think you would. In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"
Especially your example with "run over elementary school children" is duplicitous. They showed how much less dangerous the impact from the Waymo was.
> In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"
That'll depend on the circumstances. If someone is killed because of a mistake a human wouldn't have made (like driving into oncoming traffic or down a light rail track) it'll be entirely their fault. Even if they do something humans sometimes do but never should like running a red light I'd argue that it makes them unsafe. To our knowledge they've only been involved in one human fatality so far but it wasn't their fault so I don't blame them for that.
But humans do make mistakes like that (driving into oncoming traffic or driving down a light rail track).
For example, here’s a case where a human did it to avoid an ambulance:
https://www.click2houston.com/news/2012/09/18/10-injured-in-...
This guy says he was blinded by the sun:
https://kutv.com/news/local/trax-train-hits-vehicle-in-sandy
Sometimes people are drunk:
https://komonews.com/news/local/police-suspected-drunk-drive...
These people, even the drunk guy, weren't cruising down the tracks without a care in the world. They either stopped on tracks or were pushed onto them.
I was skeptical about the guy who claimed to be "blinded by the sun" and searched for more info only to find that people get hit by the light rail in Sandy Utah with alarming frequency. Not even just in cars. Pedestrians, people on bikes, people in wheelchairs, I'm starting to think it's cursed.
It is honestly kind of funny how clearly your comments read like motivated reasoning, and then one just looks at your username.
Probably not what you think unless you know what SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T5 means
Coincidence? Perhaps!
The final boss will be driving in Rome
Oh come on. Not even driving anywhere in Europe; higher difficulty levels would be Turkey , India, Russia, Egypt. Add countryside for extra points. Add harvest season in countryside for unique achievement. Add rainy/snowy season in countryside to master this game.
Come to an Indian city. You'll have cars, 2w, auto, cows coming from 7 directions everywhere.
Rome? How about Napoli or Palermo?
> 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.
This is also a huge disadvantage because any flaws in the software that don’t show up in a slow rollout will be present in every single car.
It’s a contrived example, but say a new billboard campaign rolls out that causes every car to immediately veer away from it.
Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That's been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.
Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn't do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being 'pulled over.'
These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it's the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.
The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.
Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!
Not comparable at all. Autonomous driving isn't obviously a viable business. It's not because computer programs can't drive well, it's because the and workforce infrastructure required to maintain and operate the expensive fleet may be less efficient than a human maintaining their own vehicle.
Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?
I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.
Are you also implying that people who maintain vehicles for a living do a worse job at it than the owners doing it themselves? I would say the opposite is true.
Plenty of companies around the world have well-maintained fleets of vehicles. Trucking businesses, bus companies, train companies, even some taxi companies with salaried drivers, ...
No, I'm implying that people who maintain their own cars do it more efficiently. The simple stuff like cleaning has to be done by someone. It's not about doing a "worse job," it's about doing a more expensive job.
Waymo is replacing human drivers with a capital-intensive fleet business, a substantially more expensive vehicle, and still a large number of remote assistance staff, fleet operators, safety engineers, incident response, operations staff, etc.
But I'm not saying they can't beat a human driver, I'm just saying it hasn't been proven that they will. It may only be that the highest demand markets will provide a sufficient enough utilization to make it economically viable.
You also have to be some completely isolated sociopath to not see the very obvious political and economic risks if this does indeed become successful
No amount of lobbying will help you win against a million drivers suddenly out of work
Some technologies scale, some don't, at all. Your point is moot.
Well, washing machines were once the size of washing machines; and they still are.
All cars require a workforce to maintain though.
They will lose to Tesla cabs, due to price and not having full control of their supply chain.
Tesla has a grand total of 39 unsupervised cabs operating. Waymo has literally 100x more with 3800 and growing.
https://robotaxitracker.com/?provider=tesla
I'm glad a very wealthy company is investing in hard tech R&D. Irrespective of the projected financial outcome.
Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.
I think Google can handle paying for any number of $250k cars to get a good share of the future of transportation.
I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.
I’ve heard that 10-20 years self driving spiel since Uber launched
I was also promised that I’d be 3d printing my shoes and living in the metaverse and AI will make me magical new products
All I really got was an endless social media feed
This argument proves too much. That some technical progress arrives slower than predicted does not mean no progress ever occurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
This was thought decades ago too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project Compared to 1994 we have now endless computing power and yet no reliable self driving car is available on the market.
My Tesla is quite reliable when self driving!
The cost of Waymo cars is immaterial right now. They are not production models, they are test mules. So you might as well make them nice-looking.
Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.
Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.
They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever
All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models
Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.
You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.
That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.
Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk
A human has to pass a test to be able to drive. A human (for the most part) doesn't just unknowingly drive into floods.
Why aren't we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.
Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?
Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?
If it is just taking a regular DL test, then waymo, Tesla and others would be driving all across the US by now. They already have a higher standard
> Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?
In my country at least: Yes.
Hydroplaning and driving on ice is part of the compulsory training, including driving on simulated ice on a special course.
That's great. Would you your country's test covers 100% of the situations a driver might encounter?
Even without knowing the details, I can confidently tell you they don't.
Does it teach you how to recover the car when the tires blow out? How about it is raining? How to react when a car is coming straight at you in the wrong way? How about when a dog jumps out?
> Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?
If your car starts sliding, let off the gas, don’t hit the brakes, and countersteer into the direction of the slide to recover.
If you start hydroplaning you simply remove your foot from the gas pedal.
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.
*roll out
> 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.
Sure, because human drivers famously have to be taught with each new generation that driving into six feet of water is a bad plan.
I have seen plenty of videos online that suggest that this is a true fact.
As someone who grew up in a flood-prone area… yeah. Yeah, they do. Sometimes more than once per person.
Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?
This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.
To me it looks like it's a problem with the "default attitude" (can't think of a better name) of the Waymo driving software. When a human sees that the road surface ahead is in some unknown condition (flooded, covered in lava, whatever) they usually default to caution - better stop and check first. While Waymo apparently defaults to blithely driving ahead, after all its maps tell it that there's a road ahead and it didn't detect any known obstacle, so what could possibly go wrong?
> 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.
That is not a given when dealing with "machine learning".
They will need to have metrics for all these scenarious and ensure when they solve the 20th problem down the line this one does not regress, but instead it becomes more and more generalized.
I can already see the horrified passengers in a robo-taxi going full "military-survival" mode, driving at rally speed over fast flooding back-roads, evaluating moral dilemmas like ("If i stop and pick up one more, i become a lorry on a rail at the next flood intersection").
Surprisingly good at things that get you otherwise killed. Like - it auto-backs up once it detects ground rumbles of the ground moving during a mud avalanche.
An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.
That's the reality. For both them and Apple.
By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?
They have done a lot of testing in Pittsburgh which has some of the craziest roads and intersections anywhere, so I'd assume yes
We already have a huge number of safety regulations for cars, that take into account all these various things. There's also insurance that covers flood damage and cars. These are the things that red flag something you need to test, if you want to take over driving the car.
This isn't a new challenge - it is a known one!
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.
I'm not familiar familiar with this expression silent green. Do you mean Soylent Green?
Yes sorry, typo.
An 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.
> 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?
This is the important point here. Human beings are highly apologetic towards other human beings, but not so much towards machines. At the same time, the expectation towards machines is much higher.
Tells you more about humans than machines.
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?
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.
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.
Tesla's self driving will pull over if it detects the human driver has fallen asleep.
> Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up.
Aren't there stories about certain car companies where their self-driving-at-some-level cars got worse after an OTA update?
Yep, on the money.
It's not too dissimilar from the Figure demo that was done on X/Twitter recently. Everyone was pointing out what a lackluster demo that was and here I was thinking the total opposite, it worked for 8 hours with no sexual harassment training, KPIs, management oversight, breaks or co-worker chatting. That's the worst job it'll likely ever do. We just witnessed the floor of it's capabilities.
My hope/vision with robotic cars is we make cities more human-friendly/accessible. I want revitalized/bustling downtowns of bikes/bodies and not, what some cities are, which are glorified parking lots. I want to be less alone as an american. I would a physical sense of community injected back into my veins.
> "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.
Citation needed. I have never seen independent analysis of the data. You might be right - I've even suggested similar before. However you might be wrong.
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.
You lost me here. It is too much virtue signalling to bear. Did we also "lose working class pride" when factories became (largely) automated? We did not.
Perhaps there is a better way to phrase it? One that does not sound so weird.
Still, in the case of the robotaxi (or robobus :)), the pride can potentialy be felt by the people who are responsible for their autonomous programming, right?
Though obviously not when they drive into floods en masse. :)
Sounds to me that you have never worked in your life. Virtue signalling, my arse!
Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.
Even on two lane roads: if an idiot overtakes into oncoming traffic there is usually just enough space for three vehicles next to each other. Can a Waymo move sharply to the right so there are two cars on each side with the overtaking idiot in the middle and all just fit on the road? I had to do that maneuver at least twice.
Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?
Can you open the Windows and get out if the thing decides to drive into a lake?
I don't know, currently defensive driving is the better option.
> Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.
Few people drive defensively. I try to, but I'm human: I get distracted. I sometimes forget to follow the rules that I know well. I have no clue what new rules might have been added/changed since I took drivers ed years ago. Just like everybody else.
I can't do anybody about the guy who tailgated me today until there was just barely enough of a gap to get around and then he swerved over, but one mistake on his part... At least I was in a newish car which would protect me, if it wasn't supposed to rain today I'd have been on my bike in that area...
Its funny because (at least years ago) accidents would get posted on /r/idiotsincars , and like clockwork everyone would pile on the idiot in the car.
However sometimes the dashcam would be from a motorcyclist, and the video would get posted over in the motorcycle sub as well. There, no one would talk about the idiot, and everyone would shred the motorcyclist for poor defensive driving.
The takeaway is that most regular drivers think that they are totally powerless on the road, and have no ability to avert any situation arising from someone else.
Motorcyclists die if they don't learn this skill, so they tend to be pretty sharp defensive drivers.
> Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?
Yes, actually, that's an advantage of a Waymo over a regular car. I believe they have a perfect record against carjackings despite several theft attempts. The Waymo computer isn't easily intimidated at gunpoint.
What do regular drivers do during a carjacking? They get carjacked. There are about 30,000 incidents per year in the US.
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.
I wouldn't call floods "very common"
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.
If you live in a city like Atlanta that gets significantly more rainfall that Seattle but concentrated into fewer rainy days, you’ll see flooded roadways multiple times per year.
It’s funny as someone from the North East who’s always lived around rivers I assumed uncommon means once or twice a year. Not disagreeing they are uncommon, nor suggesting driverless cars are never going to happen. Just marveling at how different two individuals understanding can be of the same word.
"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 way less seriously than tornado or severe thunderstorm warnings. I guess that people think of dangerous floods as being something much more obvious and dramatic than a street puddle just one foot deep, but flooding is no joke.
"Turn Around Don't Drown" PSA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI6mIlHKrVY)
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.
My experience with them is they only last a short time, and there is almost always an alternate route so you are not shutting anything down, just slowing things down a little.
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.
People can't really tell. I would say you can be safest by assuming all visible flooding is too high, especially if you can't clearly see road markings.
A lot of people do monkey-see-monkey-do: observing other people driving through water and then trying to follow. Some people just go slowly until it feels too sketchy and then try to back up.
People inevitably get stuck.
The really big issue is when the road is lower in some spot and you don't expect it.
For example, in my city there is a road that will be perfectly clear until you hit a small section that's a low spot at an underpass. Cars driving too fast hit that section during a heavy rain and quickly get flooded/stranded.
It helps if you know the area and the road and what landmarks are around to give you a clue. Signs, poles, bridges etc. can tip you off to how high the water level is. You can pull over to the side of the road grab a stick and poke at it to get a better idea. The water will often be deeper at the edges.
Another common but unreliable tactic is to wait for someone else to try their luck and see how they manage. Some cars and trucks will do better than others. If you do take your chances aim for the middle and go slow. Still water after a storm is dangerous enough (you can't tell what's below the surface) but I'd never take chances with visibly moving water. Even shallow water moving quickly can knock you off your feet or push your car around.
If you have any doubts at all the best thing to do is to turn around and find another route. If you drive in an area long enough you get to know which areas are prone to flooding and which roads are usually safe.
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.
Maybe not in California but anywhere like Atlanta that gets 50 inches of rain a year has quite a few flooded roadways.
Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly.
In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?
His point is that humans are prone to the same error. The flooded engine damage doesn't come from humans recognising the danger of a flooded road and choosing not to attempt it.
No one cares about flooded engines that Google has to pay for. They care about a taxi that might kill them.
You have to compare this to the number of taxi and Uber drivers who will drive into moving water with passengers on board while a passenger is telling them to stop.
> A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".
"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla
Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.
... which is different from the child whose body got folded in half by someone looking at their phone?
I think "good enough" ends up being okay. I _like_ driving. I would do manual mode often still just because I enjoy it. But I'd be completely fine with the option of autopilot in good conditions. Reality is that 99% of the time, my commute is boring and in good conditions. I don't need a self driving mode that can handle a blizzard when I'm in stop and go traffic and it's 20c outside.
This is much harder for Waymo since there isn't as easy of a manual override mode... But in my car? rip it.
Luckily I basically already have it. Adaptive cruise covers most of my cases well enough, but I wouldn't mind something with a bit more control (turning, etc.)
I'm waiting for independent analysis of the data. According to those with access to data - but also with reason to lie with statistics - waymo is enough better overall than humans that I'm not comfortable with any human driving on any public road. If you like to drive then do it on a private track/course where your mistakes won't kill other people.
Of course the real data is hidden from me and nobody I trust to be independent has seen it and is talking.
I haven't seen the data, but I have sitting strong reason to believe that roads with no cars on them cause fewer motor vehicle accidents than ones with any distribution of human and/or autonomous vehicles, so I'm not comfortable with any cars driving on any public road. If you like cars to drive, than have them do it on a private track/course where your mistakes won't kill other people.
Alternately, we could recognize that figuring out where to draw the line for a diverse group with varying behaviors is pretty hard, and any possible place you try to draw it will be strictly less safe than where I might say to draw it instead, unless you're willing to ban cars entirely. I'm guessing you'd say that banning cars entirely isn't realistic, which I'd be forced to agree with, but if you follow up by suggesting that we just ban humans instead, I'll be very interested to hear your realistic plan for how we deal with the fallout of shutting down millions of restaurants and stores that aren't near public transportation, preventing ambulances for bringing people to hospitals, and transporting goods to anywhere that's not directly on a rail line.
Of course, I have an incredible bias on the conversation on whether humans should be allowed to drive, so you might not be able to trust me. Specifically, I haven't driven for over a decade, have never owned my own car, and don't even have an active license anymore, so I don't particularly care about the idea of people liking to drive. It's probably worth it to mentally adjust what I said above to be a bit more sympathetic to human drivers based on that.
If a child is "folded in half" by someone looking at their phone, no one accepts that as "good enough", and there is a direct action: the driver responsible will lose their licence and likely end up in prison. If it happens often enough, laws are changed.
What happens when a Tesla does the same thing? Besides them lying and hiding information I mean. What remedial action is taken to reduce that specific risk from reoccurring?
>If a child is "folded in half" by someone looking at their phone, no one accepts that as "good enough"
But of course we do. Yes, we punish the individual driver that did it, but we still allow humans to drive cars. We accept the fact that driving a car carries sone risks, but we value the convenience of getting to our destination easily more than we value lives of those kids that will get killed from time to time.
> Yes, we punish the individual driver that did it, but we still allow humans to drive cars.
Yes because bad drivers aren't representative of all drivers. You also missed the part where laws are changed, safety laws are strengthened.
Oh wait. You're American aren't you.
In most of the world, laws are put in place to protect people. The Cybertruck for example, cannot be legally driven (regardless of not being for sale) in many countries because it doesn't meet pedestrian safety standards.
In my home state it's a finable offence to touch or even have your phone sitting in your lap while driving a car, and they've put detection cameras in place to enforce these laws.
So maybe define who you mean by "we" before claiming that people think kids being mutilated by negligent drivers of either the robotic or fleshy kind, is "good enough".
I never heard about this. Where?
South Australia. Possibly other Australian states too, I haven't checked (I live overseas currently)
Okay, but what about the hundreds of clones of this driver who have identical education, behavior, no sense of individual identity to attribute their actions to separately? Certainly we don't wait for every one of them to kill a child before doing something more drastic than firmly instructing them "killing children is bad!"
> ... which is different from the child whose body got folded in half by someone looking at their phone?
Fair enough, we can apply the same standard: just like the humans who drive like that aren't allowed to drive anymore, the autonomous software that drove the car like this also should be forbidden from operating vehicles. I'm sure you agree that a vehicle operator that's this reckless shouldn't be allowed back on the road just for taking a few classes or being taught a few specific techniques like "killing children or drowning passengers is bad!", so we'll be much safer going forward by just keeping off the road indefinitely. It's for the children, of course!
What a silly comment. Waymo is operating in San Francisco, Houston, and Orlando. All of those get lots of rain. Specifically, SF gets lots of "small rain" and Houston and Orlando are more likely to get short bursts of heavy rain.
The irony of people who are against self-driving cars for safety reasons: They are already much safer than regular drivers -- accidents and deaths per millions of kilometers driven. Also, the software is continuously improving. Are regular drivers also continuously improving at the same rate? If anything, they probably get modestly better from 20s into middle age (40s/50s), then begin to decline with age.
Well, they've clearly done a good job of learning how to deal with the weather in those places, so it's unfortunate that Florida never has any severe weather that can cause flooding for them to have learned from before rolling out to Atlanta
The false equivalence of emotional maturity with being able to chase production is really telling.
When people think of autonomous driving as a solved problem it evokes something very specific. It means vehicles can drive on their own, without guidance. Until you solve AVs you don’t have a claim to present whatever you actually have as such. There’s no “good enough” for AVs, you’ve either solved them or you haven’t.
That isn’t being a "responsible adult." That is an irresponsible adult shifting the blame and calling it practical.
Yeah, while the "average" person might be able to gracefully handle these situations there's still a lot of people who do things that to me seem obviously silly and avoidable.
Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.
FYI, 59 days since the last incident apparently: https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com
Floods might be an edge case in the Bay Area, but if you're trying to drive along the Gulf of Mexico it's probably something you're going to want to plan for. I'm not sure that adding an override will help by the time your car is submerged in six feet of water.
> 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.
This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.
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. :)
I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport.
To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.
The reason they can't do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.
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?
As far as the technology goes, they're able to operate on California highways. That's what I'm going off of.
I actually took a waymo down North Ave (where one got stuck) a few weeks ago and it was very pleasant.
I'm pretty conservative about this stuff but the waymo is genuinely nice to ride in.
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.
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.
VLAs (vision-language-action models), which are offspring of LLMs, and their versions that are more suitable to edge devices are being used in self-driving to add common sense to path planners ("don't drive through a police standoff", things like that).
I'm not aware of any self-driving widely available ten years ago. I just took my Model Y over Highway 1 in California without requiring human intervention (other than when I chose to pull the car over).
Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn't absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility.
But, given ten years ago this didn't exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn't seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective.
Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort?
EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.
One of the biggest challenges with self driving cars is that the cars must be substantially safer than human driven cars.
Human driven cars kill tons of people. Everyday in the US 115 people wake up who will be dead from a car accident by midnight.
But if a self driving car kills one human? Your company and mission is cooked.
Besides the immense engineering challenge, the bar is also way way way higher.
Robots vs cars? Robots are much much safer. One is a killing machine going 100km/h, other one is a slow moving thing. You don’t need fast reaction for a robot. Tesla should’ve started with robots first and then self driving.
> And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them.
I guess that's what you get when you test your cars far 20 years in a state that's almost perpetually in a state of drought.
On the other hand, as someone who grew up in New England, laughing about news stories of highways in warmer states getting backed up because of an inch or two or snow wasn't an uncommon occurrence, so maybe having trouble driving during unfamiliar weather is just a sign that they're learning to drive like humans too well
Flooded roadways completely throw human drivers too.
Is your argument:
- Only ship products when they are perfect against every possible edge condition?
or
- If Waymo fails in a few scenarios today after 20 years of effort, they can never succeed?
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.
Just get a jeep snorkle
What happens when you you start floating?
I guess water propulsion... and a rudder?
You need to get an armored jeep then
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.
See also: Duck boat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUKW
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.
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.
Whoosh...
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?
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.
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.
E.g If the driver brakes because they saw a pothole, and Lidar captures someone biking 200m away on their own path, it may mistakenly put more weight on brake causation to the 200m away object (because large moving object) vs the pothole.
I'm exaggerating, but I hope you get the point. It isn't even conflicting sensor signals about the pothole, but conflicting information about the causation. With vision only there is no conflict for the training data. This was my Aha moment. Multiple Sensors are absolutely important for fallback and extra safety, but screws up training that are based on Human Drivers
I think Elon himself doesn't understand this and hence can't articulate it, while just repeating whatever his ML engineer has said.
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...
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.
> 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.
There is noise on LIDAR returns too. No one considers a single LIDAR point to be a collision hazard.
But why can't you apply all that same logic and processing to LIDAR as well. Maybe we're not there yet, but about about in 5-10 years when we are?
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.
The main reason Tesla's don't have LIDAR is hardware cost and maintenance cost, not improved safety.
Maybe also that cars with a LIDAR rig on the roof are appallingly ugly.
Tesla wants to make EVs that look like normal cars (Cybertruck being the oddball here, admittedly).
If I recall correctly, Elon chose to avoid LIDAR (in favour of cameras) due to cost, not cosmetics. Am I wrong?
I don't know. Cost might have been part of it but I also recall hearing that he thought since humans can drive with two eyes and no LIDAR then the car should be able to do the same thing.
You can have intelligence with lidar.
You can have even more intelligence with both.
You can have your cake and eat it too?
Sensor fusion isn't free. Lidar requires more power consumption and more onboard compute. Cycles that could be spent on "intelligence" are instead being spent on sensing.
Naaah, Tesla has no edge in intelligence either. It's just a PR piece to sell to investors.
I like both approaches. The fact that both exist is a clear win for the rest of us as consumers.
Tesla's approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.
If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.
Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that's great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.
The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.
Let’s redirect the problem: it’s not the car, it’s the flooding! We should address that first
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IwBJPqyoB8
> No one should be driving in a hurricane.
I agree, but there are a number of people here in Florida who will do it or die trying (emphasis on the die trying)
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.
Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?
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.
> Rarely is a highway so full that there couldn’t be more cars
Yep, here in Chicago you might even go as many as 12 hours between such events
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.
This is literally not true, roads still have finite capacity, and sometimes demand exceeds capacity.
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.
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.
Evidence suggests... no, that day is never coming.
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.
All I'm saying is never say never
Right… any time now.
If you want to write with such confidence perhaps you should share what the lottery numbers are?
Never is a long time though. Even if it takes 500 years for that to happen, it will still have happened.
busy intersections have more than just cars, my jay walking is going to cause a massive pile up
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.
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?
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
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 mean the logical conclusion is a dedicated lane for automated cars..
At which point we've reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.
Just take away the sidewalk and bike lane :-/
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.
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.
"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.
> atleast there might be less gridlock
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.
Do other states not do this?
Now imagine if the power is out and cell service is down. We saw that happen in San Francisco and it was chaos.
That's why on-board sensor only systems are the way to go.
Until the first traffic cop has to manually direct because lights are out or there was an accident
Except the Waymo can do 150 mph bumper to bumper with other Waymos if you let them.
.. well until it hits the flood
Under an idealized situation sure, but I could get a 150 mph train of cars following me 60 years ago too if anybody had a use for that.
This is a classic case of: if the situation is not in the training data then the model is unequipped to handle it.
We've seen the phenomenon before. We've been warned against the phenomenon before, and we'll see it again in other contexts in the future for sure.
This goes for humans just as well. Humans get stuck. That waymo paused their op to avoid bad press and then get bad press BECAUSE they were being careful is enormously stupid for everyone involved.
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?
Deep water can still damage an EV by getting into connectors, sensors, wheel bearings, brakes, and cabin electronics.
They can also float just like a regular car.
Yep if they are watertight they will float, if they aren't, they'll fill up with 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
>soaked passengers will want a refund
This is so funny. I can imagine customers floating along in their Waymo thinking, "wow I need a refund for this".
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)
You also have to consider the bouyancy of wheels and body panels not yet filled with water which will kill traction, or if the water is moving it doesn't take a lot to push vehicles around.
Most cars crossing water don't get stuck because the intake is blocked by water but because they either floated or get pushed away by the flow (or slammed into the water hard enough to break stuff). If you maintain forward movement and dont float most cars will keep going in water 4-6 inches above the intake height because of the wake and bubble of the engine compartment. You only really benefit from a snorkel if you are offroading through water where there may be unseen holes because submerging your entire engine and drivetrain that deep is still a horrible idea even with a snorkel.
Also if you don't have a direct motor on each drive wheel you still have to worry about water entering differentials and transfer cases even if the electronics are perfectly sealed.
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.
Recent and related:
Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151767 - May 2026 (214 comments)
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.
Do you how often you get flash warnings in Atlanta? And local roads flood far more often than flash food warnings are issued.
If you can’t handle this issue, you really can’t operate in Atlanta.
Would be interesting if you can compare the surface roughness of pavement vs. the surface of water, wind would disturb it too
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.
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
In many situations, the depth of the water doesn't matter as driving into it will likely result in death.
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!
Google is claiming AGI is around the corner, isn’t that supposed to be at least comparable to a 3 year old?
I assume you don’t have kids or know any kids if you don’t think they’re able to judge puddle sizes at age 3.
Why shouldn’t I make the comparison? Waymo is attempting to replace human drivers. That means it needs to make something smarter than humans at driving.
The point that it is a reasonable comparison: being able to reasonably compare the performance of a lump of silicon to a human being at a complex task in the real world means the Overton window has shifted, massively, from say 5 years ago.
You compared it to a child, not a toaster. In a few years to a few decades I'm sure you will whine about how Waymo cant even measure up to Michael Schumacher and they should just throw in the towel. I mean how pathetic is it that their AGI with its petaflops of compute can't even out drive some meat bag from the previous century?
I saw a Waymo for the first time IRL last week in Atlanta. It stopped on a narrow street for about 5 minutes to wait for the person to come out. The people in the cars behind it were not happy!
Self-driving divining rods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing
Is it so hard for LiDAR/Camera to detect flood water on road. Water on a road looks like a flat surface to sensors.
I assumed they went to Miami to develop their foul weather capabilities. It's still pretty early.
Doubtful. They probably just pause service when it rains. Miami weather is ideal most of the time.
These self-driving companies have made very little progress on dealing with weather for how long they’ve spent on the problem.
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.
I imagine it is hard to determine how deep the water is. There is a lot of training with small puddles (ignore) and not much with deep water.
Still, it should be cautious as any human driver would be.
Oh, boy. I guess that means they haven't gotten to the snow phase of the testing yet.
I wonder if the decent wade depth (500mm/20") of the i-pace's they use was input as a constraint.
I guess sometimes you have to take a step backwards for making progress with something.
Inconvenient, but I'm glad they're erring on the side of safety here. Waymo is doing a surprisingly great job at expanding their network.
You can create very sophisticated simulations all you want, but in the end, you can only test the accuracy of your simulation when you try the real thing
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).
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?
Humans have a hard time judging how deep water is too! Turns out neither Lidar nor vision/cameras have the right ability to sense water depth.
Didn't ALL Waymos at once pulled over recently because it started raining?
This ain't Arizona - Atlanta has REAL weather.
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!
We had one do this in San Antonio too. Right across the well labeled low water crossing and whoosh.
... but their World Model said it was ok to drive through the flood.
Slide 3 in "Extreme weather conditions and natural disasters" section: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
I'm honestly slightly surprised that "the road markings suddenly completely vanish" doesn't raise some kind of internal warning to the system
Nashville is paused too. I don’t know why.
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.
Biblical.
I think I made a HN comment a few months/years ago about driverless cars having problems with floods across roads after watching a downpour in Kuala Lumpur flood half a street in minutes. The road was down to one lane and drivers in both directions took it in turns to use that one lane. That would be a difficult situation for a driverless car to handle.
My guess in the North East in the winter there will be similar stories.
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.
Working out kinks. There are going to be a bunch of AI bad people trying their best to pounce on this.
anyone has any videos?
I mean if they did this to avoid accidents and road congestions for other human drivers then it makes sense.
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.
It can't mean that, there's a lake there!
Coming to New Orleans soon...
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.
how would a llm help
maybe a little biological brain engineered to think it is a car with api access to the car hardware via the llm?
imagine you get into the car and in the center console you just see a floating brain in vat like fallout
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.
Lmao what…
You sound like an econ prof: full of it and hand waving away with hypotheticals.
this is absolutely already a thing under development, you can see Waymo is hiring for reasoning roles
Tesla's already doing it too
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.
Maybe. But insurance rates, and the government's enforcement of laws, are based on analytics, and overcome a lot of human emotional bias.
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)
Getting banned from driving is extremely rare. Most people convicted of DUI are still allowed to drive.
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 - though in this case it's a good illustration that AI can make errors humans would be less likely to even if it is objectively better than the average driver at parking and not speeding.
This not in any way refute my argument that 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're missing the obvious. Waymo trains with human driver data, and idiotic humans drive into deep water constantly. Oh, you want Waymo's to drive better than humans?
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection. "Tricky," he said finally.
That's not how the training data works. It's not just a constant stream of human driving footage with no regard for good or bad performance
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.
There was one in Atlanta that made the local news where it went too deep and stalled out, was stuck for over an hour.
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?”
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.
> 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.
But that is what it was: the remedy in the recall was an over-the-air update and was already universally applied several weeks time before the recall was actually formalized.
Also seems linguistically complex, since the dictionary meaning of recall is an "official order to return item to a manufacturer", but Waymo doesn't sell the vehicle itself.
Ok I see the issue, at the time the BBC article was written they hadn't paused service yet. That remedy you're referring to didn't work though, so now they have completely paused service in two cities.
> Waymo has now paused service in two cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week.
> Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, 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,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
> 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. The company said those alerts are part of a larger set of signals it relies on to prepare the vehicles for poor weather.
I still think the BBC headline is fine, but I guess if you aren't familiar with this usage of "recall" then you could be misled.
> 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.
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
you are describing a train
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.
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 don't want to own a car, but I do want privacy, and I do want to go directly from point A to point B without being on a train. I have absolutely no reason to want to board a train as an alternative unless I want to go very fast from A to a very far away B. That is a real problem that is being solved for, not just hype. Aspiring to be cattle isn't noble.
EDIT: Also - rail doesn't get built because they're expensive projects, 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. Autonomous vehicles slot nicely into infrastructure that exists already, that already has the advantage of being point-to-point.
If the goal is "improve transit", autonomous vehicles achieve that without directly competing with trains. If the goal is, for some reason, "less cars", they also arguably achieve that because you'd end up with less private ownership of cars. If the goal is "no cars", I have no idea what the point of that would be.
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.
Not everybody lives in a dense city center or wants to, which is where the usefulness of trains ends and cars begins.
> children use them to get to school, they're accessible the elderly and disabled. Many things that automated cars can not do.
...all of those things are things cars can do today, why would automated cars be any different?
yeah but guess where they're trying to get self driving cars to work: dense city centers — robotaxis aren't economical if they're driving an hour out to rural areas, so again... they're trying to turn a profit in an area that's best suited for trains
it's yet another scam under the guise of futurism
Can we please stop this experiment.
Mandatory "FSD next year!" /s
Teasing aside can you imagine how fucking scary it must be to be in a self-driving car that drives straight in flowing water? Damn.
does Waymo use Lidar or is it like Musk's "cost saving" cameras only
The spinny things on the vehicle are LIDAR.
Waymo uses lidar. There's lots of information about it on the web.
Lidar is much less accurate in the rain.
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?
Your assumption that Waymos are "(somewhat) autonomous" is wrong, which is why your questions and conclusion don't make any sense
It's an interesting illustration of how widely and quickly misinformation spreads, though.
If they only would use lidar. Oh wait…
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?
Maybe the solution is to put in more billions. Every fad creates jobs.