I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out.
The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving.
The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots.
This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate.
And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection.
On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like the Waymos used to be.
I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and reading and crossing streets with dead lights.
Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to handle.
It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
Its either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100% within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been complaining about that one cat.
>either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make.
Is there a name for this (and related) effects? Obviously, in a group of several hundred thousand people, there will always be at least a few people that complain about something for the exact opposite reasons. That's not a signal of usefulness. I feel we need a name for the some-rando-has-an-opinion-that-gets-picked-up-and-amplified-by-"the algorithm" phenomena. And the more fringe/out-there, the more passionate that particular person is likely to be about this issue, when "most" people feel "eh" about the whole thing.
the fact that there's practically no visible regulatory response to autonomous/remote-controlled vehicles that violate traffic laws or put people/pets/property at risk is a big part of why i'm personally not okay with these vehicles being allowed to use public rights-of-way.
when a waymo can get a traffic ticket (commensurate with google's ability to pay, a la the new income-based speeding ticket pilot programs in LA and SF), and when corporate officers down to engineers bear responsibility for failures, i think a lot more people will stop seeing these encroachments onto our commons as a nuisance.
story time: i've literally had one of those god awful food delivery robots run straight into me on a sidewalk. once, one of them stopped in my way and would not move, so i physically moved it myself and it followed me to my apartment. i'm about to start cow-tipping them (gently, because i don't want a lawsuit alleging property damage, even though they're practically just abandoned tech scrap without a human operator nearby to take responsibility).
>It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
What post mortem? The whole fleet reverted to it's "baseline" of acting like a hysterical teenager on day 1 of driver's ed. Obviously there's serious collateral damage to overall system performance when you just create thousands of those people out of thin air but that's "other people's problem" as far as waymo is concerned.
I’m curious what’s the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that, or at least most of everyone. What’s the situation in SF?
Yes, that is the same law in California, but so many people drift through stop signs that the guidance is close to meaningless.
In addition, there are 4-way stop signs all over SF and tourists regularly comment on how they work here.
The law is clear - yield to the right, but that is a pretty slow system in congested roads.
The local custom in SF is that someone is usually obviously first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and opposing pairs of cars go simultaneously, while being wary about left turns.
Of course pedestrians have right of way in California, so someone in a crosswalk gives implied right of way to the road parallel to the person's crosswalk.
The result is 2x or better throughput, and lots of confused tourists.
So ... with the lights out on a Saturday before Xmas, there was a mess of SF local driving protocol, irritated shoppers, people coming to SF for Xmas parties, and just normal Saturday car and foot traffic.
I thought Waymo did pretty well, but as I said, I didn't see any ones that were dead in the middle of the street..
> And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection.
Why are you saying they got pissed off? Going around another vehicle that is blocking the road sounds like basic driving to me.
There was definitely a second there where they were aggressive enough to run red lights, probably because they kept getting rear-ended by people that were expecting them to run the red light.
Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point in time criticism.
One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is, where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are effectively perfect conditions.
From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of "It's a blizzard, you can't see 10 feet, there is snow on the road and ice, it's slippery, all the lines and street markings are obscured completely, oh and the power is out and there are no traffic lights."
Some of this can be resolved by snow tires, or even studded tires which are legal in Quebec. It should be noted that Quebec plows the roads less, and uses less dirt and salt on the road, and also enforces a law that snow tires are on cars in the winter. Of course studded tires give insane grip on ice, but have reduced grip on rain.
And it can 10C and rain, then freeze, then be a blizzard, then move to -40C, all in a few days.
But anyhow, my point is if a Waymo is slow with a missing traffic light, how will it act with a missing traffic light, and 10ft visual range of reflective snow in the air, no ability to see lines on the street, and so on. Humans are great at peering and seeing mostly obscured indications of an intersection, but this is still challenging for a car with a top priority of safety.
Here's another example. The cameras in my car are constantly obscured by slush, dirt, and such on the windshield and all over the car. All the roads are coated with dirt to help with slipping on ice. I often have my car absurdly complaining that cameras are covered, and there's no assist this and that, just because the entire car is coated in dirt.
How will a Waymo operate with all sensors covered in dirt?
There are probably solutions. But it feels like it will be a long while before such cars treat a normal day in winter, as usual.
It should be noted that I've simply discussed downtown Montreal. What of a rural area? And by rural, I mean houses 1 km apart, also with a blizzard, all lines obscured on the road, and meanwhile Canadians just intuitively know where and how to drive it. We just slow down a bit (from 120km/hr to maybe 70km/hr) and just drive on our merry way. If we try to stop, distances are greatly extended, and of course in some places without care you'll just slide into the ditch.
Of course that's just a Wednesday, and you can read the 'signs of the road', and sort of tell where to slow down more. Where to take more care.
Sometimes, you'll see a bunch of cars in the ditch, and think 'Ah, must be particularly slippery here', and slow down a bit more.
I'm also curious about this. They're coming to Minneapolis next year, so apparently they're confident in their ability to figure out cold / unpredictable weather (in urban conditions at least).
LIDAR can't be compared to radarless cars (yes, to Teslas) The car might have a better understanding in low visibility conditions than a person (blizzard)
I got stuck behind a Zoox in SF trying to cross the street from an alley. There was an endless stream of stop & go traffic and the Zoox refused to push itself into traffic, despite other cars deliberately giving it space. I wasn't sure if honking at it would help or hurt the situation.
“Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators:
Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.”
I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK?
I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more cautious approach. Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy.
There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from.
What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option? Should there be human police to direct the self driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary electricity failure?
I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems and in practice having the cars stay still might have been the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc).
There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.
> There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included.
Maybe I'm reading things wrong, but it sounds like the top comment wants waymo to be better, and you want waymo to be off the roads. You're not talking about the same kind of "thinking through the ramifications".
> I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from
The sentiment comes from the corporation itself. With this much money at stake you know they have a hand in steering the conversation and that includes on sites such as this.
I feel like self-driving cars are, pretty objectively, the single least environmentally friendly mass transit solution (more cars being made and using more rare-earth minerals to produce them, more cars being driven rather than increasing public transit usage). What's the argument that not liking self-driving cars is "anti-environmental"?
Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them.
Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.
I wouldn't cry for waymo if a bunch of their cars got bulldozed out of the way but that's still unacceptable since it slows down emergency vehicles and first responders.
>I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better.
This has been the MO for "tech companies" for the past 20 years. Meanwhile I'm told I'm paranoid when the industry of "move fast or break things" decides to move into mission/safety critical industries and use its massive wealth to lobby for deregulation to maintain its habits.
We certainly have BS regulations done to constrain competition. But I'd wager a good 80% of them exist for good reason.
Surely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.
It’s not gonna be good. But you want it to be a gridlock because the cars can’t get out fast enough because there’s too many cars on the road.
Not because a bunch of cars that are perfectly capable of moving are just sitting there blocking things purposefully waiting for the driver in the sky to take over.
And what if, due to $BIG_DISASTER they won’t be able to for a week?
In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.
I'm surprised the don't know to treat it as a 4-way stop, either. This kind of outage is pretty common in Phoenix, too, which is another major Waymo market. It probably happens to at least some part of the city every monsoon season.
It is acceptable when the situation is so dire that most human drivers can't handle the situation. It is not acceptable when the human can handle the situation but the machine is dragging the flow back.
In cases where the traffic signal is not working, it is known that the FSD has to take on a more challenging role of reading traffic agent gestures. I think they have that functionality built in. But not when neither traffic signal is working nor traffic agent is present.
The basic thing is to treat everything like a four-way stop sign.
What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.
Latency makes this hard even with local connections, it’s essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore.
And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control with a highly and variably latent system is very hard/dangerous.
And in an emergency situation you’re likely to have terrible connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be sufficient for the complexity of the situation.
I suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be possible to remotely control the vehicles.
Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue the journey or stop.
Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with autonomous vehicles.
In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.
Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
There have been some experiments that suggest that traffic flow is both safer and more efficient if you just turn disable the signals entirely. I doubt it applies to all, or even most, situations but it's definitely food for thought: https://www.npr.org/2008/01/19/18217318/german-towns-traffic...
My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.
At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves.
But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both appropriate and safe.
After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).
By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.
By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with. People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've seen it.
But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious route.
(but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the middle of the road. That's NFG.)
Huh, here in Germany we have street signs (mostly of a "you are the priority road" 45° rotated square yellow-on-white "sunny side up egg" sign and the "you are not the priority road" down-pointing white-on-red triangle; for 3-way if the priority road isn't the straight road or the concept of straight is ambiguous, there's a supplemental sign depicting the path of the priority road) permanently on traffic lights; it's also common enough for non-major roads to have the lights turned off at night so drivers tend to be familiar with falling back to the signs when the lights are off.
In absence of priority roads there is also the "right before left" rule which means that the car coming from the right if they would conflict in time is the car that has priority.
It's also always illegal to enter an intersection if you can't immediately clear it; that seems to work better when there are no green traffic lights to suggest an explicit allowance to drive, though.
I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.
Odd that it was necessary, my mental model of manhattan is that it would become so slow and chaotic that it would be free reign for pedestrians to walk wherever
Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.
> Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
I’ve long been curious if people in S.F. who are used to Waymo “behavior” – including myself – behave differently when a Waymo is involved. For the most part, Waymos are extremely predictable and if you’re on the road as a pedestrian, cyclist, or car, are you more aggressive and willing to assert your turn in the road? Curious if Waymo has done a psychological study of how we start to think about the vehicles. I know many runners, for example, that’ll stride right into the crosswalk in front of a Waymo but wouldn’t dare to do that in front of other cars. Similarly, anecdotally people treat public transit vehicles differently than a civilian car: folks are more willing to let them drive even if out of natural turn.
Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.
My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)
It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]
One could argue that it's "cultural", but California state law says this about the situation:
> Traffic Light Not Working
When a traffic light is not working, stop as if the intersection is controlled by STOP signs in all directions. Then proceed cautiously when it is safe to do so.
Where I'm from (a relatively rural country) they just get treated like give way signs you'd have on a country road, the larger road generlly has priority but as it's not clear they'd be more cautious too.
Here in Johannesburg, downed traffic lights are a near daily occurrence and have been for years. It took a bit of getting used to but people are used to it now and generally obey the rules.
Actually there are times of day when I find it preferable that the traffic lights are down.
Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were ruled by stop signs. It’s not always easy to keep track of who goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well in those cases.
We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
You can further optimize the setup by not installing engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and designed for carrying.
That’s actually getting less common; pretty much all rapid transport and commuter trains are multiple units these days, as are an increasing number of intercity trains.
In Ireland, there are precisely two passenger routes still operated with locomotives, and there’s a tender offer out to replace one of them with a (really wacky; diesel, battery, _and_ overhead lines in two voltages!) multiple unit.
And all the power could just come from a few large centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over head…
It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist.
When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared with unstable and violent people, which while possibly "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real differentiating advantage.
A quaintly American complaint. A 10 minute walk being an issue is very a learned helplessness my fellow Americans suffer from.
But unfortunately the 10-15 min walk is only possible in a couple cities. most Americans day to day experience of public transit is spaced out buses that don’t work well for single family sprawl and strip malls parking lots where walking is treated as undesirable. Car oriented rather than people oriented urban planning (or lack thereof) is the original cause.
violent unstable people aren't inherent to cities.. they're inherent to places that refuse to spend any money on social work/housing/and enjoy punishing people
All public transit is at least an order of magnitude safer than driving a car. 10-15 minutes of walking is called being an inactive human. I promise it won't hurt you (unless you get hit by a car).
At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive.
Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were zero waymo fatalities due to this.
That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least one fatality due to traffic light outages.
Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They are a great company that will do a lot of good for the world. One bad night (in which noone was hurt, in part because of their cautiuosness) shouldn't negate that.
Seeing as how literally nobody died, I'm not sure if I agree with your sentiment.
I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a crash that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer is yes - there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose driver died after hitting a Waymo. Clearly we should shut down Waymo until they can handle that situation!
39,345 People were killed in traffic accidents last year in the US alone [1]. Not including permanent injury. If humans were replaced by self driving cars at their current accident rate, 34,000 less people a year would die [2].
Even if every US city had Waymos blocking the street for every single disaster, as they did here. I find it extremely unlikely that even the indirect deaths would come close to that number. And that's assuming Waymo learn from this lesson. Which they will.
You're being sarcastic, but it's a valid point. I'd love to know if there were any traffic fatalities at all during the affected period. Chances are there were and that they were due to human error.
Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
I wonder how Waymos know that the traffic lights are out.
A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently, a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one by one, as if they think the light is not working."
It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific angles.
Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are working.
I recently had a broken traffic light in my city, it was daylight and I didn't notice any other lights that should be on during the day to be off.
My approach was to get closer into the intersection slowly and judge whether the perpendicular traffic would slow down and also try to figure out what was going on or if they would just zip through like if they had green.
It required some attention and some judgement. It definitely wasn't the normal day to day driving where you don't quite think consciously what you're doing.
I understand that individual autonomous vehicles cannot be expected to be given the responsibility to make such a call and the safest thing to do for them is to have them stop.
But I assumed there were still many human operators that would oversee the fleet and they could make the call that the traffic lights are all off
> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
I lived in the training zone for both Waymo and Cruise. They were there for literally years before they were offering rides to anyone. The idea that they could train them for emergency scenarios, especially ones that happen so infrequently like a power outage on a route they regularly drive, seems borderline nonsensical, but I honestly don't know if there is a plausible way to do it.
I live in SF, and drive alongside Waymos every day. Also, they park in my buildings garage, where they frequently cause major delays and blockages inside the garage.
I am pretty sure Waymo does not disclose how many human interventions they get. It would destroy their magic aura. A fancy RC car with self-driving experimental features is not very futuristic after all. By all the evidence, that’s what we observed when the internet went out. I don’t buy the 4-way stop explanation. Waymos handle 4-way stops just fine on an average day. I drive alongside them daily.
I’ve long suspected that they get many human interventions on the road, frequent enough that when the internet connectivity slowed down to a crawl across the city, Waymos could not get themselves unstuck from a variety of situations and simply just blocked the roads. That’s not a paragon of safety, nor is it “self-driving”. Self-driving cars were 10 years away in 2015, and in 2025, they are still 10 years away.
Yeah, I was shocked by this. Blackouts in California aren’t some sort of rare event. I’m primed to expect rolling brownouts/blackouts yearly in the summer.
It also means that their claims of "autonomy" are fraudulent, like most "self driving" cars. A car which depends on powered infrastructure outside the car to drive is not autonomous.
One usage case that I saw myself is when a vehicle is parked such that it will require the other vehicle to go slighty over the curb, in this case the curb is flat so I assuming the parked driver thought it was okay. Every other human driver did okay, but Waymo just refused to put its wheel on the curb and just got stuck. Video here: https://x.com/aaditya_prakash/status/1989444130238259575?s=2...
Neither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that’s really troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.
Perhaps this is by design. Cruise had a failsafe system that detected a collision and decided to pull over but by pulling over it dragged a person underneath the car (or something close to this scenario). Maybe this dumb failsafe was designed not to repeat Cruise's mistakes?
Certainly a better way to handle this would have been to pull over. I think stopping where ever it happened to be is only acceptable if the majority of sensors fail for some reason
I was there. I encountered multiple stopped Waymos in the street. It was annoying, but not dangerous. They had their lights on. Any driver following the rules of the road would get around them fine. It was definitely imperfect, but safe. Much safer than the humans blowing through those very same intersections.
When I was a young man, I worked at a restaurant, and the lights went off.
I being the hero I was, wanted to keep the show running, bought some candles, ovens worked fine, water worked fine (for now). I wanted to charge cash. But eventually big boss came and shut us down since light wasn't coming.
And he was right, cooking and working under those conditions is dangerous for the staff, but also for the clients, without light you cannot see the food, cannot inspect its state, whether stale, with visible fungi, etc...
Yes, the perfect worker would still operate under those conditions, but we are not perfect, and admitting that we only can provide 2 or 3 nines, and recognizing where we are in that 0.01% moment, is what keeps us from actually failing so catastrophically that we undo all of the progress and benefits that the last bit of availability would have allowed us.
AIUI, it was the irregularity of the uncontrolled intersections combining with the “novel” (from the POV of the software) driving style of the humans. In dense areas during outages signaled intersections don’t actually degrade to 4 way stops, drivers act pretty poorly.
The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted.
Certainly not ideal, and the should be a very strong regulatory response (the gov should have shut them down), and meaningful financial penalties (at least for repeat incidents).
Waymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection is gone then this is no longer available, and one might speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if they are in a situation where remote help is called for and inaccessible.
Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to stop operating autonomously and try to phone home for help, or perhaps losing the connection home is itself enough to trigger a fail safe shutdown mode ?
It reminds a bit of the recent TeslaBot video, another of their teleoperated stunts, where we see the bot appearing to remove a headset with both hands that it wasn't wearing (but that it's remote operator was), then fall over backwards "dead" as the remote operator evidentially clocked off his shift or went for a bathroom break.
That’s clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious possible failure.
Things go wrong -> get human help
Human not available -> just block the road???
How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback.
I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran over something. But in a situation like this where the problem is fully external it should fall back to “park myself” mode.
"Navigating an event of this magnitude presented a unique challenge for autonomous technology. While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets."
Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting it' about technical matters have a long history of being hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with GPS.
I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.
Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
I don't understand why everyone is talking about the cars when the bigger issue is why the critical infrastructure (lights) don't have batteries for backup.
I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb.
My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event).
I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned with "the flow of traffic."
Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.
I'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training autonomous vehicles.
Most intersections I've seen in Serbia cities like Belgrade have "preferential" roads even if they are equally loaded and similarly sized: so, one direction will have either "stop" or "yield" signs, and another will not. Everyone slows down because you don't see the stop/yield sign for the orthogonal streets until you come closer to the intersection.
Perhaps we are just more used to traffic lights being off/broken (and we are, as this is, anecdotally, more like a weekly occurrence at some point during your trip to work, for instance)?
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).
Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).
Current driving model realism could be greatly improved with a few real world training styles to consider in order to offset the Austin Left Lane Hippie driver model:
- New Orleans taxi cab driver
- Houston gang banger
- Los Angeles traffic weaver
and most importantly,
- Saudi Arabia Toyota Camry driver and 360 drift hobbiest (with bonus 2 wheel tire change)
I was in hollywood, california last night and saw a waymo come to a weird 5 way intersection, stop past the limit line on a red light in or past the crosswalk at the right turn lane and go into it's sign active attract mode. I think they have some more development to do, and don't recommend using such poorly performing software.
I saw plenty of Waymos managing to make it through intersections. They were slow and tentative, but definitely made forward progress.
I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone, presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos were lacking connectivity.
There is of course also a possibility that the total demand exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human intervention.
I think it’s clear that both use cases are a must have during an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos shouldn’t be online during such times at all.
I was in the affected area and we effectively lost all but messaging. Not the whole time, but definitely while I was ordering takeout at a place with power. I couldn't get an image to send to a friend.
I lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but plenty were down.
Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out (didn’t know about it, we were going to Japan town from the Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One advantage of building unsupervised system from public version that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.
Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency vehicles pass safely.
I'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when, not training data, that results in the two behaving different.
50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a stop.
Don’t think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.
FSD is level 2. Level 3 doesn't require the human driver to monitor the outside environment, only take over when requested. Tesla also doesn't report data from FSD under L3 reporting requirements anywhere in the US.
Obvious failure should be obvious. Get out of the streets. What happens when one gets a flat tire? Surely it doesn't just stop in the middle of the street, right??
It was predicted by many, including me. It'll be a lot worse in an earthquake where power and cell service are out and there's debris and road damage. Good luck to our first responders.
As a society, as a whole society, opposed to our narrow interests and point of views as typical affluent HN dwellers, do we really NEED this kind of shit?
SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or exit there.
Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing for them, but it can be solved with software improvements. Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs, so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.
But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.
Read more carefully, Waymo didn’t boast about their numbers and that part of the story was unrelated to the issue except as a measure of impact their shutdown could have.
The word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an errand in the blackout, we didn't need to do it, but we wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including multiple disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it over, I would have stayed home.
I don't think this was a street, I think SF just experiences rolling blackouts sometimes (unsure if this is due to their forest fire laws, the city buying the grid, or something else, although it seems silly that it's happening at all)
I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-distribution scenario would count against this, but may be rare enough to not significantly affect the average.
I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out.
The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving.
The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots.
This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate.
And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection.
On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like the Waymos used to be.
I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and reading and crossing streets with dead lights.
Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to handle.
It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
Its either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100% within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been complaining about that one cat.
>either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make.
Is there a name for this (and related) effects? Obviously, in a group of several hundred thousand people, there will always be at least a few people that complain about something for the exact opposite reasons. That's not a signal of usefulness. I feel we need a name for the some-rando-has-an-opinion-that-gets-picked-up-and-amplified-by-"the algorithm" phenomena. And the more fringe/out-there, the more passionate that particular person is likely to be about this issue, when "most" people feel "eh" about the whole thing.
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the fact that there's practically no visible regulatory response to autonomous/remote-controlled vehicles that violate traffic laws or put people/pets/property at risk is a big part of why i'm personally not okay with these vehicles being allowed to use public rights-of-way.
when a waymo can get a traffic ticket (commensurate with google's ability to pay, a la the new income-based speeding ticket pilot programs in LA and SF), and when corporate officers down to engineers bear responsibility for failures, i think a lot more people will stop seeing these encroachments onto our commons as a nuisance.
story time: i've literally had one of those god awful food delivery robots run straight into me on a sidewalk. once, one of them stopped in my way and would not move, so i physically moved it myself and it followed me to my apartment. i'm about to start cow-tipping them (gently, because i don't want a lawsuit alleging property damage, even though they're practically just abandoned tech scrap without a human operator nearby to take responsibility).
Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly.
And if you’re Waymo, it’s a short-term reputation hit but great experience to learn from and improve.
Triggering some sort of extreme safety mode is considered failing now?
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>Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly.
Just because no integer lives were wasted doesn't mean we can't sum the man hours and get a number greater than 1
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>to learn from and improve.
Okay, let's see if they actually do it this time.
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>It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
What post mortem? The whole fleet reverted to it's "baseline" of acting like a hysterical teenager on day 1 of driver's ed. Obviously there's serious collateral damage to overall system performance when you just create thousands of those people out of thin air but that's "other people's problem" as far as waymo is concerned.
I’m curious what’s the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that, or at least most of everyone. What’s the situation in SF?
Yes, that is the same law in California, but so many people drift through stop signs that the guidance is close to meaningless.
In addition, there are 4-way stop signs all over SF and tourists regularly comment on how they work here.
The law is clear - yield to the right, but that is a pretty slow system in congested roads.
The local custom in SF is that someone is usually obviously first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and opposing pairs of cars go simultaneously, while being wary about left turns.
Of course pedestrians have right of way in California, so someone in a crosswalk gives implied right of way to the road parallel to the person's crosswalk.
The result is 2x or better throughput, and lots of confused tourists.
So ... with the lights out on a Saturday before Xmas, there was a mess of SF local driving protocol, irritated shoppers, people coming to SF for Xmas parties, and just normal Saturday car and foot traffic.
I thought Waymo did pretty well, but as I said, I didn't see any ones that were dead in the middle of the street..
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Legally in the United States a completely dead traffic signal becomes an all way stop.
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SF drivers mostly don’t stop at stop signs. Many do not stop at red lights either.
> And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection.
Why are you saying they got pissed off? Going around another vehicle that is blocking the road sounds like basic driving to me.
There was definitely a second there where they were aggressive enough to run red lights, probably because they kept getting rear-ended by people that were expecting them to run the red light.
Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point in time criticism.
One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is, where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are effectively perfect conditions.
From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of "It's a blizzard, you can't see 10 feet, there is snow on the road and ice, it's slippery, all the lines and street markings are obscured completely, oh and the power is out and there are no traffic lights."
Some of this can be resolved by snow tires, or even studded tires which are legal in Quebec. It should be noted that Quebec plows the roads less, and uses less dirt and salt on the road, and also enforces a law that snow tires are on cars in the winter. Of course studded tires give insane grip on ice, but have reduced grip on rain.
And it can 10C and rain, then freeze, then be a blizzard, then move to -40C, all in a few days.
But anyhow, my point is if a Waymo is slow with a missing traffic light, how will it act with a missing traffic light, and 10ft visual range of reflective snow in the air, no ability to see lines on the street, and so on. Humans are great at peering and seeing mostly obscured indications of an intersection, but this is still challenging for a car with a top priority of safety.
Here's another example. The cameras in my car are constantly obscured by slush, dirt, and such on the windshield and all over the car. All the roads are coated with dirt to help with slipping on ice. I often have my car absurdly complaining that cameras are covered, and there's no assist this and that, just because the entire car is coated in dirt.
How will a Waymo operate with all sensors covered in dirt?
There are probably solutions. But it feels like it will be a long while before such cars treat a normal day in winter, as usual.
It should be noted that I've simply discussed downtown Montreal. What of a rural area? And by rural, I mean houses 1 km apart, also with a blizzard, all lines obscured on the road, and meanwhile Canadians just intuitively know where and how to drive it. We just slow down a bit (from 120km/hr to maybe 70km/hr) and just drive on our merry way. If we try to stop, distances are greatly extended, and of course in some places without care you'll just slide into the ditch.
Of course that's just a Wednesday, and you can read the 'signs of the road', and sort of tell where to slow down more. Where to take more care.
Sometimes, you'll see a bunch of cars in the ditch, and think 'Ah, must be particularly slippery here', and slow down a bit more.
It’s entirely possible we only ever get them in major cities where feasible, and that seems ok.
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I'm also curious about this. They're coming to Minneapolis next year, so apparently they're confident in their ability to figure out cold / unpredictable weather (in urban conditions at least).
LIDAR can't be compared to radarless cars (yes, to Teslas) The car might have a better understanding in low visibility conditions than a person (blizzard)
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I got stuck behind a Zoox in SF trying to cross the street from an alley. There was an endless stream of stop & go traffic and the Zoox refused to push itself into traffic, despite other cars deliberately giving it space. I wasn't sure if honking at it would help or hurt the situation.
I'm not sure if it even knows it's being honked at.
From John Ripley on Mastodon:
“Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators:
Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.”
I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK?
I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more cautious approach. Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454
> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy.
There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from.
It's a genuine frustration here.
What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option? Should there be human police to direct the self driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary electricity failure?
I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems and in practice having the cars stay still might have been the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc).
There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.
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> There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included.
Maybe I'm reading things wrong, but it sounds like the top comment wants waymo to be better, and you want waymo to be off the roads. You're not talking about the same kind of "thinking through the ramifications".
> I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from
The sentiment comes from the corporation itself. With this much money at stake you know they have a hand in steering the conversation and that includes on sites such as this.
> anti-environmental sentiment
I feel like self-driving cars are, pretty objectively, the single least environmentally friendly mass transit solution (more cars being made and using more rare-earth minerals to produce them, more cars being driven rather than increasing public transit usage). What's the argument that not liking self-driving cars is "anti-environmental"?
Willfulness.
Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them.
Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.
I wouldn't cry for waymo if a bunch of their cars got bulldozed out of the way but that's still unacceptable since it slows down emergency vehicles and first responders.
There are people in the Waymos. It's like not moving parked cars.
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>I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better.
This has been the MO for "tech companies" for the past 20 years. Meanwhile I'm told I'm paranoid when the industry of "move fast or break things" decides to move into mission/safety critical industries and use its massive wealth to lobby for deregulation to maintain its habits.
We certainly have BS regulations done to constrain competition. But I'd wager a good 80% of them exist for good reason.
I wouldn’t wager past 50%, especially since laws don’t have expiration dates.
Surely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.
It’s not gonna be good. But you want it to be a gridlock because the cars can’t get out fast enough because there’s too many cars on the road.
Not because a bunch of cars that are perfectly capable of moving are just sitting there blocking things purposefully waiting for the driver in the sky to take over.
And what if, due to $BIG_DISASTER they won’t be able to for a week?
I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time, right?
Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with
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> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos
Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked?
We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.
I don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing.
They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.
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A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.
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In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.
I'm surprised the don't know to treat it as a 4-way stop, either. This kind of outage is pretty common in Phoenix, too, which is another major Waymo market. It probably happens to at least some part of the city every monsoon season.
During Japan's 2011 earthquake, many roads were gridlocked by human drivers.
It is acceptable when the situation is so dire that most human drivers can't handle the situation. It is not acceptable when the human can handle the situation but the machine is dragging the flow back.
In cases where the traffic signal is not working, it is known that the FSD has to take on a more challenging role of reading traffic agent gestures. I think they have that functionality built in. But not when neither traffic signal is working nor traffic agent is present.
The basic thing is to treat everything like a four-way stop sign.
What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.
Latency makes this hard even with local connections, it’s essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore.
And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control with a highly and variably latent system is very hard/dangerous.
And in an emergency situation you’re likely to have terrible connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be sufficient for the complexity of the situation.
I suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be possible to remotely control the vehicles.
Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue the journey or stop.
Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with autonomous vehicles.
This very scenario could involve no cell signal.
In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.
Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
>in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine
Well, sort of. Road injuries / fatalities in countries without these kinds of regulations are about an 3-4x higher than in those that do have them.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565684
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> with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
wow, cascading failures. I'll bet this is the tip of the iceberg.
There have been some experiments that suggest that traffic flow is both safer and more efficient if you just turn disable the signals entirely. I doubt it applies to all, or even most, situations but it's definitely food for thought: https://www.npr.org/2008/01/19/18217318/german-towns-traffic...
i had essentially the opposite experience in close proximity.
The general wisdom is to treat a broken light like a stop sign. So it really comes down to how well that wisdom is absorbed when the time comes.
Herd mentality also helps here. We see the first few people do this and we will follow along pretty quickly.
I've been through long blackouts.
My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.
At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves.
But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both appropriate and safe.
After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).
By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.
By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with. People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've seen it.
But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious route.
(but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the middle of the road. That's NFG.)
Huh, here in Germany we have street signs (mostly of a "you are the priority road" 45° rotated square yellow-on-white "sunny side up egg" sign and the "you are not the priority road" down-pointing white-on-red triangle; for 3-way if the priority road isn't the straight road or the concept of straight is ambiguous, there's a supplemental sign depicting the path of the priority road) permanently on traffic lights; it's also common enough for non-major roads to have the lights turned off at night so drivers tend to be familiar with falling back to the signs when the lights are off.
In absence of priority roads there is also the "right before left" rule which means that the car coming from the right if they would conflict in time is the car that has priority. It's also always illegal to enter an intersection if you can't immediately clear it; that seems to work better when there are no green traffic lights to suggest an explicit allowance to drive, though.
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I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.
Odd that it was necessary, my mental model of manhattan is that it would become so slow and chaotic that it would be free reign for pedestrians to walk wherever
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Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.
> Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
I’ve long been curious if people in S.F. who are used to Waymo “behavior” – including myself – behave differently when a Waymo is involved. For the most part, Waymos are extremely predictable and if you’re on the road as a pedestrian, cyclist, or car, are you more aggressive and willing to assert your turn in the road? Curious if Waymo has done a psychological study of how we start to think about the vehicles. I know many runners, for example, that’ll stride right into the crosswalk in front of a Waymo but wouldn’t dare to do that in front of other cars. Similarly, anecdotally people treat public transit vehicles differently than a civilian car: folks are more willing to let them drive even if out of natural turn.
In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.
Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
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san francisco really really needs this.. the traffic lights were incredibly hard to see with the fog and rain..
> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.
My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)
It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
One could argue that it's "cultural", but California state law says this about the situation:
> Traffic Light Not Working
When a traffic light is not working, stop as if the intersection is controlled by STOP signs in all directions. Then proceed cautiously when it is safe to do so.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...
Where I'm from (a relatively rural country) they just get treated like give way signs you'd have on a country road, the larger road generlly has priority but as it's not clear they'd be more cautious too.
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I thought the traffic went pretty well tonight in San Francisco considering we had this major issue.
I've seen 4-way 1-lane intersections behave well.
But those complex multiple lanes in all directions + turn lanes...
They do break down. I think they are a breeding ground for confusion and frustration.
Here in Johannesburg, downed traffic lights are a near daily occurrence and have been for years. It took a bit of getting used to but people are used to it now and generally obey the rules.
Actually there are times of day when I find it preferable that the traffic lights are down.
Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were ruled by stop signs. It’s not always easy to keep track of who goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well in those cases.
We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
You can further optimize the setup by not installing engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and designed for carrying.
That’s actually getting less common; pretty much all rapid transport and commuter trains are multiple units these days, as are an increasing number of intercity trains.
In Ireland, there are precisely two passenger routes still operated with locomotives, and there’s a tender offer out to replace one of them with a (really wacky; diesel, battery, _and_ overhead lines in two voltages!) multiple unit.
And all the power could just come from a few large centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over head…
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If we do all of that, then we won't need to train them to know how to operate in traffic. Perhaps we can give them a name in honour of that fact?
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It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist.
When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared with unstable and violent people, which while possibly "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real differentiating advantage.
“10-15 minute walk”
A quaintly American complaint. A 10 minute walk being an issue is very a learned helplessness my fellow Americans suffer from.
But unfortunately the 10-15 min walk is only possible in a couple cities. most Americans day to day experience of public transit is spaced out buses that don’t work well for single family sprawl and strip malls parking lots where walking is treated as undesirable. Car oriented rather than people oriented urban planning (or lack thereof) is the original cause.
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violent unstable people aren't inherent to cities.. they're inherent to places that refuse to spend any money on social work/housing/and enjoy punishing people
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All public transit is at least an order of magnitude safer than driving a car. 10-15 minutes of walking is called being an inactive human. I promise it won't hurt you (unless you get hit by a car).
Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed power to these cars using overhead cables.
At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive.
Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
In the original Sim City, having your city entirely use tracks instead of roads was superior because there was no traffic congestion from tracks
And less pollution from cars.
If you're happy to put those tracks on every road, sure. I wonder why no-one's bothered with that before.
Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.
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> I wonder why no-one's bothered with that before
Streetcars?! In San Francsico?!?
How long do you think it will take you to get across town if you have to wait through a stop on every block?
Better leave now for you doctor’s appointment tomorrow and I hope you scheduled three days off from work.
Maybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make them more efficient.
Have something like metro (maglev trains) too as they are more efficient than steel wheels on steel tracks.
Public transport for things like metro/trains/trams/buses are honestly underrated.
Fast forward to blackjack and hookers.
Slot cars at the grown-up level.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
Waymo will get better at this.
But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were zero waymo fatalities due to this.
That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least one fatality due to traffic light outages.
Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They are a great company that will do a lot of good for the world. One bad night (in which noone was hurt, in part because of their cautiuosness) shouldn't negate that.
"Hey guys what are you complaining about? We didn't (directly) kill anyone!"
Seeing as how literally nobody died, I'm not sure if I agree with your sentiment.
I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a crash that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer is yes - there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose driver died after hitting a Waymo. Clearly we should shut down Waymo until they can handle that situation!
39,345 People were killed in traffic accidents last year in the US alone [1]. Not including permanent injury. If humans were replaced by self driving cars at their current accident rate, 34,000 less people a year would die [2].
Even if every US city had Waymos blocking the street for every single disaster, as they did here. I find it extremely unlikely that even the indirect deaths would come close to that number. And that's assuming Waymo learn from this lesson. Which they will.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-estimates-39345-t... [2] https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents...
You're being sarcastic, but it's a valid point. I'd love to know if there were any traffic fatalities at all during the affected period. Chances are there were and that they were due to human error.
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Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
I wonder how Waymos know that the traffic lights are out.
A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently, a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one by one, as if they think the light is not working."
It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific angles.
Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are working.
I recently had a broken traffic light in my city, it was daylight and I didn't notice any other lights that should be on during the day to be off.
My approach was to get closer into the intersection slowly and judge whether the perpendicular traffic would slow down and also try to figure out what was going on or if they would just zip through like if they had green.
It required some attention and some judgement. It definitely wasn't the normal day to day driving where you don't quite think consciously what you're doing.
I understand that individual autonomous vehicles cannot be expected to be given the responsibility to make such a call and the safest thing to do for them is to have them stop.
But I assumed there were still many human operators that would oversee the fleet and they could make the call that the traffic lights are all off
I miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way.
> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
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That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
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I lived in the training zone for both Waymo and Cruise. They were there for literally years before they were offering rides to anyone. The idea that they could train them for emergency scenarios, especially ones that happen so infrequently like a power outage on a route they regularly drive, seems borderline nonsensical, but I honestly don't know if there is a plausible way to do it.
That's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the middle of the block with nobody in front of them.
I live in SF, and drive alongside Waymos every day. Also, they park in my buildings garage, where they frequently cause major delays and blockages inside the garage.
I am pretty sure Waymo does not disclose how many human interventions they get. It would destroy their magic aura. A fancy RC car with self-driving experimental features is not very futuristic after all. By all the evidence, that’s what we observed when the internet went out. I don’t buy the 4-way stop explanation. Waymos handle 4-way stops just fine on an average day. I drive alongside them daily.
I’ve long suspected that they get many human interventions on the road, frequent enough that when the internet connectivity slowed down to a crawl across the city, Waymos could not get themselves unstuck from a variety of situations and simply just blocked the roads. That’s not a paragon of safety, nor is it “self-driving”. Self-driving cars were 10 years away in 2015, and in 2025, they are still 10 years away.
Would have hoped they trained for this but at least now they likely will be.
frankly at least at the intersection i witnessed i saw plenty of them handling it
Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen.
Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.
> Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen
We have zero evidence a power outage wasn't foreseen. This looks like a more complex multi-system failure.
Does it matter?
Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe. And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens.
If you can physically get out of the way, you need to. Period.
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Yeah, I was shocked by this. Blackouts in California aren’t some sort of rare event. I’m primed to expect rolling brownouts/blackouts yearly in the summer.
There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
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It also means that their claims of "autonomy" are fraudulent, like most "self driving" cars. A car which depends on powered infrastructure outside the car to drive is not autonomous.
Nearly all humans depend on powered infrastructure outside their car to drive it. You're describing a shortcoming of all 21st century navigation.
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One usage case that I saw myself is when a vehicle is parked such that it will require the other vehicle to go slighty over the curb, in this case the curb is flat so I assuming the parked driver thought it was okay. Every other human driver did okay, but Waymo just refused to put its wheel on the curb and just got stuck. Video here: https://x.com/aaditya_prakash/status/1989444130238259575?s=2...
Neither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that’s really troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.
Perhaps this is by design. Cruise had a failsafe system that detected a collision and decided to pull over but by pulling over it dragged a person underneath the car (or something close to this scenario). Maybe this dumb failsafe was designed not to repeat Cruise's mistakes?
Certainly a better way to handle this would have been to pull over. I think stopping where ever it happened to be is only acceptable if the majority of sensors fail for some reason
I was there. I encountered multiple stopped Waymos in the street. It was annoying, but not dangerous. They had their lights on. Any driver following the rules of the road would get around them fine. It was definitely imperfect, but safe. Much safer than the humans blowing through those very same intersections.
When I was a young man, I worked at a restaurant, and the lights went off.
I being the hero I was, wanted to keep the show running, bought some candles, ovens worked fine, water worked fine (for now). I wanted to charge cash. But eventually big boss came and shut us down since light wasn't coming.
And he was right, cooking and working under those conditions is dangerous for the staff, but also for the clients, without light you cannot see the food, cannot inspect its state, whether stale, with visible fungi, etc...
Yes, the perfect worker would still operate under those conditions, but we are not perfect, and admitting that we only can provide 2 or 3 nines, and recognizing where we are in that 0.01% moment, is what keeps us from actually failing so catastrophically that we undo all of the progress and benefits that the last bit of availability would have allowed us.
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What makes you think it was either?
AIUI, it was the irregularity of the uncontrolled intersections combining with the “novel” (from the POV of the software) driving style of the humans. In dense areas during outages signaled intersections don’t actually degrade to 4 way stops, drivers act pretty poorly.
The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted.
Certainly not ideal, and the should be a very strong regulatory response (the gov should have shut them down), and meaningful financial penalties (at least for repeat incidents).
> The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted.
And my question is why did it halt instead of pull over?
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Waymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection is gone then this is no longer available, and one might speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if they are in a situation where remote help is called for and inaccessible.
Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to stop operating autonomously and try to phone home for help, or perhaps losing the connection home is itself enough to trigger a fail safe shutdown mode ?
It reminds a bit of the recent TeslaBot video, another of their teleoperated stunts, where we see the bot appearing to remove a headset with both hands that it wasn't wearing (but that it's remote operator was), then fall over backwards "dead" as the remote operator evidentially clocked off his shift or went for a bathroom break.
That’s clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious possible failure.
Things go wrong -> get human help
Human not available -> just block the road???
How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback.
I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran over something. But in a situation like this where the problem is fully external it should fall back to “park myself” mode.
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Seems I was pretty much correct.
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r...
"Navigating an event of this magnitude presented a unique challenge for autonomous technology. While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets."
I'm surprised that either:
1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,
2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or
3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly
Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.
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To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting it' about technical matters have a long history of being hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with GPS.
I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.
Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
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But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.
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Likely 2. Not something that will make it into in their kpis. No one is getting promoted for mitigating black swan events.
Actually that is specifically not true at Google, and I expect it applies to Waymo also.
People get promoted for running DiTR exercises and addressing the issues that are exposed.
Of course the problem is that you can't DiRT all the various Black Swans.
Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote ops that halted everything
I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
I don't understand why everyone is talking about the cars when the bigger issue is why the critical infrastructure (lights) don't have batteries for backup.
Because that would be prohibitively expensive (possibly even after the arrival of LED bulbs).
More discussion:
PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022
I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb.
My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event).
I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned with "the flow of traffic."
Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.
I'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training autonomous vehicles.
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Every 20 years seems extremely rare to me.
"But think of the thousands that will run late!"
Most intersections I've seen in Serbia cities like Belgrade have "preferential" roads even if they are equally loaded and similarly sized: so, one direction will have either "stop" or "yield" signs, and another will not. Everyone slows down because you don't see the stop/yield sign for the orthogonal streets until you come closer to the intersection.
Perhaps we are just more used to traffic lights being off/broken (and we are, as this is, anecdotally, more like a weekly occurrence at some point during your trip to work, for instance)?
Priority road sign (yellow diamond) is generally used throughout Europe.
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).
Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).
There are situations where it is allowed:
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/
Current driving model realism could be greatly improved with a few real world training styles to consider in order to offset the Austin Left Lane Hippie driver model:
- New Orleans taxi cab driver
- Houston gang banger
- Los Angeles traffic weaver
and most importantly,
- Saudi Arabia Toyota Camry driver and 360 drift hobbiest (with bonus 2 wheel tire change)
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Waymo aside, it's sad to hear that some parts of the world still have blackouts. Which third-world country does "SF" belong to?
Not texas, that’s for sure.
To get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the list of edge-cases they handle?
Each city will have its own nuances.
Why don't the regulators publish the list?
I was in hollywood, california last night and saw a waymo come to a weird 5 way intersection, stop past the limit line on a red light in or past the crosswalk at the right turn lane and go into it's sign active attract mode. I think they have some more development to do, and don't recommend using such poorly performing software.
This is how "science" works in the postmodern world. It's not about predicting, it's about implement, problem, solve.
"the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company’s control"
Well there's your problem.
The proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all along.
I thought this was trivially verifiable due to regulation and latency analysis.
If they truly rely on teleoperation, that's at least 20ms in the best case, and can grow a lot with interference.
I always assumed these things have some autonomy.
How did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?
Here's an example of it doing well:
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2002699317409186219
The Tesla example is a single oncoming car, clear right of way, and ample time in a simple 4-way intersection.
The Waymo video has over a dozen cars, at least 6 pedestrians crossing streets (many more on the sidewalks), and is a 5-way intersection.
These are cherry picked examples. Either advertising or propaganda.
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That's a really good question.
Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?
I saw plenty of Waymos managing to make it through intersections. They were slow and tentative, but definitely made forward progress.
I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone, presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos were lacking connectivity.
There is of course also a possibility that the total demand exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human intervention.
I think it’s clear that both use cases are a must have during an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos shouldn’t be online during such times at all.
First responders get the highest priority of cellular networks even in non-emergency situations (FirstNet).
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I didn’t notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.
I was in the affected area and we effectively lost all but messaging. Not the whole time, but definitely while I was ordering takeout at a place with power. I couldn't get an image to send to a friend.
I lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but plenty were down.
How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?
Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out (didn’t know about it, we were going to Japan town from the Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One advantage of building unsupervised system from public version that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.
Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency vehicles pass safely.
Treats it as a four way stop.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-A701F7D...
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https://x.com/edgecase411/status/2002630953844552094
Looks like it treats it as a 4-way stop. Is this because Tesla has more training data?
I'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when, not training data, that results in the two behaving different.
50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a stop.
Don’t think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.
> Is this because Tesla has more training data?
Its human takes over. FSD is still Level 3.
(Robotaxi, Tesla's Level 4 product, is still in beta. Based on reports, its humans had to intervene.)
FSD is level 2. Level 3 doesn't require the human driver to monitor the outside environment, only take over when requested. Tesla also doesn't report data from FSD under L3 reporting requirements anywhere in the US.
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Not looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.
Obvious failure should be obvious. Get out of the streets. What happens when one gets a flat tire? Surely it doesn't just stop in the middle of the street, right??
Did anybody get stranded on the bart?
No, but they ran through stations that lacked power, so in the sense of being dumped out far from your actual destination, yes.
I for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
Honestly, I’m just glad this stopped before a major accident happened.
It was predicted by many, including me. It'll be a lot worse in an earthquake where power and cell service are out and there's debris and road damage. Good luck to our first responders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688847
I thought LIDAR solves for this lol
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As a society, as a whole society, opposed to our narrow interests and point of views as typical affluent HN dwellers, do we really NEED this kind of shit?
If you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100% digital currency!
I think I prefer trains and buses.
SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or exit there.
Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing for them, but it can be solved with software improvements. Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs, so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.
But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.
Living in social rot and keeping unmanned little autos for those that can afford it seems even more nasty than what I initially had in mind.
Waymo should do a bit more research in reliability and explainability of their AI models.
So basically no answer from Waymo other than to boast about their numbers? Why not just be transparent?
The "boast about numbers" wasn't from Waymo, it was from their investors, and it was earlier this month and not during the service suspension.
What do you mean no answer? They are suspending their operations. That is their answer.
Read more carefully, Waymo didn’t boast about their numbers and that part of the story was unrelated to the issue except as a measure of impact their shutdown could have.
Because they are currently trying to raise money at 100bn valuation
"San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off the roads unless they needed to travel."
Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.
The word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an errand in the blackout, we didn't need to do it, but we wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including multiple disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it over, I would have stayed home.
So maybe the point was to consider a different store or route.
Or look at the traffic and decide if you REALLY want to spend an hour or more in gridlock for whatever activity you are considering.
And maybe wherever you wanted to go is closed because they don't have power either.
It is a perfectly reasonable request.
The fact that you acknowledge that is was a "crisis" implies pretty strongly that you understand that a priority evaluation might be useful.
I don't think this was a street, I think SF just experiences rolling blackouts sometimes (unsure if this is due to their forest fire laws, the city buying the grid, or something else, although it seems silly that it's happening at all)
I did when I was younger (18-25). Exploring the world outside of my hometown often put me at ease when I was feeling destabilized.
I used to go out in the snow on purpose (DC metro). Mostly have them to myself, it was always fun.
Unsure if sarcasm, but lots of people do that. I do it every day.
Some folks enjoy driving.
Yeah it was sarcasm. I enjoy driving also, actually. But I don't just go out and drive for no reason. It's always with a purposeful destination.
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It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs
I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
The power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.
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Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on the road.
Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-distribution scenario would count against this, but may be rare enough to not significantly affect the average.
My favorite was when people DOS'd waymo by scheduling a bunch of pickups at the end of a long dead end.
SF is pretty brave (stupid?) for allowing itself to be a beta test for self driving.