Comment by vlovich123
12 hours ago
> 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. We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.
Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.
Sounds like their disaster recovery plan was insufficient, intensified traffic jams in already congested areas because of "backlog", and is now being fixed to support the current scale.
The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.
What about San Francisco allowing a power outage of this magnitude and not being able to restore power for multiple days?
This kind of attitude to me indicates a lack of experience building complex systems and responding to unexpected events. If they had done the opposite and been overly aggressive in letting Waymo’s manage themselves during lights that are out would you be the first in line criticizing them then for some accident happening?
All things being considered, I’m much happier knowing Waymo is taking a conservative approach if the downside means extra momentary street congestion during a major power outage; that’s much rarer than being cavalier with fully autonomous behavior.
DR always stands for "didn't realize" in the aftermath of an event.
That's what they're learning and fixing for in the future to give the cars more self-confidence.
They probably do, they just don't give a shit. It's still the "move fast and break things" mindset. Internalize profits but externalize failures to be carried by the public. Will there be legal consequences for Waymo (i.e. fines?) for this? Probably not...
What Waymo profits?
They're one-of-one still. Having ridden in a Waymo many times, there's very little "move fast and break things" leaking in the experience.
They can simulate power outages as much as they want (testing) but the production break had some surprises. This is a technical forum.. most of us have been there.. bad things happened, plans weren't sufficient, we can measure their response on the next iteration in terms of how they respond to production insufficiencies in the next event.
Also, culturally speaking, "they suck" isn't really a working response to an RCA.
Waymo cars have been proven safer than human drivers in California. At the same time, 40k people die each year in the US in car accidents caused by human drivers.
I'm very happy they're moving fast so hopefully fewer people die in the future