Comment by dhbradshaw
3 days ago
To me this doesn't seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges.
Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.
The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.
In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to drive through deep water.
There is a pretty big difference between a citizen driving their car into danger, and a service provider driving their car into danger with you in it.
You wouldn't accept that from a taxi driver either. Pausing the service is the right move.
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We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!
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As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
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SV is the most cloistered place I've ever seen. I'm comfortable assuming that nobody in any position of power at Waymo ever thought to themselves "gee maybe the weather is different in this new city we're deploying to, perhaps we should test that"
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They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much
https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.
No simulation is perfect, so ideally you have a feedback look constantly looking at new real-world data as it comes in and finding where the simulation has errors, and updating the simulation to improve the correlation between the simulation and the real world over time.
My guess is they did have flooded street sims but the correlation was much lower than expected, or the details of the situation being simulated (lighting, building locations, how dirty the water is, ...) were sufficiently different from the situation that was encountered that the sim based training didn't generalize to the new context.
"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "
I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.
Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.
P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.
It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.
But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.
> It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets
No one who works for them thought of flooded roads.
That’s reassuring.
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Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?
This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.
It has lidar and radar, not just vision.
Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.
Just because there are real world failures doesn't mean they didn't do simulations. It could just mean the simulation didn't account for something different in the real world.
The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...
So what you're saying is that something far worse happened here. They did test for flooded streets but some slight difference caused the model to fail in real life.
To be fair, there will always be something that fails. So the more important question is probably the frequency and severity of those failures.
To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.
Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.
A merely wet road (1mm of water) and one with 10cm can be hard to distinguish. If you avoid the former, you can't operate in rain at all.
The fact that they aren't a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.
It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.
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I’ve lived in a place where it flooded every year or two. It floods regularly where I live now too.
Locals know which roads to avoid and not to drive into a flood.
I just moved from an apartment right next to where this Waymo got stuck: https://old.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/1tj00sl/flooding_i... and I can say that that particular intersection floods about every time it rains hard. That being said, yesterday's rain was particularly heavy and I hadn't seen that intersection flood that bad since before Waymo started being rolled out here
Floods aren’t a usual even.
Have you ever even been outside?
testing cannot prove the absence of bugs. It can only prove that you didn't find any, which is a completely different thing
It’s been clear for a while to anyone without money riding on this that the relatively “easy” part fooled a lot of people into assuming that the last push to full self driving wouldn’t be radically greater challenge.
An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.
That's the reality. For both them and Apple.
By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?
They have done a lot of testing in Pittsburgh which has some of the craziest roads and intersections anywhere, so I'd assume yes
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Roundabouts with with 5-10 bicycles going in and out from the different roads all the time during rushhour (Copenhagen, Denmark)? I would love to see them looking for people’s tiny hand gestures and not just get stuck in our traffic over here.
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Take a look at `2313 NW Military Hwy # 100, San Antonio, TX 78231`
This is an intersection I myself felt daunting my first few years driving. It is within Waymo's San Antonio coverage, and they seem to be handling that just fine.
However, they had to pause them recently related to a lost car, due to, drum roll please... flooding.
The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.
I'm glad a very wealthy company is investing in hard tech R&D. Irrespective of the projected financial outcome.
I think Google can handle paying for any number of $250k cars to get a good share of the future of transportation.
I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.
I’ve heard that 10-20 years self driving spiel since Uber launched
I was also promised that I’d be 3d printing my shoes and living in the metaverse and AI will make me magical new products
All I really got was an endless social media feed
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This was thought decades ago too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project Compared to 1994 we have now endless computing power and yet no reliable self driving car is available on the market.
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Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.
The cost of Waymo cars is immaterial right now. They are not production models, they are test mules. So you might as well make them nice-looking.
Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.
Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.
They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever
All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models
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All cars require a workforce to maintain though.
Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!
Not comparable at all. Autonomous driving isn't obviously a viable business. It's not because computer programs can't drive well, it's because the and workforce infrastructure required to maintain and operate the expensive fleet may be less efficient than a human maintaining their own vehicle.
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Well, washing machines were once the size of washing machines; and they still are.
Some technologies scale, some don't, at all. Your point is moot.
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They will lose to Tesla cabs, due to price and not having full control of their supply chain.
Tesla has a grand total of 39 unsupervised cabs operating. Waymo has literally 100x more with 3800 and growing.
https://robotaxitracker.com/?provider=tesla
> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
This is also a huge disadvantage because any flaws in the software that don’t show up in a slow rollout will be present in every single car.
It’s a contrived example, but say a new billboard campaign rolls out that causes every car to immediately veer away from it.
Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That's been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.
Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn't do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being 'pulled over.'
These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it's the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.
My friend, have you seen the standard that human drivers are held to? One accident, one infraction should probably cancel your driver's license, at least for some amount of time, but we just say oops, pay $150 and keep going.
Do you know how many people die in car accidents each year? More than are killed by guns (you know, tools which are designed for killing people). It's insane that we let humans drive at all. Waymo's safety record is fine.
> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
Sure, because human drivers famously have to be taught with each new generation that driving into six feet of water is a bad plan.
As someone who grew up in a flood-prone area… yeah. Yeah, they do. Sometimes more than once per person.
Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?
This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.
I have seen plenty of videos online that suggest that this is a true fact.
To me it looks like it's a problem with the "default attitude" (can't think of a better name) of the Waymo driving software. When a human sees that the road surface ahead is in some unknown condition (flooded, covered in lava, whatever) they usually default to caution - better stop and check first. While Waymo apparently defaults to blithely driving ahead, after all its maps tell it that there's a road ahead and it didn't detect any known obstacle, so what could possibly go wrong?
That is so not true of humans or Waymos
The final boss will be driving in Rome
Come to an Indian city. You'll have cars, 2w, auto, cows coming from 7 directions everywhere.
Oh come on. Not even driving anywhere in Europe; higher difficulty levels would be Turkey , India, Russia, Egypt. Add countryside for extra points. Add harvest season in countryside for unique achievement. Add rainy/snowy season in countryside to master this game.
Rome? How about Napoli or Palermo?
We already have a huge number of safety regulations for cars, that take into account all these various things. There's also insurance that covers flood damage and cars. These are the things that red flag something you need to test, if you want to take over driving the car.
This isn't a new challenge - it is a known one!
> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
That is not a given when dealing with "machine learning".
They will need to have metrics for all these scenarious and ensure when they solve the 20th problem down the line this one does not regress, but instead it becomes more and more generalized.
Sounds like they need to employ more "neurodivergents" to make these robots work correctly, before they are all Silent Greened, and it is only the CEOs left bashing each other's heads in with rocks.
I'm not familiar familiar with this expression silent green. Do you mean Soylent Green?
Yes sorry, typo.
And to me it seems like you're justifying a lack of oversight and dangers of this technology for what purpose exactly? Why are you defending a corporation?
Are you talking about automobile technology in general? Human operated vehicles kill a lot of people each year. People get tiny slaps on the wrist for breaking the law on the roads, crashing into other cars, crashing into pedestrians. It's actually really hard to lose your driver's license. We can probably give Waymo a little leeway for driving into a puddle that's deeper than it estimated
A human has to pass a test to be able to drive. A human (for the most part) doesn't just unknowingly drive into floods.
Why aren't we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.
I love when people bring this up. When was the last time anyone here had to pass an actual driving test, like where you have to physically drive a car? For me, age 16, which was more years ago than I like to count.
How many licenses do we revoke for violating traffic laws? Getting into a car crash? Injuring someone in a car crash? Killing someone in a car crash? Not nearly enough! We are so lax about driving it's insane. But you want to hold these robot cars to some much higher standard? I mean, ok, but how much higher? It's a really freaking low bar right now
Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?
Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?
If it is just taking a regular DL test, then waymo, Tesla and others would be driving all across the US by now. They already have a higher standard
> Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?
If your car starts sliding, let off the gas, don’t hit the brakes, and countersteer into the direction of the slide to recover.
If you start hydroplaning you simply remove your foot from the gas pedal.
> Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?
In my country at least: Yes.
Hydroplaning and driving on ice is part of the compulsory training, including driving on simulated ice on a special course.
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A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.
There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.
>A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.
Driving safe is not always about having faster reaction speed.
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I can already see the horrified passengers in a robo-taxi going full "military-survival" mode, driving at rally speed over fast flooding back-roads, evaluating moral dilemmas like ("If i stop and pick up one more, i become a lorry on a rail at the next flood intersection").
Surprisingly good at things that get you otherwise killed. Like - it auto-backs up once it detects ground rumbles of the ground moving during a mud avalanche.
*roll out
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> Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.
They should have done that flood training when they weren't putting people's lives at risk. It's not as if this was a situation that no one could have anticipated would arise. Over half of all drownings in a flood happen because of people driving into them. They're just lucky that they stopped service before they had more blood on their hands, but the fact that they were willing to experiment on the public first is concerning.
“More blood” seems to imply that somebody has already been hurt or died from Waymo driving into floods, but I don’t think that is the case?
As far as I know, nobody has been hurt from floods while in a Waymo. They hide their safety data from the public though (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...) so it's hard to say for sure. They've certainly been involved in crashes, killed pets (I actually give them a pass on the bodega cat), run over elementary school children, etc. Waymo has said it's only a matter of time until they kill someone and they've got plans for how to handle deaths caused by their cars, but they expect the public to accept those deaths.
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If your premise is "robotaxis are so much better than human drivers" then this is almost a disaster. This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather. It does not bode well for their expansion plans.
Better is an arbitrary statement. By number of jobs robots lose, by number of sexual assaults by taxi drivers they win. Pick the wights for very factors and you can select anything as the best in category.
Safer, cheaper, etc are less arbitrary.
> This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather
You may be relieved to hear Waymo is rolling out to Portland, Oregon. It's not in the south, and with over 150 rainy days per year, it ranks among the rainiest US cities.
Rain is one thing, but despite the rain Oregon is almost dead-last among all the states in terms of flood risk. It gets constant drizzles, not sporadic deluges.
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I'm a Waymo supporter, but I hate to break it to you, Portland gets less inches of rain per year than most major US cities.
I'll be relieved when I hear that they did it without killing anyone. Considering they didn't bother to work out how to handle floods before they put people's lives at risk everywhere else, it's not all that reassuring that they're now going to YOLO it in Portland
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Well, only one Waymo got stuck in that flood, while at least two human-driven cars did, so by pure counting metrics they are better lol. But in my experience driving around them Waymos are much much better than most Atlanta drivers, not that that's a high bar
the real question if you’re attempting to imply what i think you’re implying should be:
how many human driven cars decided not to drive through vs how many waymo’s decided the same?
I'm not sure why you would say there's no significant inclement weather in Atlanta. The flooding this week was not super common, but also not unheard of. It rains here a LOT in the summer
The part of that people aren't considering is that it's very common to get brief, intense thunderstorms that dump a lot of rain quickly. They won't flood the whole city obviously but there's _always_ pockets that have very short-lived, localized flooding on the roads. So it's not a "oh what are the odds of that happening" kind of thing.
Agreed, this happens here every year, it's why we built O4W park the way it is, and built many other drainage structures similarly. We have a real runoff problem. Waymo picked a great city to train the cars on weird weather and weirder roads. :D
It's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.
I would assume that after the very first instance you would start moving to fix it. To be in a position where you have to roll back your plans doesn't seem like a simple "delay."
The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?
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Human drivers are very very bad. Being better than humans is a low bar with plenty of room to be bad as well.
It still seems to be a high bar to achieve
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No they aren’t. Billions drive around every day with minimal collisions. Far more people get raped than hit by cars.