Comment by overfeed

3 days ago

> 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.

8 comments

overfeed

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kibwen  3 days ago

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.

  • happyPersonR  3 days ago

    This guy knows what he’s talking about.

    Born and raised in GA, it wasn’t until I moved to CA, the bay specifically, after college that I realized things like flood warnings multiple times a month and, flooded out roads during the summer weren’t just part of life lolll

    My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”

    When Waymo came here and also when Tesla started doing self driving (I drive a Tesla with FSD ) majority of the time, I was constantly seeing things that were GA specific that these systems were just clearly not trained to handle.

    The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”

    • overfeed  3 days ago

      > My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”

      So it makes sense to first rollout to a place with frequent, lighter rain - no? As an outsider, Waymo's approach seems to be solving challenges step-by-step, and the criticism in this thread is asking why it hasn't already solved the hardest cases.

      > The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”

      I wouldn't be surprised if Waymos are confidently driving into flooded roads because they "know" where the markings are without sensing the markings. Lidar-based GPS + SLAM are now very good at calculating location, as long as features like buildings or trees are still present.

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krupan  2 days ago

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.

autoexec  3 days ago

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