Comment by jfim
3 days ago
There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.
At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.
So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.
I used to work for an AV startup.
One of my favourite things to see were the random encounters that our data annotators would flag up.
Unusual agricultural vehicles, large to-scale images on the sides of vehicles, cars facing backwards being carried by a vehicle transporter.
It's a wildly long tail of things that automated vehicles need to handle.
A flooded road is a very predictable event, though.
Is it? I have been driving for 25 years and never encountered one.
Waymo seems to accept they can’t predict everything so they built a system that’s safe enough to operate in the real world and learn from experience.
I haven't encountered one as a driver either, but I'm pretty sure "Don't drive into roads with water on them" was a basic safety question on the permit test.
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You haven't been driving for 25 years anywhere east of the Mississippi river if you've never encountered road flooding. Accepting they can't predict everything sounds reasonable. Failing to account for a routine occurrence is negligent.
You probably haven't been driving in areas that flood then.
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My guess is this was brought up but getting the product out there was more important to the business so it got ignored.
Now that it's a problem for them, they get to hide behind an "oops sorry, let's fix the really obvious thing now", almost like taking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to malicious levels.
This jives with CRUD software in general, where people are not usually rewarded for preventing future issues and instead rewarded for waiting until it's a visible problem and then fixing it.