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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 have

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.

themafia 4mo ago
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.
- skybrian 4mo ago
  It's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.
  - themafia 4mo ago
    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?
    - overfeed 4mo ago
      > The question is: why haven't you fixed this already? Since you're of the opinion that this is taking too long, what do you think is a reasonable time for a fix, and why? I'm assuming Waymo didn't have a team of flood-detection experts twiddling their thumbs waiting to be prompted into action.
- overfeed 4mo 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.
  - autoexec 4mo 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
    - WorkerBee28474 4mo ago
      Nobody has ever been killed by a Waymo. You're being dramatic.
    - NiloCK 4mo ago
      Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes [1]. We currently sit in the ballpark of 300,000 pedestrian deaths per year worldwide [2]. You should be relieved every time they deploy to a new city. [1] - https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ [2] - https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/more-than-a-million-people-die-from-road-injuries-every-year https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/more-than-a-million...
  - kibwen 4mo 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 4mo 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”
- Retric 4mo ago
  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.
- mixdup 4mo ago
  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
  - burnte 4mo ago
    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
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - xienze 4mo ago
    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.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  Human drivers are very very bad. Being better than humans is a low bar with plenty of room to be bad as well.
  - MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
    No they aren’t. Billions drive around every day with minimal collisions. Far more people get raped than hit by cars.
  - __m 4mo ago
    It still seems to be a high bar to achieve
    - bluGill 4mo ago
      How high the bar is isn't worth arguing about. The question is do self driving cars clear it? Those who work on self driving cars say they have cleared it - but they have an obvious bias. Nobody independent has done a full study of this, so we have no particular reason to believe them, but we also shouldn't completely discount them (when the truth is in their favor everyone with a bias will tell it, and some people are even able to overcome their bias when the truth is against them)
- ranger207 4mo ago
  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
  - toofy 4mo ago
    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?
grumbel 4mo ago
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.
- outside2344 4mo ago
  The fact that they aren't a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.
  - trollbridge 4mo ago
    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.
  - antonymoose 4mo ago
    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.
    - throwaway2037 4mo ago
      > it’s a surprisingly common occurrence That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.
  - thrownthatway 4mo ago
    Floods aren’t a usual even. Have you ever even been outside?
  - ranger207 4mo ago
autoexec 4mo ago
> 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.
- ashdksnndck 4mo ago
  “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?
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    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-california-dmv-crash-data-foia 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.
    - RealityVoid 4mo ago
      This feels disingenuous to the extreme. Yes, chances are that some people will die run over by a Waymo. Put enough miles in one and someone will die eventually. Compare the numbers to human drivers. Would you, if they had LESS fatality rates than human drivers, say that the difference is "lives saved"? - I don't think you would. In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!" Especially your example with "run over elementary school children" is duplicitous. They showed how much less dangerous the impact from the Waymo was.
cm2187 4mo ago
The final boss will be driving in Rome
- YarickR2 4mo ago
  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.
- blackoil 4mo ago
  Come to an Indian city. You'll have cars, 2w, auto, cows coming from 7 directions everywhere.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- utopiah 4mo ago
  Rome? How about Napoli or Palermo?
sarchertech 4mo ago
> 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.
- KennyBlanken 4mo ago
  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.
  - krupan 4mo ago
    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.
jimbo808 4mo ago
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.
- JimTheMan 4mo ago
  Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!
  - bitpush 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jimbo808 4mo ago
      Not a valid analogy. At all.
  - jimbo808 4mo ago
    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.
    - beering 4mo ago
      Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?
      - jimbo808 4mo ago
        I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.
HDBaseT 4mo ago
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.
- bitpush 4mo ago
  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
  - jurgemaister 4mo ago
    > 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.
    - bitpush 4mo ago
      That's great. Would you your country's test covers 100% of the situations a driver might encounter? Even without knowing the details, I can confidently tell you they don't. Does it teach you how to recover the car when the tires blow out? How about it is raining? How to react when a car is coming straight at you in the wrong way? How about when a dog jumps out?
      - HDBaseT 4mo ago
        Does Waymo know how to handle itself if the tires blow out?
  - quickthrowman 4mo ago
    > 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.
indianbunghole 4mo ago
*roll out
saghm 4mo ago
> 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.
- adrianN 4mo ago
  I have seen plenty of videos online that suggest that this is a true fact.
- geoffpado 4mo ago
  As someone who grew up in a flood-prone area… yeah. Yeah, they do. Sometimes more than once per person.
- snakeboy 4mo ago
  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.
rob74 4mo ago
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?
- krupan 4mo ago
  That is so not true of humans or Waymos
root-parent 4mo ago
[dead]
ViewTrick1002 4mo ago
> 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.
21asdffdsa12 4mo ago
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.
Sharlin 4mo ago
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.
- nottorp 4mo ago
  That's the reality. For both them and Apple. By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?
  - pants2 4mo ago
    They have done a lot of testing in Pittsburgh which has some of the craziest roads and intersections anywhere, so I'd assume yes
    - warumdarum 4mo ago
      Medieval italian towns?
      - pants2 4mo ago
        haha you got me there, can hardly even consider those as roads!
  - dybber 4mo ago
    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.
    - nottorp 4mo ago
      I've driven in the Netherlands once for a week. Now I have nightmares involving bicycles.
  - rkuykendall-com 4mo ago
shakna 4mo ago
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!
acidhousemcnab 4mo ago
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.
- Hnrobert42 4mo ago
  I'm not familiar familiar with this expression silent green. Do you mean Soylent Green?
  - acidhousemcnab 4mo ago
    Yes sorry, typo.
cheesecompiler 4mo ago
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?
- krupan 4mo ago
  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

themafia 4mo ago

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.

skybrian 4mo ago
It's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.
- themafia 4mo ago
  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?
  - overfeed 4mo ago
    > The question is: why haven't you fixed this already? Since you're of the opinion that this is taking too long, what do you think is a reasonable time for a fix, and why? I'm assuming Waymo didn't have a team of flood-detection experts twiddling their thumbs waiting to be prompted into action.
overfeed 4mo 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.
- autoexec 4mo 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
  - WorkerBee28474 4mo ago
    Nobody has ever been killed by a Waymo. You're being dramatic.
  - NiloCK 4mo ago
    Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes [1]. We currently sit in the ballpark of 300,000 pedestrian deaths per year worldwide [2]. You should be relieved every time they deploy to a new city. [1] - https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ [2] - https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/more-than-a-million-people-die-from-road-injuries-every-year https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/more-than-a-million...
- kibwen 4mo 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 4mo 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”
Retric 4mo ago
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.
mixdup 4mo ago
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
- burnte 4mo ago
  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
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- xienze 4mo ago
  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.
bluGill 4mo ago
Human drivers are very very bad. Being better than humans is a low bar with plenty of room to be bad as well.
- MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
  No they aren’t. Billions drive around every day with minimal collisions. Far more people get raped than hit by cars.
- __m 4mo ago
  It still seems to be a high bar to achieve
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    How high the bar is isn't worth arguing about. The question is do self driving cars clear it? Those who work on self driving cars say they have cleared it - but they have an obvious bias. Nobody independent has done a full study of this, so we have no particular reason to believe them, but we also shouldn't completely discount them (when the truth is in their favor everyone with a bias will tell it, and some people are even able to overcome their bias when the truth is against them)
ranger207 4mo ago
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
- toofy 4mo ago
  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?

grumbel 4mo ago

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.

outside2344 4mo ago
The fact that they aren't a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.
- trollbridge 4mo ago
  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.
- antonymoose 4mo ago
  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.
  - throwaway2037 4mo ago
    > it’s a surprisingly common occurrence That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.
- thrownthatway 4mo ago
  Floods aren’t a usual even. Have you ever even been outside?
- ranger207 4mo ago

autoexec 4mo ago

> 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.

ashdksnndck 4mo ago
“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?
- autoexec 4mo ago
  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-california-dmv-crash-data-foia 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.
  - RealityVoid 4mo ago
    This feels disingenuous to the extreme. Yes, chances are that some people will die run over by a Waymo. Put enough miles in one and someone will die eventually. Compare the numbers to human drivers. Would you, if they had LESS fatality rates than human drivers, say that the difference is "lives saved"? - I don't think you would. In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!" Especially your example with "run over elementary school children" is duplicitous. They showed how much less dangerous the impact from the Waymo was.

cm2187 4mo ago

The final boss will be driving in Rome

YarickR2 4mo ago
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.
blackoil 4mo ago
Come to an Indian city. You'll have cars, 2w, auto, cows coming from 7 directions everywhere.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
utopiah 4mo ago
Rome? How about Napoli or Palermo?

sarchertech 4mo ago

> 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.

KennyBlanken 4mo ago
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.
- krupan 4mo ago
  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.

jimbo808 4mo ago

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.

JimTheMan 4mo ago
Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!
- bitpush 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jimbo808 4mo ago
    Not a valid analogy. At all.
- jimbo808 4mo ago
  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.
  - beering 4mo ago
    Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?
    - jimbo808 4mo ago
      I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.

HDBaseT 4mo ago

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.

bitpush 4mo ago
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
- jurgemaister 4mo ago
  > 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.
  - bitpush 4mo ago
    That's great. Would you your country's test covers 100% of the situations a driver might encounter? Even without knowing the details, I can confidently tell you they don't. Does it teach you how to recover the car when the tires blow out? How about it is raining? How to react when a car is coming straight at you in the wrong way? How about when a dog jumps out?
    - HDBaseT 4mo ago
      Does Waymo know how to handle itself if the tires blow out?
- quickthrowman 4mo ago
  > 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.

indianbunghole 4mo ago

*roll out

saghm 4mo ago

> 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.

adrianN 4mo ago
I have seen plenty of videos online that suggest that this is a true fact.
geoffpado 4mo ago
As someone who grew up in a flood-prone area… yeah. Yeah, they do. Sometimes more than once per person.
snakeboy 4mo ago
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.

rob74 4mo ago

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?

krupan 4mo ago
That is so not true of humans or Waymos

root-parent 4mo ago

[dead]

ViewTrick1002 4mo ago

> 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.

21asdffdsa12 4mo ago

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.

Sharlin 4mo ago

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.

nottorp 4mo ago
That's the reality. For both them and Apple. By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?
- pants2 4mo ago
  They have done a lot of testing in Pittsburgh which has some of the craziest roads and intersections anywhere, so I'd assume yes
  - warumdarum 4mo ago
    Medieval italian towns?
    - pants2 4mo ago
      haha you got me there, can hardly even consider those as roads!
- dybber 4mo ago
  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.
  - nottorp 4mo ago
    I've driven in the Netherlands once for a week. Now I have nightmares involving bicycles.
- rkuykendall-com 4mo ago

shakna 4mo ago

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!

acidhousemcnab 4mo ago

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.

Hnrobert42 4mo ago
I'm not familiar familiar with this expression silent green. Do you mean Soylent Green?
- acidhousemcnab 4mo ago
  Yes sorry, typo.

cheesecompiler 4mo ago

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?

krupan 4mo ago
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