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.
You wouldn't accept that from a taxi driver either. Pausing the service is the right move.
https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
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.
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.
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.
No one who works for them thought of flooded roads.
That’s reassuring.
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.
The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...
To be fair, there will always be something that fails. So the more important question is probably the frequency and severity of those failures.
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.
Locals know which roads to avoid and not to drive into a flood.
Have you ever even been outside?
By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?
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.
I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.
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
Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.
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
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.
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.
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.
Sure, because human drivers famously have to be taught with each new generation that driving into six feet of water is a bad plan.
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.
This isn't a new challenge - it is a known one!
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.
Why aren't we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.
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
> "You want to hold these robot cars to some much higher standard"
No, I want to hold these cars to the same standard as humans. Humans very rarely, accidentally, drive into flooded water.
You have humans attempt to get through flooded roads all the time, that's another issue though.
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
We're talking about a piece of software being unable to determine if something is flooded or not. 99% of humans presented with the same visual ques would be able to determine its flooded.
This is what I'm waiting parity with. I don't see how that's an unfair ask, especially considering Atlanta floods fairly regularly, its not entirely uncommon.
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.
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.
There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.
Driving safe is not always about having faster reaction speed.
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.
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.
Safer, cheaper, etc are less arbitrary.
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.
how many human driven cars decided not to drive through vs how many waymo’s decided the same?
The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?
Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going to be at AGI in a few years? I get people want these things to happen, but I just don’t see it happening any time soon. The whole tech industry feels built on what maybe, someday, possibly, could happen but most likely won’t, but we are all going to act like is a sure thing and is just around the corner.
Are there no responsible adults left at these tech companies?
A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.
If you think that "flooded roadway" is a case that's handled gracefully by every human driver, and it's the AI that's uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you.
Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of "water flood engine damage" cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of "is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out".
Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.
FYI, 59 days since the last incident apparently: https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com
I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.
I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.
When people think of autonomous driving as a solved problem it evokes something very specific. It means vehicles can drive on their own, without guidance. Until you solve AVs you don’t have a claim to present whatever you actually have as such. There’s no “good enough” for AVs, you’ve either solved them or you haven’t.
This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.
In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?
"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla
Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.
> what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day
The irony of people who are against self-driving cars for safety reasons: They are already much safer than regular drivers -- accidents and deaths per millions of kilometers driven. Also, the software is continuously improving. Are regular drivers also continuously improving at the same rate? If anything, they probably get modestly better from 20s into middle age (40s/50s), then begin to decline with age.
I think "good enough" ends up being okay. I _like_ driving. I would do manual mode often still just because I enjoy it. But I'd be completely fine with the option of autopilot in good conditions. Reality is that 99% of the time, my commute is boring and in good conditions. I don't need a self driving mode that can handle a blizzard when I'm in stop and go traffic and it's 20c outside.
This is much harder for Waymo since there isn't as easy of a manual override mode... But in my car? rip it.
Luckily I basically already have it. Adaptive cruise covers most of my cases well enough, but I wouldn't mind something with a bit more control (turning, etc.)
We're contemplating standing up an EV shuttle service in Oak Park. It will fail. As I understand it, we've piloted non-EV versions of a shuttle service; they failed. The problem is that in small local areas, the staffing for a useful transit service is too expensive; that's because "useful" imposes constraints about responsiveness, coverage, and most of all hours of service, which mean the service won't pencil out with the ridership it'll get.
An autonomous vehicle transit service in our muni would probably work fine; it's a strict grid system with very low speed limits (AVs will, in our area, be strictly better drivers than the median human drivers --- this isn't a statement about human fallibility so much as an observation about scofflawry in our area). And if the product existed, we could afford it, because we wouldn't be paying fully loaded headcount costs for 2+ shifts of drivers at epsilon levels of utilization.
For whatever it's worth, I don't really have "autonomous vehicles" and "LLMs" in the same bucket in my head. I'm bullish on both, but for very different reasons. It usually doesn't occur to me to think of Waymos as "AI", though, obviously, they are.
Even on two lane roads: if an idiot overtakes into oncoming traffic there is usually just enough space for three vehicles next to each other. Can a Waymo move sharply to the right so there are two cars on each side with the overtaking idiot in the middle and all just fit on the road? I had to do that maneuver at least twice.
Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?
Can you open the Windows and get out if the thing decides to drive into a lake?
I don't know, currently defensive driving is the better option.
However sometimes the dashcam would be from a motorcyclist, and the video would get posted over in the motorcycle sub as well. There, no one would talk about the idiot, and everyone would shred the motorcyclist for poor defensive driving.
The takeaway is that most regular drivers think that they are totally powerless on the road, and have no ability to avert any situation arising from someone else.
Motorcyclists die if they don't learn this skill, so they tend to be pretty sharp defensive drivers.
Few people drive defensively. I try to, but I'm human: I get distracted. I sometimes forget to follow the rules that I know well. I have no clue what new rules might have been added/changed since I took drivers ed years ago. Just like everybody else.
I can't do anybody about the guy who tailgated me today until there was just barely enough of a gap to get around and then he swerved over, but one mistake on his part... At least I was in a newish car which would protect me, if it wasn't supposed to rain today I'd have been on my bike in that area...
Yes, actually, that's an advantage of a Waymo over a regular car. I believe they have a perfect record against carjackings despite several theft attempts. The Waymo computer isn't easily intimidated at gunpoint.
What do regular drivers do during a carjacking? They get carjacked. There are about 30,000 incidents per year in the US.
Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.
The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.
We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.
Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn't dissapoint.
There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper 'windscreen'. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.
Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?
Maybe. But maybe not.
The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that 'pulled out on the bus', that was a highway maintenance issue.
There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and 'our' bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.
At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn't as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.
One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn't the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from 'traffic', as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.
I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.
> What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride.
A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.
Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad.
AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.
Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.
It's not too dissimilar from the Figure demo that was done on X/Twitter recently. Everyone was pointing out what a lackluster demo that was and here I was thinking the total opposite, it worked for 8 hours with no sexual harassment training, KPIs, management oversight, breaks or co-worker chatting. That's the worst job it'll likely ever do. We just witnessed the floor of it's capabilities.
My hope/vision with robotic cars is we make cities more human-friendly/accessible. I want revitalized/bustling downtowns of bikes/bodies and not, what some cities are, which are glorified parking lots. I want to be less alone as an american. I would a physical sense of community injected back into my veins.
Aren't there stories about certain car companies where their self-driving-at-some-level cars got worse after an OTA update?
Citation needed. I have never seen independent analysis of the data. You might be right - I've even suggested similar before. However you might be wrong.
Human driven cars kill tons of people. Everyday in the US 115 people wake up who will be dead from a car accident by midnight.
But if a self driving car kills one human? Your company and mission is cooked.
Besides the immense engineering challenge, the bar is also way way way higher.
I'm pretty conservative about this stuff but the waymo is genuinely nice to ride in.
Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn't absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility.
But, given ten years ago this didn't exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn't seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective.
Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort?
EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.
I guess that's what you get when you test your cars far 20 years in a state that's almost perpetually in a state of drought.
On the other hand, as someone who grew up in New England, laughing about news stories of highways in warmer states getting backed up because of an inch or two or snow wasn't an uncommon occurrence, so maybe having trouble driving during unfamiliar weather is just a sign that they're learning to drive like humans too well
And can we discuss AI drivers and AI LLMs in the same paragraph? One is a special application of trying to emulate a very particular human embodiment, with all the sensory challenges. The other is a brain in a vat. Both can fail and flourish independent of each other, or at least I see little overlap.
I live in NYC now. Drivers here are some combination of utterly selfish and mindlessly distracted. You can't even trust them to stop at red lights. It gives me a huge amount of pause riding here.
"Cars are dangerous, necessary in many places, but often driven by irresponsible people" is a huge problem that needs solving. Waymo seems to have been doing a pretty fantastic job at it.
And even if they couldn't figure out how to route around floods, floods are rare. They're still a net benefit to society.
For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate.
Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general.
I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)
- Only ship products when they are perfect against every possible edge condition?
or
- If Waymo fails in a few scenarios today after 20 years of effort, they can never succeed?
To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.
I live in Atlanta. This was 3-4 inches of rain in 30 minutes, which is uncommon and was unexpected enough that the flash flood warnings were not issued until well after the flooding occurred.
The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood?
I know it's more than 1 because there were 4 cars people abandonded on my street alone! I'm not even on that flooded or busy of a street.
This is the important point here. Human beings are highly apologetic towards other human beings, but not so much towards machines. At the same time, the expectation towards machines is much higher.
Tells you more about humans than machines.
"How many taxi drivers got stuck?" is the actual comparison.
This is a paid taxi service. If I got an uncooked meal from a restaurant and their defense was that more people accidentally don't cook their food long enough than we do I don't think I'd be accommodating.
I would bet a lot of money the number here is also >1.
I can appreciate the cameras and lidar on the Weymos don't give their remote operators a lot of good data about the depth of water on the road-way. As you point out, humans in cars often don't get this right. I think the humans that don't drive into deep water are the ones who a) give any amount of water on the roadway a big NOPE and b) people familiar with the local environment and use multiple visual clues to judge the true depth of the flooding.
Then ask the human.
I'm not sure you'd walk away the idea that they have equivalent intelligence. The human at least knew the water was there and took a risk, the car, presumably, had no idea what was in front of it and drove into it anyways.
I guess water propulsion... and a rudder?
Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?
Tesla trains it models from actual drivers purely based on (input) Vision and (output) actuators - Brake, Steering, Accelerators.
Human output is based on what they and the camera sees. So, it's a 1:1 match.
If Waymo were to do that, it'll muddle the training set. The Lidar input may override camera input.
I always struggled when Musk mentioned Lidar will make it ambiguous. It didn't make any sense to me why having a secondary failback sensor messes things. But, if you put it in the training data context, it absolutely makes sense.
Because this part is really hard, and that's why Tesla abandoned the fusion approach. You cannot possibly foresee all the conditions in which LIDAR or any active sensor will malfunction/return wrong data/return data that's only slightly off for that ONE specific time. And even if it doesn't, you need to trust it to not return noise. And when it does return noise, how do you classify it as noise?
Cameras are passive sensors - they get whatever light comes in and turn it into an image. Camera is capturing shapes that make sense to the neural nets: it's working. See all black/white/red/cannot see any shapes? Camera is not working, exclude it from the currently used set of sensors or weigh it less when applying decisions, because it's returning no signal (and yes, neural nets have their own set of problems).
EDIT: cameras also provide more continuous context: if 1 pixel is off, is clearly bright red in a mostly-green scene where no poles can be identified, the neural net will average it out and discard it as noise. If 1 pixel says "object" in LIDAR, do you trust it to be correct? Perhaps the ray just hit a bird or a fly, but you only see a point, it's a lossy summary of the information you need.
As is, Waymo's playing it smarter than Cruise did, but they're not all in on AI yet. So I don't expect them to "leapfrog Tesla" in that dimension - and it's the key dimension to self-driving.
I'm working on a similar problem in computer vision and we're quickly approaching the point where our pure vision work is better than our Lidar supported track because we've had to deal with the constraints instead of having a crutch to lean on.
You can have even more intelligence with both.
Sensor fusion isn't free. Lidar requires more power consumption and more onboard compute. Cycles that could be spent on "intelligence" are instead being spent on sensing.
Tesla's approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.
If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.
Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that's great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.
The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.
People drive into floods too. They just don't get sensational articles written about it, just posted on reddit.
That said, I know a scenario like that would never happen, probably for the best.
There might be some level of adoption where they would, but honestly we're back to "but what about trains/trucks?".
Half the problem with evacuations is people don't want to leave behind their stuff to get destroyed. You'd basically be better off getting a fleet of semi's with some quick and dirty cube system thrown up than a bunch of automated sedans.
I've never lived in a hurricane area, but when I think of news coverage of problematic evacuations, they're showing people stuck on highways, not people stuck in urban traffic grids.
It's a throughput problem. Computer controlled "car trains" with shorter following distances can boost traffic throughput, but I don't think that would be enough to make evacuation of large cities actually feasible. The highway system is simply not built for that use case. Especially since evacuation often occurs during inclement weather that reduces capacity.
AFAIK, most places try to figure out how to make shelter in place work, because mass evacuation is likely to end up with many people facing the weather event while on the highway.
You could theoretically do better with busses and trains, things, but there's likely not enough busses that are setup for long distance travel available: lots of municipal bus fleets are setup for alternate fuels which is great for emissions but makes it hard to travel to a neighboring state, because there may not be appropriate fueling opportunities on the way. Etc, etc.
Do other states not do this?
With computers driving: traffic light turns green. All cars simultaneously start driving. It'd be like a train but without the efficiency.
Similarly, with human drivers: some jackasses drive into the box and the light turns red. Now perpendicular traffic is either fully blocked or must proceeed slower to maneuver around the jackasses. With computer drivers, they shouldn't intentionally break the law and they should have plenty of sensors to figure out that they cannot make it through the box.
Imagine a busy intersection where all the cars fly past one another at 40 miles an hour without stopping but none of them crash. Humans can't do this, but machines could, if, and when the technology gets there. To be clear, there's still a way to go.
But in the future, if there is a coordination standard among driverless cars, that could allow much higher density at higher speed. Coordination standards + higher density of self driving should reduce the self driving cars doing random shit too.
I don't know that you'd ever see this in practice, but it's much more practical in theory for almost identical machines running the same software than for a bunch of humans in a variety of vehicles who've maybe only half understood how to do this.
Also, for this specific problem we know humans are idiots. They should all be driving an agreed route to the agreed evacuation point, but some real humans will decide they know a shortcut, they want to drop past Jim's place, or whatever. Just as there's a difference between what the protocol says happens when you have to abandon an aircraft on the tarmac versus the reality that people will decide they want to self-evacuate and they need their carry on bags and chaos ensues and maybe people die.
Most traffic jams are caused by accidents or people slamming the brakes
This is a big assumption.
This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can't be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.
At which point we've reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.
I agree, but there are a number of people here in Florida who will do it or die trying (emphasis on the die trying)
We've seen the phenomenon before. We've been warned against the phenomenon before, and we'll see it again in other contexts in the future for sure.
My understanding was that ICE cars have trouble because water get's drawn into the engine. Water in the engine causes it to stall. And the engine must have air in flow and out flow.
An electric car doesn't need air in the same way (no oxygen to ignite with gasoline, no air to compress and expand).
Shouldn't electric cars to much better at driving through water?
This is so funny. I can imagine customers floating along in their Waymo thinking, "wow I need a refund for this".
Most cars crossing water don't get stuck because the intake is blocked by water but because they either floated or get pushed away by the flow (or slammed into the water hard enough to break stuff). If you maintain forward movement and dont float most cars will keep going in water 4-6 inches above the intake height because of the wake and bubble of the engine compartment. You only really benefit from a snorkel if you are offroading through water where there may be unseen holes because submerging your entire engine and drivetrain that deep is still a horrible idea even with a snorkel.
Also if you don't have a direct motor on each drive wheel you still have to worry about water entering differentials and transfer cases even if the electronics are perfectly sealed.
They can also float just like a regular car.
Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151767 - May 2026 (214 comments)
You could maybe use short-wave infrared cameras combined with ground penetrating radar, but it'll get real expensive so probably not commercially viable.
I think the only "good" solution is to have the car be overly paranoid, and if it detects water on the roadway that's bigger than some arbitrary diameter (to rule out mud puddles), then the car has to assume its a flood, stop, and escalate to a human or change the route.
Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings. Maybe we as a society need to top forcing everything to still operate normally during natural disasters. It's OK to shut things down when safety calls for it, and that applies to human drivers too. If areas are flooding, stay home.
FTA
> the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,”
> But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory.
- Find the edge of the water using vision or lidar
- look up the ground height at that position in your map data. That is the water level
- run a flood fill of the local 3d map starting from that point, with that water level. That gives you an exact shape of the puddle
- for any point on your planned path, you can now check if the point is in the puddle (per the flood fill above) and how deep the water is (difference between puddle's water level and ground height)
- use that either as a go/no-go for a planned path, or even feed this into your pathfinding to find a path with acceptable water level
The main limitation is that it assumes that the ground hasn't changed. It won't help in a landslide, or on muddy ground where other cars have disturbed the ground. But for the classic case of the flooded underpass or flooded dip in the road it should be very accurate
If the apparent road surface is higher than the mapped ground surface, probably a puddle. If your point cloud has a big hole, also probably a puddle.
This assumes you aren't doing ground plane removal, of course. But it's quite likely that Waymo is using a heavily ML approach these days, and I can imagine the poor thing getting very confused if it's not an explicit training goal.
If you can’t handle this issue, you really can’t operate in Atlanta.
It’s 2026 and self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a puddle and a flooded street, something a 3 year old can do.
Google literally just got off stage telling us that AGI is almost here. Wake me up when this doesn’t feel like an NFT ape fever dream.
And here we are talking about this like “oh gosh golly I wonder if this is some simple thing that could have been easily solved but they were trying to avoid regressions”
Get out of town, man.
I wish every dollar spent by investors on Waymo went into more frequent public bus service instead. A regular-ass bus with a human driver.
Regardless, consider what you are saying: how can you seriously compare a computer to a (young) human and your response is disappointment that the AI doesn't quite measure up? If it's comparable to a child today it will be comparable to a teen in a decade!
I assume you don’t have kids or know any kids if you don’t think they’re able to judge puddle sizes at age 3.
Why shouldn’t I make the comparison? Waymo is attempting to replace human drivers. That means it needs to make something smarter than humans at driving.
These self-driving companies have made very little progress on dealing with weather for how long they’ve spent on the problem.
Also, the drivers in Miami are a bit more unpredictable than the average driver around the country in my experience, so good challenge cases for self-driving development.
The thing about weather is that with a fully automated fleet they can just stop and give up on driving instantly. Rain in Miami doesn’t tend to last very long except in specific storms like hurricanes. Waymo can just not operate during those times.
I’m very doubtful that a lot of these inherent problems with the technology are being rapidly solved. See: the article.
Still, it should be cautious as any human driver would be.
So it's actually entirely rational that the bar for companies to be able to ship software that makes those fatal errors without consequence other than an insurance payout should be higher (especially since when fatal error rates can only be estimated accurately over the order of millions of miles, driverless systems are more prone to systematic error or regression bugs than the equivalent sized set of human drivers, and the cost and appeal of autonomy probably means more experienced drivers get replaced first and more journeys get taken)
Ideally, driverless cars will one day be better drivers than humans and this will save tens of thousands of traffic deaths per year. Holding up progress because cars will be confused in extremely rare or improbable situations will cost more lives than it saves.
Random planters in the middle of the road? Streets that narrow and then widen? Drivers start slowly creeping along, which means they are less likely to injury pedestrians.
maybe a little biological brain engineered to think it is a car with api access to the car hardware via the llm?
imagine you get into the car and in the center console you just see a floating brain in vat like fallout
The LLM will apply the high level reasoning needed to deal with longer time horizons and complex decisions, like deciding that the best way to reach the car wash 100 yards away is by walking.
You sound like an econ prof: full of it and hand waving away with hypotheticals.
given accurate mapping + realtime imaging, this should be possible albeit a Big Project(tm).
Many many years ago I happened to be in a conversation with one of the guys on a team that participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. It was only the second such race after the 2004 one, but arguably the one which set off the autonomous driving race we see today. (Sebastian Thrun's team came in 2nd.)
I went into the conversation thinking it was going to be an extremely challenging but tractable sensors + control-systems problem. But by the end of the conversation I was like, OMG this is going to be a long-haul slog of solving an unending stream of problems, some potentially even AI-complete (i.e. requiring human-level judgment.)
We mostly discussed why his and most other teams failed and the failures were so myriad and so technically intractable that I could not see a path to full self-driving for at least two decades. And all of this was offroad, so it didn't even approach the challenges of sharing human-occupied streets. I cannot remember any details unfortunately, but I remember that one car got stuck in a loop due to a problem that would have been trivial for a human to bypass... but that required human-level judgment. As an analogy it was something like a soft obstacle that could safely be driven over. But for the car to know that it would require a database and an "understanding" of all possible obstacles. An LLM could have helped, but back then they were still firmly in the realm of SciFi.
So the only feasible solution was to painstakingly identify all the edge-cases and work through them slowly, carefully, one-by-one. Which is what Waymo has been doing. This is also why when Elon made his "full self-"driving announcements I knew he had absolutely NO idea what he was talking about, and he was likely going to move fast and break people.
Flooded streets is just another "bump on the road" to full self-driving, but it seems we're actually getting there now. In retrospect, my 2-decade estimate was surprisingly accurate, I have no idea how I landed on that particular number!
This ain't Arizona - Atlanta has REAL weather.
I don't think they're barreling into foot+ deep water.
I think they're driving into shallower "perfectly navigable but still deep" puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive like a high end chauffeur.
> It follows an incident on 20 April in San Antonio, Texas, where an empty Waymo vehicle entered a flooded road and was swept into a creek.
Nobody in it but sounds serious enough.
This isn't like other software "recalls" where the result is just an over-the-air update or a request to bring your car to a dealership when you have time, in this case they have actually physically removed the recalled vehicles from the road.
To use your analogy: if a bug in Python caused the PSF and package managers to actually make 3.14.4 unavailable and companies started taking Python services offline until a fix was found, yes that would be a really big deal.
Slide 3 in "Extreme weather conditions and natural disasters" section: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
I think that self driving cars won't ever be able to handle every condition out there, and so there's probably a time when the system will be paused / shutdown when conditions aren't safe to drive in. Honestly, I wish we could do this with human drivers for that matter, too, but some will press on even when they shouldn't...
A closer analogy would be ""Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm after 3 planes slide off the runway due to ice"
Absolutely I think there will be a disconnect between when people think they should be able to drive somewhere (ie to work in a no-visibility blizzard) and when ideal self-driving cars would allow themselves to operate. Maybe society will adjust to be more flexible to natural conditions, or maybe people will get frustrated and drive themselves into the poor conditions as always.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection. "Tricky," he said finally.
Teasing aside can you imagine how fucking scary it must be to be in a self-driving car that drives straight in flowing water? Damn.