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Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoMore discussion: PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022
- rwoll 10mo agoPrior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
- platevoltage 10mo agoThat sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
- creato 10mo agoThe one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
- beAbU 10mo agoI moved from South Africa to Ireland 2 years ago. It was very noticeable to me how drivers in Ireland have no idea what to do when the lights are out. Absolute chaos! In south africa, traffic lights not working is a daily occurrence. And we've all learned how to navigate a dead intersection wit zero casualties. Massive 6 way intersections with 2-4 lanes per direction worked perfectly with everyone taking turns to go.
- scoofy 10mo agoI lived in the training zone for both Waymo and Cruise. They were there for literally years before they were offering rides to anyone. The idea that they could train them for emergency scenarios, especially ones that happen so infrequently like a power outage on a route they regularly drive, seems borderline nonsensical, but I honestly don't know if there is a plausible way to do it.
- ajmurmann 10mo agoThat's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the middle of the block with nobody in front of them.
- jollymonATX 10mo agoWould have hoped they trained for this but at least now they likely will be.
- whimsicalism 10mo agofrankly at least at the intersection i witnessed i saw plenty of them handling it
- VonTum 10mo agoI miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
- victorbojica 10mo agoNot directly. But what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? It stops being funny really fast
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? Did they have documented problems? This is akin to the Waymos honking at each other at 3AM. Annoying. Potentially dangerous in various circumstances. But ultimately just destructive in a way unlikely to repeat.
- fragmede 10mo agoSame thing as if human drivers have crashed their cars in the middle of an intersection due to traffic lights being out, I would presume.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoHave you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.
- cmurf 10mo ago
- adrianmonk 10mo agoI wonder how Waymos know that the traffic lights are out. A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently, a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one by one, as if they think the light is not working." It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific angles. Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are working.
- ithkuil 9mo agoI recently had a broken traffic light in my city, it was daylight and I didn't notice any other lights that should be on during the day to be off. My approach was to get closer into the intersection slowly and judge whether the perpendicular traffic would slow down and also try to figure out what was going on or if they would just zip through like if they had green. It required some attention and some judgement. It definitely wasn't the normal day to day driving where you don't quite think consciously what you're doing. I understand that individual autonomous vehicles cannot be expected to be given the responsibility to make such a call and the safest thing to do for them is to have them stop. But I assumed there were still many human operators that would oversee the fleet and they could make the call that the traffic lights are all off
- raspasov 9mo agoI live in SF, and drive alongside Waymos every day. Also, they park in my buildings garage, where they frequently cause major delays and blockages inside the garage. I am pretty sure Waymo does not disclose how many human interventions they get. It would destroy their magic aura. A fancy RC car with self-driving experimental features is not very futuristic after all. By all the evidence, that’s what we observed when the internet went out. I don’t buy the 4-way stop explanation. Waymos handle 4-way stops just fine on an average day. I drive alongside them daily. I’ve long suspected that they get many human interventions on the road, frequent enough that when the internet connectivity slowed down to a crawl across the city, Waymos could not get themselves unstuck from a variety of situations and simply just blocked the roads. That’s not a paragon of safety, nor is it “self-driving”. Self-driving cars were 10 years away in 2015, and in 2025, they are still 10 years away.
- Adaptive 10mo agoI couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
- asdff 10mo agoIt seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs
- porphyra 10mo agoI don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
- mingus88 10mo agoThe power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.
- porphyra 10mo agoTrue but the comment I replied to mentions a different case where a Waymo got stuck for half an hour at a parade.
- fragmede 10mo ago"the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was probably congested by all the city residents using theirs instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during the outage.
- mingus88 10mo agoIn my neighborhood, Xfinity goes out every time we lose power. Even with my generator and UPS powering my modem, the outage is not resolved until mains power comes back These monopolies aren’t required to have uptime in the same way the POTS network was. We had a week long outage last year and people were driving 15 minutes out to get cell signal to catch up on their data
- 10mo ago
- raldi 10mo agoI'm surprised that either: 1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this, 2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or 3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly
- add-sub-mul-div 10mo agoEveryone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
- raldi 10mo agoBut a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.
- pacifika 10mo agoI think that statement is regional. I’ve never seen one.
- Tade0 10mo agoIt isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.
- lelanthran 10mo ago> But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon. I think too many people talk past each other when they use the word common, especially when talking about car trips. A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be periodic but it's certainly frequent with a frequency above 1 per year. Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many people say "common" meaning "periodic".
- yen223 10mo agoEven among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!
- Zambyte 10mo agoWe should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
- quantified 10mo agoSlot cars at the grown-up level.
- pokstad 10mo agoMaybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed power to these cars using overhead cables.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoAt this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive. Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
- sofixa 10mo agoMaybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make them more efficient.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoHave something like metro (maglev trains) too as they are more efficient than steel wheels on steel tracks. Public transport for things like metro/trains/trams/buses are honestly underrated.
- voidfunc 10mo agoRugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
- 10mo ago
- joshka 10mo agoI for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
- terribleperson 10mo agoIn my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay. Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
- JohnTHaller 10mo agoI saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.
- rangestransform 9mo agoOdd that it was necessary, my mental model of manhattan is that it would become so slow and chaotic that it would be free reign for pedestrians to walk wherever
- JohnTHaller 9mo agoDriving up 6th Ave all the lights change in sync one after another, so that street kept moving. Unfortunately, cars kept moving even when the light would have been red and nearly hitting pedestrians and cross traffic.
- morsch 10mo agoIn Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.
- t0mas88 10mo agoSame setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work. One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
- joshribakoff 10mo agoThis was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
- shuckles 10mo agoWaymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
- StanislavPetrov 10mo agoIf you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100% digital currency!
- Tempest1981 10mo agoHow did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?
- HardwareLust 10mo agoThat's a really good question.
- delichon 10mo agoHere's an example of it doing well: https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2002699317409186219 https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2002699317409186219
- cjsplat 10mo agoThe Tesla example is a single oncoming car, clear right of way, and ample time in a simple 4-way intersection. The Waymo video has over a dozen cars, at least 6 pedestrians crossing streets (many more on the sidewalks), and is a 5-way intersection. These are cherry picked examples. Either advertising or propaganda.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoI thought LIDAR solves for this lol
- bni 10mo agoNot looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.
- HardwareLust 10mo ago"the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company’s control" Well there's your problem.
- tiahura 10mo agoHow does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?
- brianwawok 10mo ago50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a stop. Don’t think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.
- EA-3167 10mo ago[flagged]
- andsoitis 10mo agoTreats it as a four way stop. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-A701F7DC-875C-4491-BC84-605A77EA152C.html# https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-A701F7D...
- jerlam 10mo ago[flagged]
- GMoromisato 10mo agohttps://x.com/edgecase411/status/2002630953844552094 https://x.com/edgecase411/status/2002630953844552094 Looks like it treats it as a 4-way stop. Is this because Tesla has more training data?
- gertlex 10mo agoI'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when, not training data, that results in the two behaving different.
- tanvach 10mo agoCoincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out (didn’t know about it, we were going to Japan town from the Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One advantage of building unsupervised system from public version that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country. Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency vehicles pass safely.
- laweijfmvo 10mo agoSo basically no answer from Waymo other than to boast about their numbers? Why not just be transparent?
- NetMageSCW 10mo agoRead more carefully, Waymo didn’t boast about their numbers and that part of the story was unrelated to the issue except as a measure of impact their shutdown could have.
- nextworddev 10mo agoBecause they are currently trying to raise money at 100bn valuation
- krisoft 10mo agoWhat do you mean no answer? They are suspending their operations. That is their answer.
- jerlam 10mo agoThe "boast about numbers" wasn't from Waymo, it was from their investors, and it was earlier this month and not during the service suspension.
- alistairSH 10mo agoAnybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?
- isodev 10mo agoI think it’s clear that both use cases are a must have during an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos shouldn’t be online during such times at all.
- jerlam 10mo agoFirst responders get the highest priority of cellular networks even in non-emergency situations (FirstNet).
- AlotOfReading 10mo agoFirstNet is AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile have their own alternatives (FrontLine and T-Priority, respectively). QCI is a fun rabbit hole, because some of these networks share the first responder QCIs with certain business use cases.
- nerdsniper 10mo agoI didn’t notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.
- torham 10mo agoI lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but plenty were down.
- scoofy 10mo agoI was in the affected area and we effectively lost all but messaging. Not the whole time, but definitely while I was ordering takeout at a place with power. I couldn't get an image to send to a friend.
- MBCook 10mo agoFrom John Ripley on Mastodon: “Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators: Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.” I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK? I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more cautious approach. Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though. https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454 https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked? We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.
- MBCook 10mo agoI don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing. They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking. > They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars. There are productive responses to this episode. None of them involve flipping out on X.
- gavmor 10mo agoNo, it's not a disaster, but with a little imagination it could be a hormetic innoculation.
- andsoitis 10mo agoSeems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen. Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.
- BlackjackCF 10mo agoYeah, I was shocked by this. Blackouts in California aren’t some sort of rare event. I’m primed to expect rolling brownouts/blackouts yearly in the summer.
- duhast2020 10mo agoThere haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
- Polizeiposaune 10mo agoThere were significant power shutdowns in California in 2019 (affecting millions of customers in aggregate); the reason for the shutdowns was different from 2001 (preemptive shutdowns when the risk of downed power lines starting wildfires was thought to be high) but the impact on customers is the same: no power for an extended period.
- andsoitis 10mo ago> There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001. Waymo operates in more places than the Bay Area. Phoenix, AZ, for example, had widespread power outages in Aug 2025 due to Haboob and Monsoon.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen We have zero evidence a power outage wasn't foreseen. This looks like a more complex multi-system failure.
- MBCook 10mo ago
- cess11 10mo agoI think I prefer trains and buses.
- chroma 10mo agoSF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or exit there. Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing for them, but it can be solved with software improvements. Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs, so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can. But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.
- cess11 10mo agoLiving in social rot and keeping unmanned little autos for those that can afford it seems even more nasty than what I initially had in mind.
- Wowfunhappy 10mo agoNeither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that’s really troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo agoWaymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection is gone then this is no longer available, and one might speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if they are in a situation where remote help is called for and inaccessible. Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to stop operating autonomously and try to phone home for help, or perhaps losing the connection home is itself enough to trigger a fail safe shutdown mode ? It reminds a bit of the recent TeslaBot video, another of their teleoperated stunts, where we see the bot appearing to remove a headset with both hands that it wasn't wearing (but that it's remote operator was), then fall over backwards "dead" as the remote operator evidentially clocked off his shift or went for a bathroom break.
- MBCook 10mo agoThat’s clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious possible failure. Things go wrong -> get human help Human not available -> just block the road??? How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback. I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran over something. But in a situation like this where the problem is fully external it should fall back to “park myself” mode.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback Barring everything else, the proper failsafe for any vehicle should be to stop moving and tell the humans inside to evacuate. This is true for autonomous vehicles as well as manned ones–if you can't figure out how to pull over during a disaster, ditching is absolutely a valid move.
- chopete3 10mo agoTo get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the list of edge-cases they handle? Each city will have its own nuances. Why don't the regulators publish the list?
- SoftTalker 10mo ago"San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off the roads unless they needed to travel." Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.
- nerdsniper 10mo agoI did when I was younger (18-25). Exploring the world outside of my hometown often put me at ease when I was feeling destabilized.
- casion 10mo agoUnsure if sarcasm, but lots of people do that. I do it every day. Some folks enjoy driving.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoYeah it was sarcasm. I enjoy driving also, actually. But I don't just go out and drive for no reason. It's always with a purposeful destination.
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoThat implies less enjoyment than other activities.
- alistairSH 10mo agoI used to go out in the snow on purpose (DC metro). Mostly have them to myself, it was always fun.
- scoofy 10mo agoThe word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an errand in the blackout, we didn't need to do it, but we wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including multiple disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it over, I would have stayed home.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoDid anybody get stranded on the bart?
- jeffbee 10mo agoNo, but they ran through stations that lacked power, so in the sense of being dumped out far from your actual destination, yes.
- bink 10mo agoIt was predicted by many, including me. It'll be a lot worse in an earthquake where power and cell service are out and there's debris and road damage. Good luck to our first responders. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688847
- elzbardico 10mo agoAs a society, as a whole society, opposed to our narrow interests and point of views as typical affluent HN dwellers, do we really NEED this kind of shit?
- scoofy 10mo agoI live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb. My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event). I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned with "the flow of traffic."
- jeffbee 10mo agoPretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.
- scoofy 10mo agoI'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training autonomous vehicles.
- jeffbee 10mo agoOK well let's argue about the semantics of "autonomous" instead. To me, it means the vehicle's on-board systems should generalize to safe and non-disruptive behaviors under all circumstances. In this instance they should have been able to either navigate to a depot or at least pull off the road.
- scoofy 10mo agoI think that’s a perfectly reasonable standard for a normal operating environment. In emergencies I think “safe” is preferable to “non-disruptive.”
- cjsplat 10mo agoI was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out. The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving. The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots. This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate. And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection. On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like the Waymos used to be. I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and reading and crossing streets with dead lights. Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to handle. It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
- suzzer99 10mo agoI got stuck behind a Zoox in SF trying to cross the street from an alley. There was an endless stream of stop & go traffic and the Zoox refused to push itself into traffic, despite other cars deliberately giving it space. I wasn't sure if honking at it would help or hurt the situation.
- userbinator 9mo agoI'm not sure if it even knows it's being honked at.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoI’m curious what’s the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that, or at least most of everyone. What’s the situation in SF?
- rvz 10mo agoThe proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all along.
- TZubiri 10mo agoI thought this was trivially verifiable due to regulation and latency analysis. If they truly rely on teleoperation, that's at least 20ms in the best case, and can grow a lot with interference. I always assumed these things have some autonomy.
- uqual 10mo agoInterestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet). Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).
- aag 10mo agoThere are situations where it is allowed: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/ https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/
- mlpro 10mo agoWaymo should do a bit more research in reliability and explainability of their AI models.
- pif 10mo ago[flagged]
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoObvious failure should be obvious. Get out of the streets. What happens when one gets a flat tire? Surely it doesn't just stop in the middle of the street, right??
- ursAxZA 10mo agoHonestly, I’m just glad this stopped before a major accident happened.
- _ea1k 10mo agoWaymo will get better at this. But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were zero waymo fatalities due to this. That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least one fatality due to traffic light outages. Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They are a great company that will do a lot of good for the world. One bad night (in which noone was hurt, in part because of their cautiuosness) shouldn't negate that.
- jordanb 10mo ago"Hey guys what are you complaining about? We didn't (directly) kill anyone!"
- amazingman 10mo agoYou're being sarcastic, but it's a valid point. I'd love to know if there were any traffic fatalities at all during the affected period. Chances are there were and that they were due to human error.
- tomjakubowski 9mo ago> Chances are there were and that they were due to human error. Eh, I don't know. ~40 people die from traffic collisions each year in San Francisco, so about one every nine days. People would be driving more cautiously without traffic signals or street lights, and most collisions at intersections would occur a relatively low speed assuming drivers treat the dead signal as a stop sign. The risk of death for drivers might be higher during a power outage like that, but I doubt it would be 9x (and the outage lasted less a full day).
- SR2Z 10mo agoSeeing as how literally nobody died, I'm not sure if I agree with your sentiment. I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a crash that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer is yes - there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose driver died after hitting a Waymo. Clearly we should shut down Waymo until they can handle that situation!
- markdown 10mo agoI don't understand why everyone is talking about the cars when the bigger issue is why the critical infrastructure (lights) don't have batteries for backup.
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoBecause that would be prohibitively expensive (possibly even after the arrival of LED bulbs).
- alexweberk 10mo agoWaymo aside, it's sad to hear that some parts of the world still have blackouts. Which third-world country does "SF" belong to?
- dyauspitr 10mo agoNot texas, that’s for sure.
- throw7 10mo agoThis is how "science" works in the postmodern world. It's not about predicting, it's about implement, problem, solve.
- necovek 9mo agoMost intersections I've seen in Serbia cities like Belgrade have "preferential" roads even if they are equally loaded and similarly sized: so, one direction will have either "stop" or "yield" signs, and another will not. Everyone slows down because you don't see the stop/yield sign for the orthogonal streets until you come closer to the intersection. Perhaps we are just more used to traffic lights being off/broken (and we are, as this is, anecdotally, more like a weekly occurrence at some point during your trip to work, for instance)?
- watermelon0 9mo agoPriority road sign (yellow diamond) is generally used throughout Europe.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoMy favorite was when people DOS'd waymo by scheduling a bunch of pickups at the end of a long dead end. SF is pretty brave (stupid?) for allowing itself to be a beta test for self driving.
- schlauerfox 9mo agoI was in hollywood, california last night and saw a waymo come to a weird 5 way intersection, stop past the limit line on a red light in or past the crosswalk at the right turn lane and go into it's sign active attract mode. I think they have some more development to do, and don't recommend using such poorly performing software.
- The_President 9mo agoCurrent driving model realism could be greatly improved with a few real world training styles to consider in order to offset the Austin Left Lane Hippie driver model: - New Orleans taxi cab driver - Houston gang banger - Los Angeles traffic weaver and most importantly, - Saudi Arabia Toyota Camry driver and 360 drift hobbiest (with bonus 2 wheel tire change)
- cindyllm 9mo ago[dead]