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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
- maryamshafaqat 5mo ago[dead]
- Guestmodinfo 5mo agoMaybe the solution is to put in more billions. Every fad creates jobs.
- LunicLynx 5mo agoIf they only would use lidar. Oh wait…
- jvanderbot 5mo agoSnark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.
- Aboutplants 5mo agoEvacuation is a use case in my mind. Having a fleet of shuttles on command to move people in preparation of a hurricane would be a benefit. They would obviously need to put weather limitations during actual storms because no one should be driving in a hurricane.
- steveBK123 5mo agoEvacuation you want to prioritized throughput - think of how little road space 100 people in a bus take up vs say 50 cars with 2 people each. Or even 25 cars with 4 people each.
- ua709 5mo agoIf you have central control you might even be able to get away with changing the rules. i.e. most roads are now one-way leading out of the city. voilà we nearly doubled outbound throughput. Even just for commuting that would be awesome, not that it is happening anytime soon, but one can dream, especially while sitting in gridlock traffic.
- fragmede 5mo agoHaving the middle of five lanes change direction depending on the hour is fairly common. There's even a dedicated machine to move a concrete barrier to support this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IwBJPqyoB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IwBJPqyoB8
- VoidWhisperer 5mo ago> No one should be driving in a hurricane. I agree, but there are a number of people here in Florida who will do it or die trying (emphasis on the die trying)
- VoidWhisperer 5mo agoWhile this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving That said, I know a scenario like that would never happen, probably for the best.
- Jabrov 5mo agoWhy would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?
- lukevp 5mo agoTraffic is usually caused by adding inefficiencies across a system with little slack - someone brakes too hard or too early, and if all the cars are stacked up, that one brake event can ripple through hundreds of following cars, getting worse and worse because each person brakes more. Self driving cars can perfectly sync up and move like a train. Theoretically there could be no traffic on highways if all cars are self-driving. Rarely is a highway so full that there couldn’t be more cars (eg. The entrance ramps are backed up) which implies the issues are related to the driving flow and not the capacity of the street itself.
- queenkjuul 5mo ago> Rarely is a highway so full that there couldn’t be more cars Yep, here in Chicago you might even go as many as 12 hours between such events
- paxys 5mo agoSame reason there's less gridlock when people obey traffic lights and other rules of the road and don't brake randomly. If every car on the road drove itself then there would never be traffic.
- hooloovoo_zoo 5mo agoExcept the Waymo can do 150 mph bumper to bumper with other Waymos if you let them.
- xnx 5mo agoI wonder how much of this is trouble perceiving water depth vs integrating that understanding into the larger driver model without creating regressions elsewhere.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoI don't think there's a good solution right now. You can't just go based on surrounding traffic because humans are also stupid and flood their cars all the time. 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.
- kieranmaine 5mo ago> Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings. 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.
- sarchertech 5mo agoDo you how often you get flash warnings in Atlanta? And local roads flood far more often than flash food warnings are issued. If you can’t handle this issue, you really can’t operate in Atlanta.
- 5mo ago
- ibejoeb 5mo agoI assumed they went to Miami to develop their foul weather capabilities. It's still pretty early.
- dangus 5mo agoDoubtful. They probably just pause service when it rains. Miami weather is ideal most of the time. These self-driving companies have made very little progress on dealing with weather for how long they’ve spent on the problem.
- janderson215 5mo agoDuring the “winter”, sure, but it dumps rain during the same and there are flash floods occasionally. I agree with the parent comment that Miami is a great area to test - especially given that the bad weather is seasonal. They can run 24/7 during the good weather seasons. 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.
- dangus 5mo agoUnpredictable drivers aren’t a challenge compared to weather. They’re just 3D objects to avoid. That’s a solved problem. 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.
- colordrops 5mo agoSelf driving will never handle all corner cases until they essentially have a frontal cortex. They probably need something like an LLM to help with very high level abstract situations, e.g. avoiding a hurricane like someone else mentioned in this thread.
- moomoo11 5mo agohow would a llm help 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
- michaelt 5mo agoThe driving ML model will take care of the next 10 seconds of driving, in a fast loop deciding what steering and throttle commands to give. 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.
- ydse 5mo agoLmao what… You sound like an econ prof: full of it and hand waving away with hypotheticals.
- whimsicalism 5mo agothis is absolutely already a thing under development, you can see Waymo is hiring for reasoning roles
- dmix 5mo agoTesla's already doing it too
- quantummagic 5mo agoA frontal cortex isn't enough; there are plenty of corner cases that humans fail at too. The real test is if self-driving performs on par, or better than, humans in the vast majority of cases. If it saves 50,000 lives a year to go with self-driving, it's a net-win even if there are a few people who die in situations where they would have survived with a human driver behind the wheel.
- paxys 5mo agoDriving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.
- ge96 5mo agoJust get a jeep snorkle
- radiorental 5mo ago[flagged]
- ge96 5mo agoYeah was a joke as I think most cars if you drive through that your car is f'd
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoTheir account is about as old as yours.
- radiorental 5mo agoMore a comment on how HN has devolved in the past 2 years, if I want snark, this isn't the place I go to find it.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoReally? I find more bad faith and snark on HN than anywhere else and always have.
- _heimdall 5mo agoIronically, a properly sealed EV system would better deal with a flood. Combustion engines have issues due mostly to the air intake and exhaust.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoClearly they haven't actually had any serious problems getting stuck or anything because it'd be all over the news. 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.
- thewebguyd 5mo agoThere was one in Atlanta that made the local news where it went too deep and stalled out, was stuck for over an hour.
- thebruce87m 5mo agoThousands of Waymos recalled after robotaxi swept into a creek https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2011dl4xo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2011dl4xo > 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.
- manwe150 5mo agoThat title sounds so much more dramatic than it seems it actually was. I imagine headlines like: “Billions of python 3.14.4 programs were recalled today when a bug was found in the core itself. No word yet on whether the successor product, Python 3.14.5, will avoid a similar fate. How long will we tolerate being used as test subjects in the developer’s risky games?”
- burkaman 5mo agoHow would you phrase the headline? I think it's pretty accurate, they have pulled thousands of vehicles out of service and completely stopped service in two cities, and the reason is literally that one of their cars was swept into a creek (in addition to other flood-related incidents). I can't think of a way to make the headline any more clear. 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.
- ck2 5mo agodoes Waymo use Lidar or is it like Musk's "cost saving" cameras only
- jcims 5mo agoThe spinny things on the vehicle are LIDAR.
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo agoWaymo uses lidar. There's lots of information about it on the web.
- exmicrosoldier 5mo agoLidar is much less accurate in the rain.
- micromacrofoot 5mo agothey should probably put some sort of metal strip into the roads that a vehicle can follow reliably, future iterations could make continuous contact to the strip to deliver power to these vehicles, and this would also allow them to become larger by reducing fuel weight or even allow cars to travel very close together for efficiency gains
- eodecker 5mo agoyou are describing a train
- llbbdd 5mo agoThat's the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it's some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.
- micromacrofoot 5mo agohaving a decent train system in a city can cut car ownership in half, it's a solved technology we've had for 100 years but pretty much no one builds it because it's not some private ownership tech hype bullshit
- llbbdd 5mo agoThat's fine but you still have to get to/from the train station, which is a problem cars solve very well. All the better if the car drives itself. They complement each other which is why I find it so strange that discussion of trains shows up in these threads so often as though though they're some kind of panaceanic alternative that is being overlooked. > because it's not some private ownership tech hype bullshit I don't want to own a car, but I do want privacy, and I do want to go directly from point A to point B without being on a train. I have absolutely no reason to want to board a train as an alternative unless I want to go very fast from A to a very far away B. That is a real problem that is being solved for, not just hype. Aspiring to be cattle isn't noble. EDIT: Also - rail doesn't get built because they're expensive projects, they take up a lot of space that people can't walk on, that cars can't drive on, that isn't useful to park housing or commerce near. Autonomous vehicles slot nicely into infrastructure that exists already, that already has the advantage of being point-to-point. If the goal is "improve transit", autonomous vehicles achieve that without directly competing with trains. If the goal is, for some reason, "less cars", they also arguably achieve that because you'd end up with less private ownership of cars. If the goal is "no cars", I have no idea what the point of that would be.
- asah 5mo agohard part is that cars should drive through shallow water... but how to know the depth? given accurate mapping + realtime imaging, this should be possible albeit a Big Project(tm).
- antonymoose 5mo agoAssuming they can say the water ends at X and the water ends at Y could they not estimate the depth to a good degree of confidence? Roads have a degree of uniformity I would imagine makes this a solvable problem?
- dev_l1x_be 5mo agoBiblical.
- selimthegrim 5mo agoComing to New Orleans soon...
- retrocryptid 5mo agoI thought Weymo's were supposed to be "supervised" by humans in the Philippines. Maybe driving in circles in the suburbs and driving into flood waters happens only when the cars are out of mobile data range? Did Weymo pay their mobile phone bill? Does the (somewhat) autonomous system on the car decide when to flag a human for help? I would have expected a human to be watching all the time. Are they experiencing labor problems in the Philippines? Maybe Weymo doesn't want to pay their remote operators as much as the remote operators want to get paid?
- OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo agoYour assumption that Waymos are "(somewhat) autonomous" is wrong, which is why your questions and conclusion don't make any sense
- jeffbee 5mo agoIt's an interesting illustration of how widely and quickly misinformation spreads, though.
- losvedir 5mo agoI think another way of framing it is "Waymo pauses Atlanta service due to weather conditions", which doesn't sound at all unreasonable to me. It's no different from "Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm" or whatever. 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...
- stetrain 5mo agoWell except that there were incidents of cars getting stuck in floods with passengers before they paused the service. 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.
- etempleton 5mo agoThis is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them. 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?
- tptacek 5mo agoI was (I think the search bar will prove this out) a pretty committed skeptic of driverless cars, but I've come around on them in some use cases. I'm not optimistic about them on highways. But they solve some important problems in regional/local transit. 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.
- zamadatix 5mo agoI'm bullish on AI as a replacement for Uber from airports well behaved climates I frequent but bearish on how long it'll take to actually make a damn for me needing my car in Ohio until the mid-late 2030s at this rate. It's just so close and so far away at the same time.
- bps1418 5mo agoIs it so hard for LiDAR/Camera to detect flood water on road. Water on a road looks like a flat surface to sensors.
- httpz 5mo agoGuessing the depth of a puddle is not an easy task. Many untrained horses will refuse to step into shallow puddles. Then we also have human drivers driving into flooded road.
- bhelkey 5mo agoMaybe a dumb question, why do electric cars have issues with water? 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?
- LatencyKills 5mo agoDeep water can still damage an EV by getting into connectors, sensors, wheel bearings, brakes, and cabin electronics. They can also float just like a regular car.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoYep if they are watertight they will float, if they aren't, they'll fill up with water.
- hamdingers 5mo agoThey can drive through surprisingly deep water, but you'd still rather avoid it for a lot of reasons. Dangerous loss of traction and risk of getting swept away, soaked passengers will want a refund, and a sopping wet interior will take the vehicle out of service for a while.
- callbacked 5mo agothat and the seal for the battery enclosure can seize up after continuous drives through dirty water, the next passenger may not be so lucky and end up stranded once water breaches the battery pack
- s3p 5mo ago>soaked passengers will want a refund This is so funny. I can imagine customers floating along in their Waymo thinking, "wow I need a refund for this".
- 5mo ago
- dhbradshaw 5mo agoTo 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 5mo agoIf 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 5mo agoIt's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.
- themafia 5mo agoI 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 5mo 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.
- Retric 5mo agoBetter 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.
- keeda 5mo agoThis is just part of the slog that autonomous driving was always going to be. 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!
- t1234s 5mo agoWhat are the chances that google just shuts down waymo once they get whatever they need from it. Weren't there other ambitious projects under google that had a similar fate?
- wutwutwat 5mo agoIt can't mean that, there's a lake there!
- ls612 5mo agoHumans have a hard time judging how deep water is too! Turns out neither Lidar nor vision/cameras have the right ability to sense water depth.
- Kye 5mo agoWe get popup thunderstorms here and those often mean zero visibility conditions even without a flood. It's just part of life in the spring and summer with all that chaotic moisture coming off the Gulf. We might get a few minutes warning. If your robot can't handle that then you're going to have a bad time.
- tintor 5mo ago... but their World Model said it was ok to drive through the flood. Slide 3 in "Extreme weather conditions and natural disasters" section: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simulation/ https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
- jp0001 5mo agoMy guess in the North East in the winter there will be similar stories.
- jeffwask 5mo agoWe had one do this in San Antonio too. Right across the well labeled low water crossing and whoosh.
- BobBagwill 5mo agoYou're missing the obvious. Waymo trains with human driver data, and idiotic humans drive into deep water constantly. Oh, you want Waymo's to drive better than humans? Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection. "Tricky," he said finally.
- dmix 5mo agoThat's not how the training data works. It's not just a constant stream of human driving footage with no regard for good or bad performance
- dyauspitr 5mo agoWorking out kinks. There are going to be a bunch of AI bad people trying their best to pounce on this.
- reed1234 5mo agoI imagine it is hard to determine how deep the water is. There is a lot of training with small puddles (ignore) and not much with deep water. Still, it should be cautious as any human driver would be.
- Findecanor 5mo agoThis is a classic case of: if the situation is not in the training data then the model is unequipped to handle it. 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.
- boxed 5mo agoThis goes for humans just as well. Humans get stuck. That waymo paused their op to avoid bad press and then get bad press BECAUSE they were being careful is enormously stupid for everyone involved.
- renegade-otter 5mo agoDidn't ALL Waymos at once pulled over recently because it started raining? This ain't Arizona - Atlanta has REAL weather.
- theodpHN 5mo agoSelf-driving divining rods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing
- dang 5mo agoRecent and related: Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151767 - May 2026 (214 comments)
- InfiniteRand 5mo agoYou can create very sophisticated simulations all you want, but in the end, you can only test the accuracy of your simulation when you try the real thing
- jaxn 5mo agoNashville is paused too. I don’t know why.
- essekar 5mo agoanyone has any videos?
- thway-exwaymo 5mo ago[dead]
- _HMCB_ 5mo agoCan we please stop this experiment.
- nunez 5mo agoInconvenient, but I'm glad they're erring on the side of safety here. Waymo is doing a surprisingly great job at expanding their network.
- dwa3592 5mo agoI mean if they did this to avoid accidents and road congestions for other human drivers then it makes sense.
- mancerayder 5mo agoOh, boy. I guess that means they haven't gotten to the snow phase of the testing yet.
- zenai666 5mo ago[flagged]
- jimjimjim 5mo agoI think I made a HN comment a few months/years ago about driverless cars having problems with floods across roads after watching a downpour in Kuala Lumpur flood half a street in minutes. The road was down to one lane and drivers in both directions took it in turns to use that one lane. That would be a difficult situation for a driverless car to handle.
- utopiah 5mo agoMandatory "FSD next year!" /s 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.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoI'm honestly slightly surprised that "the road markings suddenly completely vanish" doesn't raise some kind of internal warning to the system
- philjohn 5mo agoI wonder if the decent wade depth (500mm/20") of the i-pace's they use was input as a constraint.
- leumon 5mo agoI guess sometimes you have to take a step backwards for making progress with something.
- jgalt212 5mo agoWaymo, who's arguably the most competent operator by far, cannot handle Atlanta. But TSLA and its Potemkin village-like robotaxi service trades at 380 PE. Figure that one out.
- DannyBee 5mo agoAn infinite number of comments about how good/bad/etc this is, and nobody seems to have noticed that it is literally a report of exactly one waymo getting stuck in flooded water that caused this. 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.
- beernet 5mo ago> 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? 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.
- flextheruler 5mo agoComparing individual drivers to a taxi company is disingenuous and silly. "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.
- DannyBee 5mo ago"How many taxi drivers got stuck?" is the actual comparison." I would bet a lot of money the number here is also >1.
- Elzair 5mo agoI saw a Waymo for the first time IRL last week in Atlanta. It stopped on a narrow street for about 5 minutes to wait for the person to come out. The people in the cars behind it were not happy!
- Rekindle8090 5mo ago[dead]
- PeterStuer 5mo agoWhy are there that many foods in Atlanta that this is an issue? Not saying Waymo should not be able to deal with this if that is a regular occurrence in the area they operate, but still seems weird.