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Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intellige
by paxys 5mo ago
Driving 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.
- masklinn 5mo agoYou'd need to ensure every electrical connection is in a waterproof location which I'm pretty sure is not a thing for any standard car manufacturing. Cabins are also rarely watertight. AFAIK your best bet is a diesel with a snorkel, and hope things have dried off before you need to restart the engine.
- bushbaba 5mo agoIf cabins are water tight you risk carbon monoxide poisoning
- entropicdrifter 5mo agoCarbon monoxide... in an EV?
- whicks 5mo agoRivan's R1T and R1S have a water fording height of ~43", standard: - https://rivian.com/support/article/what-is-the-water-fording-height https://rivian.com/support/article/what-is-the-water-fording...
- gruez 5mo agoAre EVs typically "sealed" by default? If not, how is going through the effort to "seal" an EV different than installing snorkels for ICE cars?
- whicks 5mo agoSome are more sealed than others, such as Rivian's R1T and R1S which have a water fording height of ~43": https://rivian.com/support/article/what-is-the-water-fording-height https://rivian.com/support/article/what-is-the-water-fording...
- alex1138 5mo agoPeople are allowed to joke. We don't always need 'substantive comments'
- radiorental 5mo agoIt's not a joke if it doesn't make any sense, what good is a snorkle on an electric car?
- Rooster61 5mo agoThat's...the joke. The humor is in the absurdity of recommending an addon to the car that utterly would not work and would look ridiculous. It's layered on the fact that Jeep snorkels look sort of ridiculous even on the vehicles they were designed for.
- jader201 5mo ago> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nutjob2 5mo agoWhat happens when you you start floating? I guess water propulsion... and a rudder?
- nielsole 5mo agoYou need to get an armored jeep then
- bell-cot 5mo agoA decent welder should be able to turn out a trailer hitch <=> outboard motor bracket in under 15 minutes. It's not like you'll need much more than a modest fishing outboard to get through flooded spots.
- throwaway2037 5mo agoSee also: Duck boat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUKW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUKW
- abfan1127 5mo agojeep snorkels are for air intakes for engines. electric cars don't have air intakes. they have air cooling for batteries... I suppose you could snorkel those.
- fragmede 5mo agoDepends on the EV. Some of them have liquid cooling for their battery pack.
- KennyBlanken 5mo agoAll major production EVs do. About the only exception I'm aware of is the first generation Nissan Leaf. I don't know if they've since changed. Toyota uses air cooling (from the cabin) for their hybrid batteries, as do others.
- ramraj07 5mo agoThey never advertised that they did. Its not even real true AI. They just struggle with new scenarios. People drive into floods too. They just don't get sensational articles written about it, just posted on reddit.
- sarchertech 5mo agoTaxi drivers with passengers don’t tend to though. At least not at the same rate.
- mschulkind 5mo agoWhoosh...
- fastball 5mo agoThis is why I personally feel like Tesla's approach is more likely to "win". The fundamental blocker to self-driving cars is not sensing / sensor fusion, it is intelligence. And the Tesla approach seems much more likely to achieve functional intelligence than Waymo's.
- mschulkind 5mo agoWhile I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind. 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?
- CSMastermind 5mo agoI got downvoted for saying this last time the topic came up but constraints focus a project. It’s best to start work with as few variables as possible, and only add new ones when absolutely necessary. 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.
- mschulkind 5mo agoI agree, but these are also the exact constraints that lead to an early leader getting overtaken by a longer term, yet better set of plans. Not saying that's the case here, but given how much success Waymo has had so far, over really everything Tesla has produced, says quite a bit about the likelihood of the approach, even if it's not yet there.
- ai-x 5mo agoI thought about this and I think it boils to how the model is trained. 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.
- thegreatpeter 5mo agoLet’s redirect the problem: it’s not the car, it’s the flooding! We should address that first
- retrocryptid 5mo agoThat being said... it's actually somewhat uncommon for humans to drive into flooded streets. To the degree that people think it's notable enough to take videos and post them to social media. I don't have the data, but would be interested to see how many times per passenger mile travelled human-directed and remotely-operated vehicles like Weymos drove into flooded streets. 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.
- slongfield 5mo agoAs far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it's pretty uncommon.
- throwup238 5mo agoIt shows up on social media when it’s a rare event for that area. It’s uncommon but “happens all the time” here in California in the deserts every heavy rain either because locals forget how deep the flood control washes are, or because tourists just drive into them thinking its a straight road, despite all the signs and warnings posted around them.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- themafia 5mo agoAsk the car, in the sense you can, why it drove into the water. 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.