Waymos 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.

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MBCook 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That’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.

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JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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Wowfunhappy 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If the alternative is that the vehicle explodes, sure. And since GP did say "final fallback", I suppose you're right. But if the cars are actually reaching that point, they probably shouldn't be on the road in the first place.

The not-quite-final fallback should be to pull over.

	▲	MBCook 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. I wasn’t considering people, just getting the car out of the way. I wasn’t considering people taking it as a given that any time the car gives up the doors should be unlocked for passengers to leave if they feel it’s safe. And as a passenger, I’d feel way safer getting out if it pulled over instead of just stopped in the middle of the street and other cars were trying to drive around it. No one should ever be trapped inside by the car.

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torham 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They now apparently run these things on the interstate, the car needs to do more than just stop.