I 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."

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TZubiri 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"But think of the thousands that will run late!"

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jeffbee 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretty 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.

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scoofy 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I'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.

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jeffbee 5 hours ago | parent [-]

OK 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 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that’s a perfectly reasonable standard for a normal operating environment. In emergencies I think “safe” is preferable to “non-disruptive.”