For common routes, yes. For getting to John's house, where the path there sometimes floods, no.

So the first waymo to get to this less used road to john’s will not have the data rather than every waymo that travels down a new highway, that then becomes a problem if it rains.

One car with an issue of first coincides with rain on a less used road?

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nomel 25 days ago | parent [-]

Well, it's closer to: any car with stale data and sufficient water depth is a financial and PR disaster. These cars are not cheap, and a tiktok of someone being driven into the water is even more expensive!

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cma 25 days ago | parent [-]

As soon as the car descends below what was mapped it should be able to know there is a discrepency.

Satellite monitoring is also available for detecting extensive road work which they could use to invalidate and send out something to remap.

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nomel 25 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, if you drive around slow enough so you can stop in time. Lets say coefficient of friction is around 0.5. That means you can drive around town at a brisk 12mph, if you need to stop within 10 feet (with 0ms reaction time).

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cma 24 days ago | parent [-]

People usually drive slow too through flooded sections. They don't have the advantage of any descent of the car diverging from HD maps, or any water level visually below HD map surface serving as an immediate warning.

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nomel 24 days ago | parent [-]

> drive slow too through flooded section

This first requires knowing you're in a flooded section. That's the gap here, is it not? My point is that you can't use descent AS a "flooded zone" detection because then your speed, by the harsh mistress of psychics, is very limited everywhere you go, flooded or not, because stopping distance has to be kept very short since just a few feet of overshoot, when your flood detection triggers, is the difference between ruined engine or not.

Maybe that's their fix, if a flat mirrored surface is detected, slow way down, because perceiving depth of muddy water before getting in it is hard.

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cma 24 days ago | parent [-]

I'm assuming there is no issue detecting water over the road, only depth below it that has changed since the HD map was made.

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nomel 24 days ago | parent [-]

And, we're full circle at this point.

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cma 23 days ago | parent [-]

They had an issue detecting them here. But my understanding was people were saying beyond seeing the flooded section there is a fundamental problem that they can never solve that if there is new construction under the flooded section lowering the level of the road they can never deal with that. But as long as it is not a sudden dip or sinkhole I think HD mapping can still help with that since they can monitor the cars altitude as it traverses it and detect divergence from what is mapped early.

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