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dhbradshaw 2 hours ago

To 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.

grumbel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.

krackers an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

brookst an hour ago | parent [-]

IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.

marcosdumay 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.

But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.

burnte an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to drive through deep water.

QuercusMax 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!

outside2344 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The fact that they aren't a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.

antonymoose an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.

trollbridge 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ve lived in a place where it flooded every year or two. It floods regularly where I live now too.

Locals know which roads to avoid and not to drive into a flood.

autoexec 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.

They should have done that flood training when they weren't putting people's lives at risk. It's not as if this was a situation that no one could have anticipated would arise. Over half of all drownings in a flood happen because of people driving into them. They're just lucky that they stopped service before they had more blood on their hands, but the fact that they were willing to experiment on the public first is concerning.

ashdksnndck 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

“More blood” seems to imply that somebody has already been hurt or died from Waymo driving into floods, but I don’t think that is the case?

autoexec 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

As far as I know, nobody has been hurt from floods while in a Waymo. They hide their safety data from the public though (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...) so it's hard to say for sure. They've certainly been involved in crashes, killed pets (I actually give them a pass on the bodega cat), run over elementary school children, etc. Waymo has said it's only a matter of time until they kill someone and they've got plans for how to handle deaths caused by their cars, but they expect the public to accept those deaths.

themafia 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If 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.

mixdup an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure why you would say there's no significant inclement weather in Atlanta. The flooding this week was not super common, but also not unheard of. It rains here a LOT in the summer

burnte an hour ago | parent [-]

Agreed, this happens here every year, it's why we built O4W park the way it is, and built many other drainage structures similarly. We have a real runoff problem. Waymo picked a great city to train the cars on weird weather and weirder roads. :D

overfeed an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather

You may be relieved to hear Wayno is rolling out to Portland, Oregon. It's not in the south, and with over 150 rainy days per year, it ranks among the rainiest US cities.

kibwen 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Rain is one thing, but despite the rain Oregon is almost dead-last among all the states in terms of flood risk. It gets constant drizzles, not sporadic deluges.

autoexec 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I'll be relieved when I hear that they did it without killing anyone. Considering they didn't bother to work out how to handle floods before they put people's lives at risk everywhere else, it's not all that reassuring that they're now going to YOLO it in Portland

skybrian 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.

themafia an hour ago | parent [-]

I 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 an hour ago | parent [-]

> 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 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Better 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.