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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.

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.

This is very much expected while the kinks are worked out. The reason Waymo is rolling out their vehicles in Atlanta in partnership with Uber is precisely for scenarios like this. Standard Uber service provides a backstop for when times when Waymos can't fulfill rides.

The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".

A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.

If you think that "flooded roadway" is a case that's handled gracefully by every human driver, and it's the AI that's uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you.

Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of "water flood engine damage" cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of "is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out".

I was (I think the search bar will prove this out) a pretty committed skeptic of driverless cars, but I've come around on them in some use cases. I'm not optimistic about them on highways. But they solve some important problems in regional/local transit.

We're contemplating standing up an EV shuttle service in Oak Park. It will fail. As I understand it, we've piloted non-EV versions of a shuttle service; they failed. The problem is that in small local areas, the staffing for a useful transit service is too expensive; that's because "useful" imposes constraints about responsiveness, coverage, and most of all hours of service, which mean the service won't pencil out with the ridership it'll get.

An autonomous vehicle transit service in our muni would probably work fine; it's a strict grid system with very low speed limits (AVs will, in our area, be strictly better drivers than the median human drivers --- this isn't a statement about human fallibility so much as an observation about scofflawry in our area). And if the product existed, we could afford it, because we wouldn't be paying fully loaded headcount costs for 2+ shifts of drivers at epsilon levels of utilization.

For whatever it's worth, I don't really have "autonomous vehicles" and "LLMs" in the same bucket in my head. I'm bullish on both, but for very different reasons. It usually doesn't occur to me to think of Waymos as "AI", though, obviously, they are.

I actually took a waymo down North Ave (where one got stuck) a few weeks ago and it was very pleasant.

I'm pretty conservative about this stuff but the waymo is genuinely nice to ride in.

I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I'll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don't want to) deal with malice.

Motorcycling used to be one of my biggest hobbies.

I live in NYC now. Drivers here are some combination of utterly selfish and mindlessly distracted. You can't even trust them to stop at red lights. It gives me a huge amount of pause riding here.

"Cars are dangerous, necessary in many places, but often driven by irresponsible people" is a huge problem that needs solving. Waymo seems to have been doing a pretty fantastic job at it.

And even if they couldn't figure out how to route around floods, floods are rare. They're still a net benefit to society.

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport.

To your point, knowledge work, _as a whole_ is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

Just get a jeep snorkle

That 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.

Let’s redirect the problem: it’s not the car, it’s the flooding! We should address that first

Ask 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.

This 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.

They 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.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop moving

That said, I know a scenario like that would never happen, probably for the best.

Evacuation is a use case in my mind. Having a fleet of shuttles on command to move people in preparation of a hurricane would be a benefit. They would obviously need to put weather limitations during actual storms because no one should be driving in a hurricane.

Except the Waymo can do 150 mph bumper to bumper with other Waymos if you let them.

I don't think there's a good solution right now. You can't just go based on surrounding traffic because humans are also stupid and flood their cars all the time.

You could maybe use short-wave infrared cameras combined with ground penetrating radar, but it'll get real expensive so probably not commercially viable.

I think the only "good" solution is to have the car be overly paranoid, and if it detects water on the roadway that's bigger than some arbitrary diameter (to rule out mud puddles), then the car has to assume its a flood, stop, and escalate to a human or change the route.

Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings. Maybe we as a society need to top forcing everything to still operate normally during natural disasters. It's OK to shut things down when safety calls for it, and that applies to human drivers too. If areas are flooding, stay home.

In many situations, the depth of the water doesn't matter as driving into it will likely result in death.

I feel like re-reading this sentence a few times sends me right to the twilight zone of AI psychosis.

It’s 2026 and self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a puddle and a flooded street, something a 3 year old can do.

Google literally just got off stage telling us that AGI is almost here. Wake me up when this doesn’t feel like an NFT ape fever dream.

And here we are talking about this like “oh gosh golly I wonder if this is some simple thing that could have been easily solved but they were trying to avoid regressions”

Get out of town, man.

I wish every dollar spent by investors on Waymo went into more frequent public bus service instead. A regular-ass bus with a human driver.

They can drive through surprisingly deep water, but you'd still rather avoid it for a lot of reasons. Dangerous loss of traction and risk of getting swept away, soaked passengers will want a refund, and a sopping wet interior will take the vehicle out of service for a while.

Another reason water and ICE cars don't mix is the wiring harness. Even if you don't flood the engine, you'll be having trouble with the electrical for the rest of the car's life. (Or, at least, that's the conventional wisdom)

Deep water can still damage an EV by getting into connectors, sensors, wheel bearings, brakes, and cabin electronics.

They can also float just like a regular car.

Doubtful. They probably just pause service when it rains. Miami weather is ideal most of the time.

These self-driving companies have made very little progress on dealing with weather for how long they’ve spent on the problem.

Well except that there were incidents of cars getting stuck in floods with passengers before they paused the service.

A closer analogy would be ""Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm after 3 planes slide off the runway due to ice"

Absolutely I think there will be a disconnect between when people think they should be able to drive somewhere (ie to work in a no-visibility blizzard) and when ideal self-driving cars would allow themselves to operate. Maybe society will adjust to be more flexible to natural conditions, or maybe people will get frustrated and drive themselves into the poor conditions as always.

A frontal cortex isn't enough; there are plenty of corner cases that humans fail at too. The real test is if self-driving performs on par, or better than, humans in the vast majority of cases. If it saves 50,000 lives a year to go with self-driving, it's a net-win even if there are a few people who die in situations where they would have survived with a human driver behind the wheel.

Humans don't handle all corner cases. People can be slow to react to completely novel or surprising situations. There will be corner cases where humans generally do better than a machine, but the simple rule to slow down and come to a halt if things look too weird or confusing will almost always be the right answer.

Ideally, driverless cars will one day be better drivers than humans and this will save tens of thousands of traffic deaths per year. Holding up progress because cars will be confused in extremely rare or improbable situations will cost more lives than it saves.

They will add flooded streets to the training simulation and this problem will go away. Eventually, the corner cases not in the training simulation will be so corner they basically never happen. Waymo can be incredibly successful without dealing with "surprise clown parade" or whatever.

this is absolutely already a thing under development, you can see Waymo is hiring for reasoning roles

how would a llm help

maybe a little biological brain engineered to think it is a car with api access to the car hardware via the llm?

imagine you get into the car and in the center console you just see a floating brain in vat like fallout

you are describing a train

> One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.

Thousands of Waymos recalled after robotaxi swept into a creek https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2011dl4xo

> It follows an incident on 20 April in San Antonio, Texas, where an empty Waymo vehicle entered a flooded road and was swept into a creek.

Nobody in it but sounds serious enough.

There was one in Atlanta that made the local news where it went too deep and stalled out, was stuck for over an hour.

Waymo uses lidar. There's lots of information about it on the web.

The spinny things on the vehicle are LIDAR.

Lidar is much less accurate in the rain.

Your assumption that Waymos are "(somewhat) autonomous" is wrong, which is why your questions and conclusion don't make any sense