Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/21/waymo-pauses-atlanta-service-as-its-robotaxis-keep-driving-into-floods/

by mattas • 2 months ago

369 462 2 months ago

techcrunch.com

Guestmodinfo• 2 months ago

Maybe the solution is to put in more billions. Every fad creates jobs.

LunicLynx• 2 months ago

If they only would use lidar. Oh wait…

jvanderbot2• 2 months ago

Snark aside, there will probably always be conditions in which waymo is not the right answer. Are they going to do hurricane evacuation? I think removing the driver just necessitates this.

Aboutplants• 2 months ago

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.

steveBK1232• 2 months ago

Evacuation you want to prioritized throughput - think of how little road space 100 people in a bus take up vs say 50 cars with 2 people each. Or even 25 cars with 4 people each.

VoidWhisperer2• 2 months ago

No one should be driving in a hurricane.

I agree, but there are a number of people here in Florida who will do it or die trying (emphasis on the die trying)

VoidWhisperer2• 2 months ago

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.

Jabrov• 2 months ago

Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?

kjkjadksj• 2 months ago

It would be a failure. Turns out they do something stupid. People tested this in sf by calling a bunch of waymos at once for a prank, but I guess that is the best case example of what a panicked evacuation on the service might be like. It was like a ddos attack. They ended up gridlocking themselves and turned it into a real life version of one of those rush hour board games. No one got out of the little area they called the waymos in.

steveBK1232• 2 months ago

I mean the logical conclusion is a dedicated lane for automated cars..

At which point we've reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.

Eji1700• 2 months ago

The problem is they're not designed for that. They aren't spending resources on some master control networking system because in 99% of use cases that won't be useful anyways as most of the traffic being dealt with isn't other waymo's willing to communicate.

There might be some level of adoption where they would, but honestly we're back to "but what about trains/trucks?".

Half the problem with evacuations is people don't want to leave behind their stuff to get destroyed. You'd basically be better off getting a fleet of semi's with some quick and dirty cube system thrown up than a bunch of automated sedans.

tintor6• 2 months ago

"assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid"

This is a big assumption.

This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can't be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.

toast0• 2 months ago

atleast there might be less gridlock

I've never lived in a hurricane area, but when I think of news coverage of problematic evacuations, they're showing people stuck on highways, not people stuck in urban traffic grids.

It's a throughput problem. Computer controlled "car trains" with shorter following distances can boost traffic throughput, but I don't think that would be enough to make evacuation of large cities actually feasible. The highway system is simply not built for that use case. Especially since evacuation often occurs during inclement weather that reduces capacity.

AFAIK, most places try to figure out how to make shelter in place work, because mass evacuation is likely to end up with many people facing the weather event while on the highway.

You could theoretically do better with busses and trains, things, but there's likely not enough busses that are setup for long distance travel available: lots of municipal bus fleets are setup for alternate fuels which is great for emissions but makes it hard to travel to a neighboring state, because there may not be appropriate fueling opportunities on the way. Etc, etc.

bink• 2 months ago

Now imagine if the power is out and cell service is down. We saw that happen in San Francisco and it was chaos.

jvanderbot2• 2 months ago

Until the first traffic cop has to manually direct because lights are out or there was an accident

hooloovoo_zoo• 2 months ago

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

bakies2• 2 months ago

.. well until it hits the flood

AngryData2• 2 months ago

Under an idealized situation sure, but I could get a 150 mph train of cars following me 60 years ago too if anybody had a use for that.

xnx• 2 months ago

I wonder how much of this is trouble perceiving water depth vs integrating that understanding into the larger driver model without creating regressions elsewhere.

thewebguyd2• 2 months ago

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.

kieranmaine• 2 months ago

Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings.

FTA

the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,”
But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory.

sarchertech8• 2 months ago

Do you how often you get flash warnings in Atlanta? And local roads flood far more often than flash food warnings are issued.

If you can’t handle this issue, you really can’t operate in Atlanta.

ge962• 2 months ago

Would be interesting if you can compare the surface roughness of pavement vs. the surface of water, wind would disturb it too

AlotOfReading• 2 months ago

The vehicles have enough information to make the determination. Ground data is available in the point cloud and usually labeled as such. Water sometimes shows up in point clouds, sometimes it doesn't depending on conditions and wavelength.

If the apparent road surface is higher than the mapped ground surface, probably a puddle. If your point cloud has a big hole, also probably a puddle.

This assumes you aren't doing ground plane removal, of course. But it's quite likely that Waymo is using a heavily ML approach these days, and I can imagine the poor thing getting very confused if it's not an explicit training goal.

wongarsu• 2 months ago

Their fleet is constantly scanning the area with lidar, which is assembled into maps. If those maps are in 3d rather than a 2d road grid you can calculate puddles very accurately with no extra sensors:

- Find the edge of the water using vision or lidar

- look up the ground height at that position in your map data. That is the water level

- run a flood fill of the local 3d map starting from that point, with that water level. That gives you an exact shape of the puddle

- for any point on your planned path, you can now check if the point is in the puddle (per the flood fill above) and how deep the water is (difference between puddle's water level and ground height)

- use that either as a go/no-go for a planned path, or even feed this into your pathfinding to find a path with acceptable water level

The main limitation is that it assumes that the ground hasn't changed. It won't help in a landslide, or on muddy ground where other cars have disturbed the ground. But for the classic case of the flooded underpass or flooded dip in the road it should be very accurate

ludicrousdispla• 2 months ago

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

dangus5• 2 months ago

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.

thereisnospork2• 2 months ago

What 3 year old is judging the depth of a puddle before jumping in?

Regardless, consider what you are saying: how can you seriously compare a computer to a (young) human and your response is disappointment that the AI doesn't quite measure up? If it's comparable to a child today it will be comparable to a teen in a decade!

ibejoeb• 2 months ago

I assumed they went to Miami to develop their foul weather capabilities. It's still pretty early.

dangus5• 2 months ago

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.

janderson215• 2 months ago

During the “winter”, sure, but it dumps rain during the same and there are flash floods occasionally. I agree with the parent comment that Miami is a great area to test - especially given that the bad weather is seasonal. They can run 24/7 during the good weather seasons.

Also, the drivers in Miami are a bit more unpredictable than the average driver around the country in my experience, so good challenge cases for self-driving development.

colordrops• 2 months ago

Self driving will never handle all corner cases until they essentially have a frontal cortex. They probably need something like an LLM to help with very high level abstract situations, e.g. avoiding a hurricane like someone else mentioned in this thread.

moomoo11• 2 months ago

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

michaelt• 2 months ago

The driving ML model will take care of the next 10 seconds of driving, in a fast loop deciding what steering and throttle commands to give.

The LLM will apply the high level reasoning needed to deal with longer time horizons and complex decisions, like deciding that the best way to reach the car wash 100 yards away is by walking.

whimsicalism• 2 months ago

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

dmix4• 2 months ago

Tesla's already doing it too

quantummagic2• 2 months ago

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.

paxys4• 2 months ago

Self driving cars are not going to be accepted if they have only marginally better success rates than humans. Just look at the news. Every minor self driving incident is endlessly magnified by the media while millions of human-caused accidents are just a part of life. That's just how our brains work. All major decisions are made primarily based on emotion, not analytics.

aero142• 2 months ago

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.

loudmax2• 2 months ago

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.

eptcyka• 2 months ago

I think self-driving cars will only become better once they can do all the learning in real time and on-board. Otherwise, they will only be as good as the data they trained on - which is ultimately real meat driver data and a derivations of said data.

com2kid• 2 months ago

Not only are people slow to react to unusual situations, but this is taken advantage of by city designers to force people to slow down.

Random planters in the middle of the road? Streets that narrow and then widen? Drivers start slowly creeping along, which means they are less likely to injury pedestrians.

paxys4• 2 months ago

Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.

ge962• 2 months ago

Just get a jeep snorkle

nutjob2• 2 months ago

What happens when you you start floating?

I guess water propulsion... and a rudder?

abfan1127• 2 months ago

jeep snorkels are for air intakes for engines. electric cars don't have air intakes. they have air cooling for batteries... I suppose you could snorkel those.

ramraj07• 2 months ago

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.

sarchertech8• 2 months ago

Taxi drivers with passengers don’t tend to though. At least not at the same rate.

mschulkind5• 2 months ago

Whoosh...

fastball2• 2 months ago

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.

mschulkind5• 2 months ago

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind.

Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

venussnatch• 2 months ago

You can have intelligence with lidar.

You can have even more intelligence with both.

RealityVoid2• 2 months ago

Naaah, Tesla has no edge in intelligence either. It's just a PR piece to sell to investors.

buu700• 2 months ago

I like both approaches. The fact that both exist is a clear win for the rest of us as consumers.

Tesla's approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.

If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.

Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that's great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.

The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.

thegreatpeter• 2 months ago

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

retrocryptid2• 2 months ago

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.

slongfield• 2 months ago

As far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it's pretty uncommon.

throwup238• 2 months ago

It shows up on social media when it’s a rare event for that area. It’s uncommon but “happens all the time” here in California in the deserts every heavy rain either because locals forget how deep the flood control washes are, or because tourists just drive into them thinking its a straight road, despite all the signs and warnings posted around them.

themafia3• 2 months ago

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.

cucumber37328423• 2 months ago

Clearly they haven't actually had any serious problems getting stuck or anything because it'd be all over the news.

I don't think they're barreling into foot+ deep water.

I think they're driving into shallower "perfectly navigable but still deep" puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive like a high end chauffeur.

thewebguyd2• 2 months ago

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

thebruce87m• 2 months ago

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.

manwe1503• 2 months ago

That title sounds so much more dramatic than it seems it actually was. I imagine headlines like: “Billions of python 3.14.4 programs were recalled today when a bug was found in the core itself. No word yet on whether the successor product, Python 3.14.5, will avoid a similar fate. How long will we tolerate being used as test subjects in the developer’s risky games?”

burkaman3• 2 months ago

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.

ck2• 2 months ago

does Waymo use Lidar or is it like Musk's "cost saving" cameras only

jcims• 2 months ago

The spinny things on the vehicle are LIDAR.

hoppyhoppy2• 2 months ago

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

exmicrosoldier• 2 months ago

Lidar is much less accurate in the rain.

micromacrofoot4• 2 months ago

they should probably put some sort of metal strip into the roads that a vehicle can follow reliably, future iterations could make continuous contact to the strip to deliver power to these vehicles, and this would also allow them to become larger by reducing fuel weight or even allow cars to travel very close together for efficiency gains

eodecker• 2 months ago

you are describing a train

llbbdd3• 2 months ago

That's the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it's some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.

asah• 2 months ago

hard part is that cars should drive through shallow water... but how to know the depth?

given accurate mapping + realtime imaging, this should be possible albeit a Big Project(tm).

antonymoose3• 2 months ago

Assuming they can say the water ends at X and the water ends at Y could they not estimate the depth to a good degree of confidence? Roads have a degree of uniformity I would imagine makes this a solvable problem?

dev_l1x_be• 2 months ago

Biblical.

selimthegrim• 2 months ago

Coming to New Orleans soon...

retrocryptid2• 2 months ago

I thought Weymo's were supposed to be "supervised" by humans in the Philippines. Maybe driving in circles in the suburbs and driving into flood waters happens only when the cars are out of mobile data range? Did Weymo pay their mobile phone bill? Does the (somewhat) autonomous system on the car decide when to flag a human for help? I would have expected a human to be watching all the time. Are they experiencing labor problems in the Philippines? Maybe Weymo doesn't want to pay their remote operators as much as the remote operators want to get paid?

OsrsNeedsf2P• 2 months ago

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

jeffbee• 2 months ago

It's an interesting illustration of how widely and quickly misinformation spreads, though.

losvedir• 2 months ago

I think another way of framing it is "Waymo pauses Atlanta service due to weather conditions", which doesn't sound at all unreasonable to me. It's no different from "Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm" or whatever.

I think that self driving cars won't ever be able to handle every condition out there, and so there's probably a time when the system will be paused / shutdown when conditions aren't safe to drive in. Honestly, I wish we could do this with human drivers for that matter, too, but some will press on even when they shouldn't...

stetrain• 2 months ago

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.

etempleton• 2 months ago

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them.

Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going to be at AGI in a few years? I get people want these things to happen, but I just don’t see it happening any time soon. The whole tech industry feels built on what maybe, someday, possibly, could happen but most likely won’t, but we are all going to act like is a sure thing and is just around the corner.

Are there no responsible adults left at these tech companies?

tptacek• 2 months ago

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.

zamadatix• 2 months ago

I'm bullish on AI as a replacement for Uber from airports well behaved climates I frequent but bearish on how long it'll take to actually make a damn for me needing my car in Ohio until the mid-late 2030s at this rate. It's just so close and so far away at the same time.

RationPhantoms2• 2 months ago

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.

ACCount374• 2 months ago

"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.

A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.

Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad.

AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.

Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.

Theodores2• 2 months ago

The option that doesn't exist in America is to get the bus.

Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.

The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.

We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.

Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn't dissapoint.

There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper 'windscreen'. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.

Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?

Maybe. But maybe not.

The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that 'pulled out on the bus', that was a highway maintenance issue.

There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and 'our' bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.

At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn't as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.

One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn't the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from 'traffic', as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.

I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.

3498q2• 2 months ago

Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.

Even on two lane roads: if an idiot overtakes into oncoming traffic there is usually just enough space for three vehicles next to each other. Can a Waymo move sharply to the right so there are two cars on each side with the overtaking idiot in the middle and all just fit on the road? I had to do that maneuver at least twice.

Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?

Can you open the Windows and get out if the thing decides to drive into a lake?

I don't know, currently defensive driving is the better option.

ACCount374• 2 months ago

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".

autoexec9• 2 months ago

The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast.

I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.

I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.

JamesSwift2• 2 months ago

Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly.

In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?

48terry• 2 months ago

A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".

"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla

Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.

mxkopy• 2 months ago

The false equivalence of emotional maturity with being able to chase production is really telling.

When people think of autonomous driving as a solved problem it evokes something very specific. It means vehicles can drive on their own, without guidance. Until you solve AVs you don’t have a claim to present whatever you actually have as such. There’s no “good enough” for AVs, you’ve either solved them or you haven’t.

reus09• 2 months ago

That isn’t being a "responsible adult." That is an irresponsible adult shifting the blame and calling it practical.

glenngillen• 2 months ago

Yeah, while the "average" person might be able to gracefully handle these situations there's still a lot of people who do things that to me seem obviously silly and avoidable.

Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.

FYI, 59 days since the last incident apparently: https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com

saghm7• 2 months ago

Floods might be an edge case in the Bay Area, but if you're trying to drive along the Gulf of Mexico it's probably something you're going to want to plan for. I'm not sure that adding an override will help by the time your car is submerged in six feet of water.

streetfighter64• 2 months ago

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.

This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.

xedrac• 2 months ago

It's funny how people take this perspective for Waymo, but when it comes to Tesla FSD, they are much less forgiving, even though I think Tesla's performance is at least as good, if not better.

bsimpson• 2 months ago

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.

yurishimo• 2 months ago

Tbf, I think you’re just experiencing a downside of living in NYC. I’ve only ever been there as a tourist, but I wouldn’t ever dream of renting a motorcycle in the city for the reasons you mention.

For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate.

Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general.

I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)

aerhardt2• 2 months ago

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.

fragmede8• 2 months ago

The reason they can't do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.

liveoneggs• 2 months ago

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.

northerdome• 2 months ago

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.

keybored• 2 months ago

AI as commonly discussed is just pretty-general intelligence that is very economically valuable. Not AGI outside of the true believers.

And can we discuss AI drivers and AI LLMs in the same paragraph? One is a special application of trying to emulate a very particular human embodiment, with all the sensory challenges. The other is a brain in a vat. Both can fail and flourish independent of each other, or at least I see little overlap.

red75prime• 2 months ago

VLAs (vision-language-action models), which are offspring of LLMs, and their versions that are more suitable to edge devices are being used in self-driving to add common sense to path planners ("don't drive through a police standoff", things like that).

wtp1saac• 2 months ago

I'm not aware of any self-driving widely available ten years ago. I just took my Model Y over Highway 1 in California without requiring human intervention (other than when I chose to pull the car over).

Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn't absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility.

But, given ten years ago this didn't exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn't seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective.

Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort?

EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.

WarmWash2• 2 months ago

One of the biggest challenges with self driving cars is that the cars must be substantially safer than human driven cars.

Human driven cars kill tons of people. Everyday in the US 115 people wake up who will be dead from a car accident by midnight.

But if a self driving car kills one human? Your company and mission is cooked.

Besides the immense engineering challenge, the bar is also way way way higher.

cryptoegorophy• 2 months ago

Robots vs cars? Robots are much much safer. One is a killing machine going 100km/h, other one is a slow moving thing. You don’t need fast reaction for a robot. Tesla should’ve started with robots first and then self driving.

saghm7• 2 months ago

And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them.

I guess that's what you get when you test your cars far 20 years in a state that's almost perpetually in a state of drought.

On the other hand, as someone who grew up in New England, laughing about news stories of highways in warmer states getting backed up because of an inch or two or snow wasn't an uncommon occurrence, so maybe having trouble driving during unfamiliar weather is just a sign that they're learning to drive like humans too well

contubernio2• 2 months ago

Flooded roadways completely throw human drivers too.

tsycho• 2 months ago

Is your argument:

- Only ship products when they are perfect against every possible edge condition?

- If Waymo fails in a few scenarios today after 20 years of effort, they can never succeed?

bps1418• 2 months ago

Is it so hard for LiDAR/Camera to detect flood water on road. Water on a road looks like a flat surface to sensors.

httpz• 2 months ago

Guessing the depth of a puddle is not an easy task. Many untrained horses will refuse to step into shallow puddles. Then we also have human drivers driving into flooded road.

bhelkey• 2 months ago

Maybe a dumb question, why do electric cars have issues with water?

My understanding was that ICE cars have trouble because water get's drawn into the engine. Water in the engine causes it to stall. And the engine must have air in flow and out flow.

An electric car doesn't need air in the same way (no oxygen to ignite with gasoline, no air to compress and expand).

Shouldn't electric cars to much better at driving through water?

LatencyKills• 2 months ago

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.

SoftTalker3• 2 months ago

Yep if they are watertight they will float, if they aren't, they'll fill up with water.

hamdingers• 2 months ago

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.

callbacked• 2 months ago

that and the seal for the battery enclosure can seize up after continuous drives through dirty water, the next passenger may not be so lucky and end up stranded once water breaches the battery pack

s3p• 2 months ago

soaked passengers will want a refund

This is so funny. I can imagine customers floating along in their Waymo thinking, "wow I need a refund for this".

thunderfork• 2 months ago

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)

AngryData2• 2 months ago

You also have to consider the bouyancy of wheels and body panels not yet filled with water which will kill traction, or if the water is moving it doesn't take a lot to push vehicles around.

Most cars crossing water don't get stuck because the intake is blocked by water but because they either floated or get pushed away by the flow (or slammed into the water hard enough to break stuff). If you maintain forward movement and dont float most cars will keep going in water 4-6 inches above the intake height because of the wake and bubble of the engine compartment. You only really benefit from a snorkel if you are offroading through water where there may be unseen holes because submerging your entire engine and drivetrain that deep is still a horrible idea even with a snorkel.

Also if you don't have a direct motor on each drive wheel you still have to worry about water entering differentials and transfer cases even if the electronics are perfectly sealed.

dhbradshaw• 2 months 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.

themafia3• 2 months ago

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.

skybrian• 2 months ago

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

Retric• 2 months ago

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.

overfeed3• 2 months ago

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 Waymo 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.

mixdup• 2 months ago

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

bluGill9• 2 months ago

Human drivers are very very bad. Being better than humans is a low bar with plenty of room to be bad as well.

ranger2072• 2 months ago

Well, only one Waymo got stuck in that flood, while at least two human-driven cars did, so by pure counting metrics they are better lol. But in my experience driving around them Waymos are much much better than most Atlanta drivers, not that that's a high bar

grumbel• 2 months ago

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.

outside2344• 2 months ago

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

krackers• 2 months ago

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...

burnte5• 2 months ago

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.

marcosdumay• 2 months ago

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.

EA-3167• 2 months ago

It’s been clear for a while to anyone without money riding on this that the relatively “easy” part fooled a lot of people into assuming that the last push to full self driving wouldn’t be radically greater challenge.

rawgabbit• 2 months ago

Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?

This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.

gensym• 2 months ago

Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.

pj_mukh• 2 months ago

"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "

I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.

Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.

P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.

Ekaros• 2 months ago

To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.

Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.

vrighter• 2 months ago

testing cannot prove the absence of bugs. It can only prove that you didn't find any, which is a completely different thing

sumeno• 2 months ago

Just because there are real world failures doesn't mean they didn't do simulations. It could just mean the simulation didn't account for something different in the real world.

The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...

autoexec9• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

“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?

cm2187• 2 months ago

The final boss will be driving in Rome

YarickR2• 2 months ago

Oh come on. Not even driving anywhere in Europe; higher difficulty levels would be Turkey , India, Russia, Egypt. Add countryside for extra points. Add harvest season in countryside for unique achievement. Add rainy/snowy season in countryside to master this game.

blackoil• 2 months ago

Come to an Indian city. You'll have cars, 2w, auto, cows coming from 7 directions everywhere.

utopiah2• 2 months ago

Rome? How about Napoli or Palermo?

sarchertech8• 2 months ago

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.

This is also a huge disadvantage because any flaws in the software that don’t show up in a slow rollout will be present in every single car.

It’s a contrived example, but say a new billboard campaign rolls out that causes every car to immediately veer away from it.

KennyBlanken3• 2 months ago

Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That's been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.

Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn't do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being 'pulled over.'

These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it's the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.

jimbo8084• 2 months ago

The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.

JimTheMan• 2 months ago

Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!

thehappypm• 2 months ago

All cars require a workforce to maintain though.

YinglingHeavy• 2 months ago

They will lose to Tesla cabs, due to price and not having full control of their supply chain.

fhub• 2 months ago

I'm glad a very wealthy company is investing in hard tech R&D. Irrespective of the projected financial outcome.

atherton94027• 2 months ago

Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.

BurningFrog3• 2 months ago

I think Google can handle paying for any number of $250k cars to get a good share of the future of transportation.

I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.

cyberax2• 2 months ago

The cost of Waymo cars is immaterial right now. They are not production models, they are test mules. So you might as well make them nice-looking.

Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.

HDBaseT4• 2 months ago

A human has to pass a test to be able to drive. A human (for the most part) doesn't just unknowingly drive into floods.

Why aren't we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.

bitpush3• 2 months ago

Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?

Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?

If it is just taking a regular DL test, then waymo, Tesla and others would be driving all across the US by now. They already have a higher standard

rajbot• 2 months ago

A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.

There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.

krupan5• 2 months ago

I love when people bring this up. When was the last time anyone here had to pass an actual driving test, like where you have to physically drive a car? For me, age 16, which was more years ago than I like to count.

How many licenses do we revoke for violating traffic laws? Getting into a car crash? Injuring someone in a car crash? Killing someone in a car crash? Not nearly enough! We are so lax about driving it's insane. But you want to hold these robot cars to some much higher standard? I mean, ok, but how much higher? It's a really freaking low bar right now

indianbunghole• 2 months ago

*roll out

saghm7• 2 months ago

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.

Sure, because human drivers famously have to be taught with each new generation that driving into six feet of water is a bad plan.

adrianN• 2 months ago

I have seen plenty of videos online that suggest that this is a true fact.

geoffpado• 2 months ago

As someone who grew up in a flood-prone area… yeah. Yeah, they do. Sometimes more than once per person.

snakeboy• 2 months ago

Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?

This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.

rob74• 2 months ago

To me it looks like it's a problem with the "default attitude" (can't think of a better name) of the Waymo driving software. When a human sees that the road surface ahead is in some unknown condition (flooded, covered in lava, whatever) they usually default to caution - better stop and check first. While Waymo apparently defaults to blithely driving ahead, after all its maps tell it that there's a road ahead and it didn't detect any known obstacle, so what could possibly go wrong?

krupan5• 2 months ago

That is so not true of humans or Waymos

ViewTrick1002• 2 months ago

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.

That is not a given when dealing with "machine learning".

They will need to have metrics for all these scenarious and ensure when they solve the 20th problem down the line this one does not regress, but instead it becomes more and more generalized.

21asdffdsa12• 2 months ago

I can already see the horrified passengers in a robo-taxi going full "military-survival" mode, driving at rally speed over fast flooding back-roads, evaluating moral dilemmas like ("If i stop and pick up one more, i become a lorry on a rail at the next flood intersection").

Surprisingly good at things that get you otherwise killed. Like - it auto-backs up once it detects ground rumbles of the ground moving during a mud avalanche.

Sharlin• 2 months ago

An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.

nottorp2• 2 months ago

That's the reality. For both them and Apple.

By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?

shakna• 2 months ago

We already have a huge number of safety regulations for cars, that take into account all these various things. There's also insurance that covers flood damage and cars. These are the things that red flag something you need to test, if you want to take over driving the car.

This isn't a new challenge - it is a known one!

acidhousemcnab2• 2 months ago

Sounds like they need to employ more "neurodivergents" to make these robots work correctly, before they are all Silent Greened, and it is only the CEOs left bashing each other's heads in with rocks.

Hnrobert42• 2 months ago

I'm not familiar familiar with this expression silent green. Do you mean Soylent Green?

cheesecompiler• 2 months ago

And to me it seems like you're justifying a lack of oversight and dangers of this technology for what purpose exactly? Why are you defending a corporation?

krupan5• 2 months ago

Are you talking about automobile technology in general? Human operated vehicles kill a lot of people each year. People get tiny slaps on the wrist for breaking the law on the roads, crashing into other cars, crashing into pedestrians. It's actually really hard to lose your driver's license. We can probably give Waymo a little leeway for driving into a puddle that's deeper than it estimated

keeda• 2 months ago

This is just part of the slog that autonomous driving was always going to be.

Many many years ago I happened to be in a conversation with one of the guys on a team that participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. It was only the second such race after the 2004 one, but arguably the one which set off the autonomous driving race we see today. (Sebastian Thrun's team came in 2nd.)

I went into the conversation thinking it was going to be an extremely challenging but tractable sensors + control-systems problem. But by the end of the conversation I was like, OMG this is going to be a long-haul slog of solving an unending stream of problems, some potentially even AI-complete (i.e. requiring human-level judgment.)

We mostly discussed why his and most other teams failed and the failures were so myriad and so technically intractable that I could not see a path to full self-driving for at least two decades. And all of this was offroad, so it didn't even approach the challenges of sharing human-occupied streets. I cannot remember any details unfortunately, but I remember that one car got stuck in a loop due to a problem that would have been trivial for a human to bypass... but that required human-level judgment. As an analogy it was something like a soft obstacle that could safely be driven over. But for the car to know that it would require a database and an "understanding" of all possible obstacles. An LLM could have helped, but back then they were still firmly in the realm of SciFi.

So the only feasible solution was to painstakingly identify all the edge-cases and work through them slowly, carefully, one-by-one. Which is what Waymo has been doing. This is also why when Elon made his "full self-"driving announcements I knew he had absolutely NO idea what he was talking about, and he was likely going to move fast and break people.

Flooded streets is just another "bump on the road" to full self-driving, but it seems we're actually getting there now. In retrospect, my 2-decade estimate was surprisingly accurate, I have no idea how I landed on that particular number!

t1234s• 2 months ago

What are the chances that google just shuts down waymo once they get whatever they need from it. Weren't there other ambitious projects under google that had a similar fate?

wutwutwat• 2 months ago

It can't mean that, there's a lake there!

ls612• 2 months ago

Humans have a hard time judging how deep water is too! Turns out neither Lidar nor vision/cameras have the right ability to sense water depth.

Kye• 2 months ago

We get popup thunderstorms here and those often mean zero visibility conditions even without a flood. It's just part of life in the spring and summer with all that chaotic moisture coming off the Gulf. We might get a few minutes warning. If your robot can't handle that then you're going to have a bad time.

tintor6• 2 months ago

... but their World Model said it was ok to drive through the flood.

Slide 3 in "Extreme weather conditions and natural disasters" section: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

jp0001• 2 months ago

My guess in the North East in the winter there will be similar stories.

jeffwask• 2 months ago

We had one do this in San Antonio too. Right across the well labeled low water crossing and whoosh.

BobBagwill• 2 months ago

You're missing the obvious. Waymo trains with human driver data, and idiotic humans drive into deep water constantly. Oh, you want Waymo's to drive better than humans?

Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection. "Tricky," he said finally.

dmix4• 2 months ago

That's not how the training data works. It's not just a constant stream of human driving footage with no regard for good or bad performance

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

Working out kinks. There are going to be a bunch of AI bad people trying their best to pounce on this.

reed1234• 2 months ago

I imagine it is hard to determine how deep the water is. There is a lot of training with small puddles (ignore) and not much with deep water.

Still, it should be cautious as any human driver would be.

Findecanor• 2 months ago

This is a classic case of: if the situation is not in the training data then the model is unequipped to handle it.

We've seen the phenomenon before. We've been warned against the phenomenon before, and we'll see it again in other contexts in the future for sure.

boxed• 2 months ago

This goes for humans just as well. Humans get stuck. That waymo paused their op to avoid bad press and then get bad press BECAUSE they were being careful is enormously stupid for everyone involved.

renegade-otter• 2 months ago

Didn't ALL Waymos at once pulled over recently because it started raining?

This ain't Arizona - Atlanta has REAL weather.

theodpHN• 2 months ago

Self-driving divining rods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing

dang• 2 months ago

Recent and related:

Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151767 - May 2026 (214 comments)

InfiniteRand• 2 months ago

You can create very sophisticated simulations all you want, but in the end, you can only test the accuracy of your simulation when you try the real thing

jaxn• 2 months ago

Nashville is paused too. I don’t know why.

essekar• 2 months ago

anyone has any videos?

_HMCB_• 2 months ago

Can we please stop this experiment.

nunez• 2 months ago

Inconvenient, but I'm glad they're erring on the side of safety here. Waymo is doing a surprisingly great job at expanding their network.

dwa3592• 2 months ago

I mean if they did this to avoid accidents and road congestions for other human drivers then it makes sense.

mancerayder• 2 months ago

Oh, boy. I guess that means they haven't gotten to the snow phase of the testing yet.

jimjimjim• 2 months ago

I think I made a HN comment a few months/years ago about driverless cars having problems with floods across roads after watching a downpour in Kuala Lumpur flood half a street in minutes. The road was down to one lane and drivers in both directions took it in turns to use that one lane. That would be a difficult situation for a driverless car to handle.

utopiah2• 2 months ago

Mandatory "FSD next year!" /s

Teasing aside can you imagine how fucking scary it must be to be in a self-driving car that drives straight in flowing water? Damn.

voidUpdate• 2 months ago

I'm honestly slightly surprised that "the road markings suddenly completely vanish" doesn't raise some kind of internal warning to the system

philjohn• 2 months ago

I wonder if the decent wade depth (500mm/20") of the i-pace's they use was input as a constraint.

leumon• 2 months ago

I guess sometimes you have to take a step backwards for making progress with something.

jgalt212• 2 months ago

Waymo, who's arguably the most competent operator by far, cannot handle Atlanta. But TSLA and its Potemkin village-like robotaxi service trades at 380 PE. Figure that one out.

DannyBee2• 2 months ago

An infinite number of comments about how good/bad/etc this is, and nobody seems to have noticed that it is literally a report of exactly one waymo getting stuck in flooded water that caused this.

I live in Atlanta. This was 3-4 inches of rain in 30 minutes, which is uncommon and was unexpected enough that the flash flood warnings were not issued until well after the flooding occurred.

The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood?

I know it's more than 1 because there were 4 cars people abandonded on my street alone! I'm not even on that flooded or busy of a street.

beernet• 2 months ago

The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood?

This is the important point here. Human beings are highly apologetic towards other human beings, but not so much towards machines. At the same time, the expectation towards machines is much higher.

Tells you more about humans than machines.

flextheruler• 2 months ago

Comparing individual drivers to a taxi company is disingenuous and silly.

"How many taxi drivers got stuck?" is the actual comparison.

This is a paid taxi service. If I got an uncooked meal from a restaurant and their defense was that more people accidentally don't cook their food long enough than we do I don't think I'd be accommodating.

Elzair• 2 months ago

I saw a Waymo for the first time IRL last week in Atlanta. It stopped on a narrow street for about 5 minutes to wait for the person to come out. The people in the cars behind it were not happy!

PeterStuer• 2 months ago

Why are there that many foods in Atlanta that this is an issue? Not saying Waymo should not be able to deal with this if that is a regular occurrence in the area they operate, but still seems weird.

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

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