[HN Gopher] Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causi...
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Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
Author : rwoll
Score : 151 points
Date : 2025-12-21 05:12 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (missionlocal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (missionlocal.org)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion:
|
| _PG &E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022
| rwoll wrote:
| Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to
| an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is
| not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are "confused"
| by traffic lights being out.
| platevoltage wrote:
| That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually
| navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if
| Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
| creato wrote:
| The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total
| chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already
| happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1
| wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
| beAbU wrote:
| I moved from South Africa to Ireland 2 years ago. It was
| very noticeable to me how drivers in Ireland have no idea
| what to do when the lights are out. Absolute chaos!
|
| In south africa, traffic lights not working is a daily
| occurrence. And we've all learned how to navigate a dead
| intersection wit zero casualties.
|
| Massive 6 way intersections with 2-4 lanes per direction
| worked perfectly with everyone taking turns to go.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| That's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the
| middle of the block with nobody in front of them.
| jollymonATX wrote:
| Would have hoped they trained for this but at least now they
| likely will be.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| frankly at least at the intersection i witnessed i saw plenty
| of them handling it
| VonTum wrote:
| I miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was
| meant in a humorous way.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was
| meant in a humorous way_
|
| Not sure what about this isn't funny. Nobody died. And the
| notion that traffic lights going down would not have
| otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
| victorbojica wrote:
| Not directly. But what about the emergency services not
| being able to reach their destinations? It stops being
| funny really fast
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what about the emergency services not being able to
| reach their destinations?_
|
| Did they have documented problems?
|
| This is akin to the Waymos honking at each other at 3AM.
| Annoying. Potentially dangerous in various circumstances.
| But ultimately just destructive in a way unlikely to
| repeat.
| fragmede wrote:
| Same thing as if human drivers have crashed their cars in
| the middle of an intersection due to traffic lights being
| out, I would presume.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights
| and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the
| right call to suspend service, they will probably update
| their playbook to suspend service during power outages in
| the future.
| cmurf wrote:
| Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but
| will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at
| all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable.
|
| At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive
| social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and
| unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot.
|
| Waymo should lose their operating license based on this
| experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to _everyone_
| to be incapable of basic iteration. There 's a whole set
| of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling
| failed traffic lights. Why have lower expectations of an
| anonymous car than a human?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Waymo should lose their operating license based on this
| experience.
|
| Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your
| draconian reasoning. Because...
|
| > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to
| follow for handling failed traffic lights.
|
| And they don't, it's chaos.
|
| > Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a
| human?
|
| You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous
| cars than humans, it is not the other way around for
| those of us who disagree with you. The only difference is
| that Waymo can get better with experience and humans
| generally don't.
| jjav wrote:
| > > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to
| follow for handling failed traffic lights.
|
| > And they don't, it's chaos.
|
| Do you live in areas where traffic lights go out
| regularly?
|
| Because for human driver it is a non-issue. It becomes an
| all-way stop and you take turns, it is easy. Traffic
| throughput slows down a bit, but nothing approaching
| chaos about it. If waymo can't deal with this, that's a
| problem.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _for human driver it is a non-issue_
|
| Genuine question, do we have data for accident rates in
| traffic-lights-out intersections?
| bombcar wrote:
| If I remember my research correctly, accident _rates_ go
| up but _fatalities and injuries_ go way down.
| will4274 wrote:
| Developing new technologies has risks. In the absence of
| anything really bad actually happening, I think we can
| solve the problem by adding new requirements to Waymo's
| operating license (and all self driving cars) rather than
| kneecapping the technology.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I wonder how Waymos know _that_ the traffic lights are out.
|
| A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we
| just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office
| buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up
| but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently,
| a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit
| up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one
| by one, as if they think the light is not working."
|
| It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither
| green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a
| burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual
| obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers
| that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific
| angles.
|
| Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is
| functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it
| seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the
| side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are
| working.
| Adaptive wrote:
| I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page
| but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be
| publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
| asdff wrote:
| It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something
| that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs
| porphyra wrote:
| I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half
| an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of
| teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
| mingus88 wrote:
| The power outage probably knocked out the infra those
| operators needed to control the cars.
| porphyra wrote:
| True but the comment I replied to mentions a different case
| where a Waymo got stuck for half an hour at a parade.
| fragmede wrote:
| "the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was
| probably congested by all the city residents using theirs
| instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating
| to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during
| the outage.
| mingus88 wrote:
| In my neighborhood, Xfinity goes out every time we lose
| power.
|
| Even with my generator and UPS powering my modem, the
| outage is not resolved until mains power comes back
|
| These monopolies aren't required to have uptime in the
| same way the POTS network was.
|
| We had a week long outage last year and people were
| driving 15 minutes out to get cell signal to catch up on
| their data
| patrick451 wrote:
| Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on
| the road.
| Ukv wrote:
| Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce
| overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-
| distribution scenario would count against this, but may be
| rare enough to not significantly affect the average.
| raldi wrote:
| I'm surprised that either:
|
| 1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,
|
| 2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important
| enough to prioritize, or
|
| 3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless
| failed so badly
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Everyone should have understood that driving requires
| improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke
| challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either
| because it's common sense or because so many people have been
| shouting it for so long.
| raldi wrote:
| But a citywide blackout isn't _that_ uncommon.
| Tade0 wrote:
| It isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this
| should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > But a citywide blackout isn't that uncommon.
|
| I think too many people talk past each other when they use
| the word _common_ , especially when talking about car
| trips.
|
| A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be
| _periodic_ but it 's certainly _frequent_ with a frequency
| above 1 per year.
|
| Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many
| people say "common" meaning "periodic".
| yen223 wrote:
| Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent",
| they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency.
| That's why online communication is tricky!
| pacifika wrote:
| I think that statement is regional. I've never seen one.
| srdjanr wrote:
| I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon
| situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle
| something fits my criteria.
|
| Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do
| when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I
| assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to
| wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules
| sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
| eurleif wrote:
| In practice, no one treats it as a four-way stop, which
| makes it dangerous to treat it as one.
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as
| a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| If you are driving a car on a public street and your
| solution to getting confused is stopping your car in the
| middle of the road wherever this confusion happens to
| arise, and sitting there for however long you are confused,
| you should not be driving a car in the first place. That
| includes AI cars.
| slavik81 wrote:
| What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is
| a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a
| four-way stop.
| A1kmm wrote:
| In many versions of road rules (I don't know about
| California), having four vehicles stopped at an
| intersection without one of the four lanes having priority
| creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four
| vehicles are giving way to others.
|
| Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-
| driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes
| happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially
| if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they
| can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock.
| It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars
| coordinated by different companies.
| array_key_first wrote:
| That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four
| way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting
| it' about technical matters have a long history of being
| hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ
| damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of
| either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being
| impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a
| bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be
| usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with
| GPS.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote
| ops that halted everything
| Zambyte wrote:
| We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out
| of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can
| even link the cars together for efficiency or something like
| that.
| quantified wrote:
| Slot cars at the grown-up level.
| pokstad wrote:
| Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed
| power to these cars using overhead cables.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more
| expensive.
|
| Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph
| charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently
| dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city
| pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
| sofixa wrote:
| Maybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make
| them more efficient.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Have something like metro (maglev trains) too as they are
| more efficient than steel wheels on steel tracks.
|
| Public transport for things like metro/trains/trams/buses are
| honestly underrated.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us
| to have things like that. We must always be in our individual
| bubbles away from the filthy poors.
| rcxdude wrote:
| If you're happy to put those tracks on every road, sure. I
| wonder why no-one's bothered with that before.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell.
| Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were
| ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in
| selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is
| starting from a false premise, because people have bothered
| with that.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I'm well aware that there are multiple options for public
| transport, but none of them are actually as flexible or as
| far reaching as cars/taxis. To me this 'but why not trains'
| on every article about self-driving cars is a tired meme
| that fails to address that these are not equivalent
| options. I might as well say "Well, why don't we get rid of
| these expensive rails and fixed timetables and just lay
| down some cheap concrete and let people navigate how they
| want" in just as condescending a tone and be equally as
| unconvincing.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| There are car lobbyists of course but the streetcars in LA
| at least were put there by housing developments to sell
| suburban homes before most people owned cars. Once the
| homes were sold the corporation that built the rails had no
| incentive to maintain them, and eventually they were spun
| off and went bankrupt (of course competing with cars didn't
| help)
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled
| with. It seems that politicians are congenitally
| completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as
| a concept when they are writing laws.
|
| Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars
| don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as
| free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and
| railed vehicles perform much, much _worse_ at it, which
| is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail
| schedules.
| beAbU wrote:
| You can further optimize the setup by not installing
| engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car
| providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and
| designed for carrying.
| philistine wrote:
| If we do all of that, then we won't need to train them to
| know how to operate in traffic. Perhaps we can give them a
| name in honour of that fact?
| cr125rider wrote:
| And all the power could just come from a few large
| centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could
| just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over
| head...
| fragmede wrote:
| Of course, the maintenance on those wires outside of the
| city means that you'd make electric trains with large
| batteries on them instead.
|
| https://evmagazine.com/articles/tesla-launches-first-all-
| ele...
| beAbU wrote:
| I don't think I buy BEV trains to be honest. I'm
| struggling to think of a proper reason why they might be
| better compared to normal electric trains.
|
| But the linked article is pretty light on info, so I'll
| reserve judgement till more info comes to light.
| namibj wrote:
| They are good for infrequently used track and places
| where overhead wires would be in the way, like that very
| Tesla employee shuttle on it's own track and container
| ports.
|
| It's not the best way to go for mainline track and not
| suitable for long distance high speed trains.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Expense is correlative to scale, likely it's cheaper to
| deploy pantographs than battery factories.
|
| Why did India build a high speed freight corridor with
| overhead power when they could have used batteries
| instead? Because the quantity of battery to power the
| trains doesn't exist, and overhead wires do.
| asdfasvea wrote:
| Fast forward to blackjack and hookers.
| warmedcookie wrote:
| In the original Sim City, having your city entirely use tracks
| instead of roads was superior because there was no traffic
| congestion from tracks
| jrs235 wrote:
| And less pollution from cars.
| will4274 wrote:
| It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self
| driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist.
|
| When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub
| that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of
| your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared
| with unstable and violent people, which while possibly
| "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people
| would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real
| differentiating advantage.
| ailurooo wrote:
| violent unstable people aren't inherent to cities.. they're
| inherent to places that refuse to spend any money on social
| work/housing/and enjoy punishing people
| joshka wrote:
| I for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
| terribleperson wrote:
| In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic
| lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people
| deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like
| it's okay.
|
| Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in
| the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory
| solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with
| no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work
| very well when no one else is behaving that way.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection
| in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting
| pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic
| for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop
| sign.
| morsch wrote:
| In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs
| that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs
| everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
|
| One interesting effect is that there are also often
| pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone.
| Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a
| steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that
| happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited
| pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until
| the police showed up.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Except in NL you guys actually have someone sit and think
| about the flow of traffic, in most other countries the
| design is usually pretty much random. In my parents' city
| in Poland they decided to turn off the traffic lights at
| night and the result is much higher number of accidents.
| Funnily, my father failed to yield the right of way exactly
| when talking about the issue. Yes, theoretically all
| intersections do have full set of signs, but in practice
| the visibility of those signs is extremely limited.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way
| signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
|
| Most places in Poland have this exact setup. And I say
| most because I have not seen one that does not, but I am
| guessing they exist. Maybe some of them have bad
| visibility even?
|
| If one does not respect the yield sign that does not seem
| a signaling problem.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Some don't in Finland. But then it is back to basic rule
| of yielding to traffic from right. Which is pretty common
| on smaller roads so drivers should think about it enough.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > that does not seem a signaling problem.
|
| Average signaling in Poland be like
|
| https://files.catbox.moe/ipl96o.png
| namibj wrote:
| Are the words critical? As a German I read that as "you
| are not the priority road; you may only go left or right,
| but not straight"?
| ailurooo wrote:
| san francisco really really needs this.. the traffic lights
| were incredibly hard to see with the fog and rain..
| kovek wrote:
| I thought the traffic went pretty well tonight in San Francisco
| considering we had this major issue.
| ianstormtaylor wrote:
| That wasn't my experience, having just driven across the city
| and back during tonight's outage. It was actually weirdly
| inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the
| powerless intersections.
|
| There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of
| it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty
| orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world
| where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on
| just fine.
|
| The Waymo's, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While
| walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo
| every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was
| particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both
| directions -- in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i had essentially the opposite experience in close proximity.
| rsanek wrote:
| >in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights
| or stop signs, people get on just fine
|
| Well, sort of. Road injuries / fatalities in countries
| without these kinds of regulations are about an 3-4x higher
| than in those that do have them.
|
| https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565684
| pacifika wrote:
| Number of traffic accidents went down by 50% in this town.
|
| https://worksthatwork.com/1/shared-space
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I think a significant factor helping that to work is the
| mixing of all traffic on the street. I've noticed that in
| LA's Skid Row, where homeless people are constantly
| moving into the street on foot or on bicycle and they
| walk around in vehicle lanes pushing shopping cart
| armadas and so on, drivers are more cautious than usual
| and I see, if anything, less reckless driving and close
| calls there than in other parts of downtown, where
| pedestrians stick to the sidewalk and distracted or car-
| brained drivers don't look out for them. Just anecdotal
| observation, of course.
| viraptor wrote:
| Different things. A country with lax rules is not the
| same as a specific environment with shared spaces, where
| according to known data it's safer to eliminate some
| specific kind of regulation and let the remaining part
| take over.
| difjcnwoxk18 wrote:
| It's not lax rules, in many cases it's just alternative
| coordination -- eg roundabouts
| m463 wrote:
| > with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions -- in
| the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
|
| wow, cascading failures. I'll bet this is the tip of the
| iceberg.
| m463 wrote:
| I've seen 4-way 1-lane intersections behave well.
|
| But those complex multiple lanes in all directions + turn
| lanes...
|
| They do break down. I think they are a breeding ground for
| confusion and frustration.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I've been through long blackouts.
|
| My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.
|
| At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people
| just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like
| they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to
| their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn
| as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through
| themselves.
|
| But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both
| appropriate and safe.
|
| After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local
| municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle
| of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning
| what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).
|
| By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems
| "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do
| (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-
| complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the
| flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.
|
| By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels
| like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with.
| People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like
| their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown
| off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've
| seen it.
|
| But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that
| timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious
| route.
|
| (but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the
| middle of the road. That's NFG.)
| namibj wrote:
| Huh, here in Germany we have street signs (mostly of a "you
| are the priority road" 45deg rotated square yellow-on-white
| "sunny side up egg" sign and the "you are not the priority
| road" down-pointing white-on-red triangle; for 3-way if the
| priority road isn't the straight road or the concept of
| straight is ambiguous, there's a supplemental sign depicting
| the path of the priority road) permanently on traffic lights;
| it's also common enough for non-major roads to have the
| lights turned off at night so drivers tend to be familiar
| with falling back to the signs when the lights are off.
|
| In absence of priority roads there is also the "right before
| left" rule which means that the car coming from the right if
| they would conflict in time is the car that has priority.
| It's also always illegal to enter an intersection if you
| can't immediately clear it; that seems to work better when
| there are no green traffic lights to suggest an explicit
| allowance to drive, though.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when
| there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that
| yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars
| it was mayhem downtown.
|
| In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had
| almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power
| outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed
| standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked
| well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs.
| There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car
| already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize
| there was an intersection with lights out and just raced
| through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the
| just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was
| especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of
| those cars who didn't realize it either.
| rwoll wrote:
| > Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well
| when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian
| that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For
| cars it was mayhem downtown.
|
| I've long been curious if people in S.F. who are used to
| Waymo "behavior" - including myself - behave differently when
| a Waymo is involved. For the most part, Waymos are extremely
| predictable and if you're on the road as a pedestrian,
| cyclist, or car, are you more aggressive and willing to
| assert your turn in the road? Curious if Waymo has done a
| psychological study of how we start to think about the
| vehicles. I know many runners, for example, that'll stride
| right into the crosswalk in front of a Waymo but wouldn't
| dare to do that in front of other cars. Similarly,
| anecdotally people treat public transit vehicles differently
| than a civilian car: folks are more willing to let them drive
| even if out of natural turn.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic
| lights being out.
|
| My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is
| variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any
| intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's
| slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries
| where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at
| each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)
|
| It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures
| collaboration. [0]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
| fragmede wrote:
| One could argue that it's "cultural", but California state
| law says this about the situation:
|
| > Traffic Light Not Working
|
| When a traffic light is not working, stop as if the
| intersection is controlled by STOP signs in all directions.
| Then proceed cautiously when it is safe to do so.
|
| https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-
| han...
| reorder9695 wrote:
| Where I'm from (a relatively rural country) they just get
| treated like give way signs you'd have on a country road, the
| larger road generlly has priority but as it's not clear
| they'd be more cautious too.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is when one road is busy enough the other
| doesn't get a "look in".
|
| Rural drivers will know to turn right and make a u-turn,
| but city drivers may not know that trick.
| speedylight wrote:
| Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were
| ruled by stop signs. It's not always easy to keep track of who
| goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well
| in those cases.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having
| vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its
| bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and
| blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing
| if there are pedestrians when they're literally in the cross walk
| stopped.
| shuckles wrote:
| Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the
| blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was
| blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should
| never happen again.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| If you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100%
| digital currency!
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| How did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?
| HardwareLust wrote:
| That's a really good question.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I thought LIDAR solves for this lol
| bni wrote:
| Not looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.
| HardwareLust wrote:
| "the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company's
| control"
|
| Well there's your problem.
| tiahura wrote:
| How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?
| brianwawok wrote:
| 50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a
| stop.
|
| Don't think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the
| power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red
| light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I think Tesla doesn't care a out their reputation like Waymo
| does.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Treats it as a four way stop.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-A701F7D...
| jerlam wrote:
| That manual entry does not exude confidence.
|
| It might work, if other Tesla drivers regularly drive in that
| area. Also, it might not work, and you should assume that it
| won't work.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| https://x.com/edgecase411/status/2002630953844552094
|
| Looks like it treats it as a 4-way stop. Is this because Tesla
| has more training data?
| gertlex wrote:
| I'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for
| Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when,
| not training data, that results in the two behaving
| different.
| tanvach wrote:
| Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out
| (didn't know about it, we were going to Japan town from the
| Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working
| traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One
| advantage of building unsupervised system from public version
| that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.
|
| Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency
| vehicles pass safely.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is this because Tesla has more training data?_
|
| Its human takes over. FSD is still Level 3.
|
| (Robotaxi, Tesla's Level 4 product, is still in beta. Based on
| reports, its humans had to intervene.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| FSD is level 2. Level 3 doesn't require the human driver to
| monitor the outside environment, only take over when
| requested. Tesla also doesn't report data from FSD under L3
| reporting requirements anywhere in the US.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| So basically no answer from Waymo other than to boast about their
| numbers? Why not just be transparent?
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Read more carefully, Waymo didn't boast about their numbers and
| that part of the story was unrelated to the issue except as a
| measure of impact their shutdown could have.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Because they are currently trying to raise money at 100bn
| valuation
| krisoft wrote:
| What do you mean no answer? They are suspending their
| operations. That is their answer.
| jerlam wrote:
| The "boast about numbers" wasn't from Waymo, it was from their
| investors, and it was earlier this month and not during the
| service suspension.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or
| lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?
| isodev wrote:
| I think it's clear that both use cases are a must have during
| an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people
| would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos
| shouldn't be online during such times at all.
| jerlam wrote:
| First responders get the highest priority of cellular
| networks even in non-emergency situations (FirstNet).
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| FirstNet is AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile have their own
| alternatives (FrontLine and T-Priority, respectively). QCI
| is a fun rabbit hole, because some of these networks share
| the first responder QCIs with certain business use cases.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I didn't notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to
| like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.
| torham wrote:
| I lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back
| immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some
| towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but
| plenty were down.
| MBCook wrote:
| From John Ripley on Mastodon:
|
| "Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to
| legislators:
|
| Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco's
| emergency services will be blocked by Waymos."
|
| I'm AMAZED they're not designed to handle this better. This does
| indeed seem like a massive problem. "Oops we give up" right when
| things get the worst? How is this OK?
|
| I've been very impressed by Waymo's more cautious approach.
| Perhaps they haven't fully thought through the ramifications of
| it though.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco's
| emergency services will be blocked by Waymos_
|
| Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked?
|
| We have an actual failure here-step one is identifying _actual_
| failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what
| hypothetically could.
| MBCook wrote:
| I don't know. But if human drivers are having to go around
| them, they're not doing the right thing.
|
| They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the
| road and wait.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if human drivers are having to go around them, they're
| not doing the right thing_
|
| They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is
| on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking.
|
| > _They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there
| in the road and wait_
|
| Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and
| the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums
| for self-driving cars.
|
| There are productive responses to this episode. None of
| them involve flipping out on X.
| gavmor wrote:
| No, it's not a disaster, but with a little imagination it
| could be a hormetic innoculation.
| MBCook wrote:
| > But it's also not a disaster
|
| Because it's a power outage. If we instead learned about
| this during a real disaster people could have died
| because these things were let on the road without
| planning what they should do in abnormal circumstances.
|
| We're _lucky_ it's not a disaster.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If we instead learned about this during a real
| disaster people could have died_
|
| This is universally true. The question is how bad could
| it have been, and in which cases would it have been the
| worst?
|
| > _We're lucky it's not a disaster_
|
| This is always true. Again, the question is how lucky?
|
| We have an opportunity to count blocked emergency
| vehicles and calculate a hypothetical body count. This
| lets us characterize the damage. But it also permits
| constraining hysteria.
| ailurooo wrote:
| waymos shouldn't exist, and san francisco shouldn't just
| be a experimentation lab for tech companies
| crooked-v wrote:
| > They're not.
|
| They are. I did myself yesterday because one was sitting
| at the front of a turning lane at a dead light, just
| waiting there forever with the blinker on.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > Waymo has a lesson to learn from.
|
| At what point can we be spared from having Waymos lessons
| inflicted upon us
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way_
|
| Sure, but it would be notable if one had to. If none had
| to, we have a problem to solve, not a catastrophe.
| MBCook wrote:
| It can do that with a normal driver too. Doesn't make it ok
| for there to ever be a situation where they need to when
| the target vehicle/driver is just fine and capable of doing
| it themselves.
| justin66 wrote:
| It can't push a block of gridlocked traffic that cannot
| move because of the dead waymos present out of the way.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I
| mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time,
| right?
| malfist wrote:
| Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with
| w-ll wrote:
| True, but in a 'Big One' event i dont think we would care.
| moregrist wrote:
| You care because it takes valuable time to move things
| out of the way and in an emergency time is often the one
| resource you don't have.
| estebank wrote:
| In an emergency, if the only options are taking time
| moving things out of the way or not being able to move,
| you move things out of the way.
| MBCook wrote:
| GP's point is that's a false dichotomy.
|
| Yes that's the correct decision when those are the only
| options, like if a car has stalled or the driver just got
| out and ran away.
|
| In this case there's a third option: the computer that's
| still perfectly functional should have been able to get
| out of the way on its own. And legally all drivers are
| required to.
|
| I assume that applies to robots as well, if it doesn't it
| absolutely should.
| quesera wrote:
| Modern fire trucks, and police cars usually, are built to
| be able to push vehicles out of the way. It's a very common
| need.
|
| (Not an argument against Waymo doing better in this
| situation though!)
| blibble wrote:
| if google's property is blocking the road, google can pay
| for the damage
| philipallstar wrote:
| As long as you're happy that if your property ever blocks
| the road, you will pay for the damage too.
| blibble wrote:
| absolutely
|
| don't be a dick, don't block the road
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| They have massive steel bumpers, pushing them away slowly
| seems mostly harmless (not at maximum velocity lol)
| sefrost wrote:
| Surely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas
| on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of
| zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it
| happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for
| emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.
| MBCook wrote:
| It's not gonna be good. But you want it to be a gridlock
| because the cars can't get out fast enough because there's
| too many cars on the road.
|
| Not because a bunch of cars that are perfectly capable of
| moving are just sitting there blocking things purposefully
| waiting for the driver in the sky to take over.
|
| And what if, due to $BIG_DISASTER they won't be able to for a
| week?
| themafia wrote:
| > Perhaps they haven't fully thought through the ramifications
| of it though.
|
| There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do
| this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost
| universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're
| just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental
| sentiment and jealousy.
|
| There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there
| are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the
| hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even
| if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that
| a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement
| this system with the best interests of society in hand comes
| from.
|
| It's a genuine frustration here.
| dmix wrote:
| What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's
| hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving
| in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures
| you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming
| some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at
| the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is
| likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest
| option? Should there be human police to direct the self
| driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary
| electricity failure?
|
| I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems
| and in practice having the cars stay still might have been
| the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's
| office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc).
|
| There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can
| 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made
| not to do so for safety.
| pinnochio wrote:
| Uh, how about having their remote driver staff take over?
|
| > but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.
|
| You know this how?
| MBCook wrote:
| That's what they usually do. The assumption here is that
| due to the blackout or some other related issue the human
| drivers were unavailable.
|
| However even if that's not true if they have more cars
| than human drivers there's gonna be a problem until they
| work through the queue. And the bigger that ratio, the
| longer it will take.
| bink wrote:
| This only works if they have cell service and enough
| human drivers to handle all of their cars.
| MBCook wrote:
| I think part of the problem is they've made it our problem.
|
| Look I like Waymo. I think they're neat and I trust them
| far more than any of the other companies. But in my mind
| being able to handle stuff like this is just a requirement
| to be on the roads in any non-trivial number. Like if they
| had two vehicles in this happened then OK that's a problem
| but it was two vehicles in an entire city.
|
| When you have enough on the road that you can randomly have
| six at one intersection you should absolutely be able to
| handle this by then.
|
| I want them to do good. I want them to succeed. But just
| like airliners this is the kind of thing where people's
| safety comes first.
|
| What we saw happen looks like the safety of the Waymo and
| its passengers came above everyone else _despite having no
| need to do that_. There are certainly some situations where
| just staying put is the best decision.
|
| The power went out and there are no other hazards on the
| road is not one of them. They made things _worse_ for
| everyone else on average in a foreseeable situation where
| it was totally unnecessary. And that's not OK with me.
|
| This feels like the kind of thing that absolutely should've
| been tested extremely well by now. Before they were allowed
| to drive in large volumes.
| macintux wrote:
| [delayed]
| wiml wrote:
| We already have a solution, it's written down in the
| traffic laws. If the signals fail, treat the intersection
| roughly like a four-way stop. Everybody learns this in
| drivers' ed. It's not obscure. If the cars can't follow
| traffic rules maybe they're not ready to be on the streets
| unsupervised.
| dmix wrote:
| That may be the rules for humans, particuarly people who
| are always in a rush and won't stay still anyway. With a
| major intersection turned four-way stop you have lots of
| humans making very complex decisions and taking a lot of
| personal risk. If multiple self driving cars make the
| choice at the wrong time you could jam up an intersection
| and create a worse traffic issue, or kill a passenger.
|
| It's all a careful risk calculation, those self driving
| cars need to determine if it's safe to continue through
| an intersection without the traffic lights their
| computers spent millions of hours to train on (likewise
| with humans). That's a tough choice for a highly
| regulated/insured company running thousands of cars.
|
| If anything, their programming should only take such a
| risk to move out of the way for a fire truck/ambulance.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to
| basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of
| the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an
| attractive pitch.
| bombcar wrote:
| This very scenario could involve no cell signal.
| Smoosh wrote:
| I suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the
| communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be
| possible to remotely control the vehicles.
|
| Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or
| if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue
| the journey or stop.
|
| Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with
| autonomous vehicles.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should
| have foreseen.
|
| Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they
| haven't thought about proactively either.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Yeah, I was shocked by this. Blackouts in California aren't
| some sort of rare event. I'm primed to expect rolling
| brownouts/blackouts yearly in the summer.
| duhast2020 wrote:
| There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| There were significant power shutdowns in California in
| 2019 (affecting millions of customers in aggregate); the
| reason for the shutdowns was different from 2001
| (preemptive shutdowns when the risk of downed power lines
| starting wildfires was thought to be high) but the impact
| on customers is the same: no power for an extended period.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
|
| Waymo operates in more places than the Bay Area. Phoenix,
| AZ, for example, had widespread power outages in Aug 2025
| due to Haboob and Monsoon.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo
| should have foreseen_
|
| We have zero evidence a power outage wasn't foreseen. This
| looks like a more complex multi-system failure.
| MBCook wrote:
| Does it matter?
|
| Once you're on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe.
| And that means not blocking the road/intersections when
| something unexpected happens.
|
| If you can physically get out of the way, you need to.
| Period.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Does it matter_
|
| Yes. OP is inferring Waymo's internal processes from this
| meltdown. ("Makes me think there are likely other obvious
| use cases they haven't thought about proactively either.")
|
| If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a
| systemic problem. If, on the other hand, there was some
| weird power and cellular meltdown that coincided with
| something else, that's a fixable edge case.
| MBCook wrote:
| >If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a
| systemic problem.
|
| I agree with this bit
|
| > If, on the other hand, there was some weird power and
| cellular meltdown that coincided with something else,
| that's a fixable edge case.
|
| This is what I have a problem with. That's not an edge
| case. There will always be a weird thing no one
| programmed for.
|
| Remember a few years ago when a semi truck overturned
| somewhere and poured slimy eels all over the highway? No
| one's ever gonna program for that.
|
| It doesn't matter. There has to be an absolute minimum
| fail safe that can always work if the car is capable of
| moving safely. The fact that a human driver couldn't be
| reached to press a button to say to execute that is not
| acceptable. Not having the human available is a totally
| foreseeable problem. It's Google. They know networks
| fail.
| cgriswald wrote:
| This isn't to disagree with your overall point about
| proper emergency mitigation and having humans available.
|
| > Remember a few years ago when a semi truck overturned
| somewhere and poured slimy eels all over the highway? No
| one's ever gonna program for that.
|
| While the _cause_ is unusual, this is really just three
| things that everyone absolutely _should_ be programming
| into their autonomous vehicles: accidents, road debris,
| and slick conditions.
| MBCook wrote:
| Certainly. That one was interesting both because of the
| odd specifics of it and because it made the road more
| slippery than any normal accident where just a bunch of
| boxes of random dry goods fell over.
|
| It just happens to make a fantastic example of "thing no
| one is ever going to foresee".
|
| If there wasn't footage how many people would even
| believe it happened?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > > Does it matter
|
| > Yes. OP is inferring Waymo's internal processes from
| this meltdown. ("Makes me think there are likely other
| obvious use cases they haven't thought about proactively
| either.")
|
| No, I'm not inferring internal processes.
|
| I'm guessing level of critical thinking.
|
| When you are creating autonomous vehicles, one of the
| things that you want to risk assess and have mitigation
| for is what you want the vehicles to do in case the
| systems they depend on fail (e.g. electricity, comms).
|
| Now, it could be that the team has anticipated those
| things but some other failure in their systems have
| caused vehicles to stop in the middle of intersections,
| blocking traffic (as per article).
|
| I'm super curious to learn more about what Waymo
| encountered and how they plan to up their game.
| scoofy wrote:
| A fail-safe is EXACTLY _blocking_ roads at intersections
| without power, not _proceeding through_ intersections
| without power. It 's much safer to be stopped than to keep
| going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked
| out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood
| last night actually understood this.
| empressplay wrote:
| An intersection without power is just a 4-way stop.
| scoofy wrote:
| An intersection without power is _supposed to be treated_
| as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number
| of drivers last night were not following that rule.
| MBCook wrote:
| And yet the humans managed.
|
| Even at a normal four-way stop with stop signs people
| sometimes blow through it. The Waymo has to handle it.
|
| That's part of driving.
|
| It can creep through at 3 miles an hour if it thinks
| that's what's safe. All it has to do is get out of the
| intersection.
| scoofy wrote:
| The outrage people would _rightly_ have at Waymo allowing
| a number of its vehicles to blow the lights would be
| huge. People running blacked out lights is unacceptable.
| moregrist wrote:
| It's not a fail-safe. It's a different failure mode.
| Jamming up traffic, including emergency traffic, creates
| systemic problems.
|
| It's a bit like designing an electronic lock that can't
| be opened if the power goes out. If your recourse to
| exiting a dangerous situation becomes breaking the door,
| then the lock is unsafe.
| scoofy wrote:
| Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails,
| fail in a way that doesn't cause injury" -> the cars
| didn't know how to proceed, so they stopped, with their
| lights on, in a way that any attentive driver could
| safely navigate... which is a failing safe.
|
| The alternative here, is a protocol that obviously hasn't
| been tested. How on earth are you going to test a Waymo
| in blackout conditions? I would rather have them just
| stop, than hope they navigate those untested conditions
| with vulnerable pedestrians and vehicles acting
| unpredictable.
| MBCook wrote:
| Simulate them on a test course? There are absolutely
| places with street lights and everything that you could
| test something. Hell since they don't need to work you
| can just have some put up in a parking lot to test with.
| Who cares.
|
| You don't need to wait for a city blackout to actually
| test this kind of scenario.
|
| The thing still has cameras. And LIDAR. It should be
| fully capable of pulling over on its own safely. Why
| would not having a traffic light prevent that?
|
| Humans are expected to negotiate this. The robots should
| be too. That's part of driving. If the lights fail, the
| law tells you what you're supposed to do. And it is not
| stop the intersection.
| scoofy wrote:
| > Simulate them on a test course?
|
| Yes, what's the worst that could happen... oh wait...
| people literally getting killed.
| moregrist wrote:
| > Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function
| fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury"
|
| In a very local sense, this is true. In terms of the
| traffic system, this can create a systemic problem if the
| stoppage causes a traffic jam that creates problems for
| emergency vehicles.
|
| Thus it is a _different_ failure mode.
|
| If someone stops in the middle of traffic because they're
| lost, their GPS went out, or they realized that they're
| unsafe to drive, we don't celebrate that as the driver
| entering a fail-safe mode. We call that "bad judgment"
| and give them a ticket.
|
| If it precipitates a larger problem where lives are lost,
| they may be in considerable legal or financial trouble.
|
| I don't see why we should treat Waymo any differently.
| scoofy wrote:
| Traffic doesn't cause injury. Why are we concerned about
| traffic flow in a blackout situation. The cars stopped at
| intersections, EMS could use the oncoming lanes. I'm not
| seeing how it's not a fail safe, you're describing it as
| not being fail-ideal, and I would agree.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It also means that their claims of "autonomy" are fraudulent,
| like most "self driving" cars. A car which depends on powered
| infrastructure outside the car to drive is not autonomous.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Nearly all humans depend on powered infrastructure outside
| their car to drive it. You're describing a shortcoming of
| _all_ 21st century navigation.
| basilgohar wrote:
| I think the 100 or so miles I can generally drive in my car
| while it still has gas is different from my car just
| stopping suddenly because of a power outage.
| AyyEye wrote:
| Tell that to all of the humans who were capable of driving,
| but blocked by a fake autonomous car that froze in the
| middle of the road.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Horse manure. If the power goes out, I can still drive.
| Including navigating intersections. Same for my cell phone.
| cess11 wrote:
| I think I prefer trains and buses.
| chroma wrote:
| SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most
| of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control
| systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no
| lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or
| exit there.
|
| Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing
| for them, but it can be solved with software improvements.
| Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs,
| so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.
|
| But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the
| whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead
| lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think
| that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.
| cess11 wrote:
| Living in social rot and keeping unmanned little autos for
| those that can afford it seems even more nasty than what I
| initially had in mind.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Neither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause
| the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that's really
| troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at
| the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Waymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle
| doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection
| is gone then this is no longer available, and one might
| speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if
| they are in a situation where remote help is called for and
| inaccessible.
|
| Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to
| stop operating autonomously and try to phone home for help, or
| perhaps losing the connection home is itself enough to trigger
| a fail safe shutdown mode ?
|
| It reminds a bit of the recent TeslaBot video, another of their
| teleoperated stunts, where we see the bot appearing to remove a
| headset with both hands that it wasn't wearing (but that it's
| remote operator was), then fall over backwards "dead" as the
| remote operator evidentially clocked off his shift or went for
| a bathroom break.
| MBCook wrote:
| That's clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle
| not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious
| possible failure.
|
| Things go wrong -> get human help
|
| Human not available -> just block the road???
|
| How is there not a very basic "pull over and wait" final
| fallback.
|
| I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran
| over something. But in a situation like this where the
| problem is fully external it should fall back to "park
| myself" mode.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How is there not a very basic "pull over and wait" final
| fallback_
|
| Barring _everything_ else, the proper failsafe for any
| vehicle should be to stop moving and tell the humans inside
| to evacuate. This is true for autonomous vehicles as well
| as manned ones-if you can 't figure out how to pull over
| during a disaster, ditching is absolutely a valid move.
| torham wrote:
| They now apparently run these things on the interstate,
| the car needs to do more than just stop.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If the alternative is that the vehicle explodes, sure.
| And since GP did say " _final_ fallback ", I suppose
| you're right. But if the cars are actually reaching that
| point, they probably shouldn't be on the road in the
| first place.
|
| The not-quite-final fallback should be to pull over.
| MBCook wrote:
| Yeah. I wasn't considering people, just getting the car
| out of the way.
|
| I wasn't considering people taking it as a given that any
| time the car gives up the doors should be unlocked for
| passengers to leave if they feel it's safe.
|
| And as a passenger, I'd feel way safer getting out if it
| pulled over instead of just stopped in the middle of the
| street and other cars were trying to drive around it.
|
| No one should ever be trapped inside by the car.
| Coneylake wrote:
| Perhaps this is by design. Cruise had a failsafe system that
| detected a collision and decided to pull over but by pulling
| over it dragged a person underneath the car (or something close
| to this scenario). Maybe this dumb failsafe was designed not to
| repeat Cruise's mistakes?
|
| Certainly a better way to handle this would have been to pull
| over. I think stopping where ever it happened to be is only
| acceptable if the majority of sensors fail for some reason
| scoofy wrote:
| I was there. I encountered multiple stopped Waymos in the
| street. It was annoying, but not dangerous. They had their
| lights on. Any driver following the rules of the road would
| get around them fine. It was definitely imperfect, but safe.
| Much safer than the humans blowing through those very same
| intersections.
| lokar wrote:
| What makes you think it was either?
|
| AIUI, it was the irregularity of the uncontrolled intersections
| combining with the "novel" (from the POV of the software)
| driving style of the humans. In dense areas during outages
| signaled intersections don't actually degrade to 4 way stops,
| drivers act pretty poorly.
|
| The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software
| determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted.
|
| Certainly not ideal, and the should be a very strong regulatory
| response (the gov should have shut them down), and meaningful
| financial penalties (at least for repeat incidents).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off
| the roads unless they needed to travel."
|
| Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all
| the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I did when I was younger (18-25). Exploring the world outside
| of my hometown often put me at ease when I was feeling
| destabilized.
| casion wrote:
| Unsure if sarcasm, but lots of people do that. I do it every
| day.
|
| Some folks enjoy driving.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah it was sarcasm. I enjoy driving also, actually. But I
| don't just go out and drive for no reason. It's always with a
| purposeful destination.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I used to go out in the snow on purpose (DC metro). Mostly have
| them to myself, it was always fun.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Did anybody get stranded on the bart?
| jeffbee wrote:
| No, but they ran through stations that lacked power, so in the
| sense of being dumped out far from your actual destination,
| yes.
| bink wrote:
| It was predicted by many, including me. It'll be a lot worse in
| an earthquake where power and cell service are out and there's
| debris and road damage. Good luck to our first responders.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688847
| chopete3 wrote:
| To get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the
| list of edge-cases they handle?
|
| Each city will have its own nuances.
|
| Why don't the regulators publish the list?
| elzbardico wrote:
| As a society, as a whole society, opposed to our narrow interests
| and point of views as typical affluent HN dwellers, do we really
| NEED this kind of shit?
| scoofy wrote:
| I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw
| four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the
| street. One was along the curb.
|
| My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw _flying_ through
| blacked out intersection -- _major_ intersections -- I 'm very
| happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white
| swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen
| event).
|
| I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was
| just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's
| miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned
| with "the flow of traffic."
| jeffbee wrote:
| Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E
| spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their
| assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their
| junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen
| water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second
| time that this specific substation has burned in living memory.
| It already burned in 1996 and 2003.
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd
| consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an
| "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training
| autonomous vehicles.
| jeffbee wrote:
| OK well let's argue about the semantics of "autonomous"
| instead. To me, it means the vehicle's on-board systems
| should generalize to safe and non-disruptive behaviors
| under _all_ circumstances. In this instance they should
| have been able to either navigate to a depot or at least
| pull off the road.
| scoofy wrote:
| I think that's a perfectly reasonable standard for a
| normal operating environment.
|
| In emergencies I think "safe" is preferable to "non-
| disruptive."
| cjsplat wrote:
| I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of
| lights that were out.
|
| The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection.
| It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused
| them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers
| did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving.
|
| The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get
| through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its
| driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots.
|
| This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be
| following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to
| turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate.
|
| And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a
| Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that
| the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the
| intersection.
|
| On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than
| they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no
| longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like
| the Waymos used to be.
|
| I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve
| this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and
| reading and crossing streets with dead lights.
|
| Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have
| reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and
| perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to
| handle.
|
| It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
| rvz wrote:
| The proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all
| along.
| uqual wrote:
| Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five
| I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the
| intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of
| the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of
| these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).
|
| Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it
| seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with
| blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights
| responding to a braking action).
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