[HN Gopher] Lessons from the PG&E outage
___________________________________________________________________
Lessons from the PG&E outage
Author : scoofy
Score : 130 points
Date : 2025-12-24 02:16 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (waymo.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related context:
|
| _Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic
| jams_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412
| jtchang wrote:
| How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery
| plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an
| earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they
| not take into account this would happen?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals
| on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these
| requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to
| response delays contributing to congestion on already-
| overwhelmed streets. We established these confirmation
| protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early
| deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current
| scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller
| outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that
| provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing
| it to navigate more decisively.
|
| Sounds like it was and you're not correctly understanding the
| complexity of running this at scale.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Sounds like their disaster recovery plan was insufficient,
| intensified traffic jams in already congested areas because
| of "backlog", and is now being fixed to support the current
| scale.
|
| The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's
| perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of
| running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.
| shafyy wrote:
| They probably do, they just don't give a shit. It's still
| the "move fast and break things" mindset. Internalize
| profits but externalize failures to be carried by the
| public. Will there be legal consequences for Waymo (i.e.
| fines?) for this? Probably not...
| atherton94027 wrote:
| Waymo cars have been proven safer than human drivers in
| California. At the same time, 40k people die each year in
| the US in car accidents caused by human drivers.
|
| I'm very happy they're moving fast so hopefully fewer
| people die in the future
| browningstreet wrote:
| What Waymo profits?
|
| They're one-of-one still. Having ridden in a Waymo many
| times, there's very little "move fast and break things"
| leaking in the experience.
|
| They can simulate power outages as much as they want
| (testing) but the production break had some surprises.
| This is a technical forum.. most of us have been there..
| bad things happened, plans weren't sufficient, we can
| measure their response on the next iteration in terms of
| how they respond to production insufficiencies in the
| next event.
|
| Also, culturally speaking, "they suck" isn't really a
| working response to an RCA.
| kotaKat wrote:
| DR always stands for "didn't realize" in the aftermath of
| an event.
|
| That's what they're learning and fixing for in the future
| to give the cars more self-confidence.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| What about San Francisco allowing a power outage of this
| magnitude and not being able to restore power for multiple
| days?
|
| This kind of attitude to me indicates a lack of experience
| building complex systems and responding to unexpected
| events. If they had done the opposite and been overly
| aggressive in letting Waymo's manage themselves during
| lights that are out would you be the first in line
| criticizing them then for some accident happening?
|
| All things being considered, I'm much happier knowing Waymo
| is taking a conservative approach if the downside means
| extra momentary street congestion during a major power
| outage; that's much rarer than being cavalier with fully
| autonomous behavior.
| Animats wrote:
| If the onboard software has detected an unusual situation it
| doesn't understand, moving may be a bad idea. Possible problems
| requiring a management decision include flooding, fires,
| earthquakes, riots, street parties, power outages, building
| collapses... Handling all that onboard is tough. For different
| situations, a nearby "safe place" to stop varies. The control
| center doesn't do remote driving, says Waymo. They provide
| hints, probably along the lines of "back out, turn around, and
| get out of this area", or "clear the intersection, then stop
| and unload your passenger".
|
| Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact
| with the control center a stop condition? After some number of
| seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for
| assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop
| condition. Apparently here they overloaded the control center.
| That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not
| one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that.
| That's good for scaling.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| relying on essentially remote dispatch to resolve these
| errors states is a disaster
| michaelt wrote:
| _> For example, is loss of contact with the control center a
| stop condition?_
|
| Almost certainly no - you don't want the vehicle to enter a
| tunnel, then stop half way through due to a lack of cell
| signal.
|
| Rather, areas where signal dropouts are common would be made
| into no-go areas for route planning purposes.
| rdiddly wrote:
| No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's
| equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| On the contrary, I would prefer HN detach all threads
| expressing "concern." That way we don't have to make a
| subjective call if a comment is "concern" or "concern trolling"
| at all - they are equally uninteresting and do not advance
| curiosity.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Based. Anyone complaining about HN being "insufficiently
| outraged" should go to Twitter and never return.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I was actually wondering more about the people whose
| streets they are. Didn't mean to indicate that I or anyone
| cares what HN thinks.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The internet lens tends to distort what's happening on
| the ground quite a lot. I would expect the people living
| there have different things to direct their ire to.
| tengbretson wrote:
| > No one seems sufficiently outraged
|
| Harvesting outrage is about the only reliable function the
| internet seems to have at this point. You're not seeing enough
| of it?
| rdiddly wrote:
| I've seen plenty but about the wrong things.
| jlebar wrote:
| No one seems sufficiently outraged that human drivers kill
| 40,000 people a year in the US.
|
| It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the
| deaths.
|
| Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year;
| car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for
| people aged 5-29 worldwide.
|
| https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem
|
| https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
| scoofy wrote:
| Seriously. People are _outraged_ about the _theoretical_
| potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant
| death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western
| country.
|
| I mean _really._ I'm a self driving skeptic exactly because
| our roads are inherently dangerous. I've been outraged at
| Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and
| acting in bad faith.
|
| Everything I've seen from Waymo has been exceptional... and I
| literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and
| saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
|
| They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement,
| but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing
| through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus
| do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the
| same damn thing.
|
| People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their
| arguments.
| paddleon wrote:
| Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that
| the right way is to:
|
| build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and
|
| train drivers to show respect for other people on the road
|
| However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your
| answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is
| better than those damn people" might be the one that
| actually works.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| I've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK
| and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I
| don't think that's the main issue.
|
| What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing
| a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new
| drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver
| shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other
| drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad
| drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on
| average British drive better.
|
| Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem -
| they are more dangerous for everyone except people in
| such vehicle.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Your "right way" is to try to fix human nature. A
| complete nonstarter.
|
| If we could do anything like "train drivers to show
| respect for other people on the road" at scale, then we'd
| live in a different world by now.
| forshaper wrote:
| I currently live in a place where, when walking on the
| street, I routinely almost get hit by vehicles while
| crossing crosswalks with the cross light on.
|
| However, I used to live in a place where every local
| driver did an 'after you' that included pedestrians,
| regardless of road rules, and generally drove the speed
| limit (and usually less).
|
| Both of these places in the United States!
|
| The latter is not impossible, just rare.
| TylerE wrote:
| Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull
| made up stats out of your ass.
|
| The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic
| fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
|
| I count 14 countries higher.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-
| r...
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| When people say "western" they often don't mean "western
| hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be
| "western" by this definition but Australia might be.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western",
| which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but
| excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about
| South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say
| something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that
| includes all highly developed nations.
| trollbridge wrote:
| It's referring to a specific culture of people.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich
| typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove
| my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a
| European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair
| game depending on context.
|
| Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social
| issue discussions.
|
| Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out
| of government efficacy discussions.
|
| It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's
| about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue
| so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West
| Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else
| it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the
| thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that
| analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position
| the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.
|
| You see this slight of hand up and down and left and
| right across every possible topic of discussion in
| communities composed of american demographics that
| generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.
| verteu wrote:
| No, they're generally referring to the set of countries
| depicted in these maps [1], for the reasons described in
| the article [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/Fi
| le:West...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
| xnorswap wrote:
| I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked
| _that_ well.
|
| Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving,
| I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;)
|
| The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously,
| we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test
| is genuinely difficult to pass.
|
| I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently
| throughout the primary national curriculum.
|
| And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never
| quite forget, such as:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE
| TylerE wrote:
| The US is just a big place. We drive a lot. Average
| annual mileage is about 13k vs 7k in the UK.
| adrianN wrote:
| The USA don't do very well on the deaths per km metric
| either.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand
| driving
|
| Is this written in jest, or is there something more
| serious behind it? Off the top of my head, I cannot think
| of an obvious reason why "road handedness" (left vs
| right) would matter for road safety. Could it something
| about more people are right-handed so there is some 2nd
| order safety effect that I am overlooking?
| xnorswap wrote:
| Yes, it was in jest. ;)
| tzs wrote:
| Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if
| left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you
| note right-handed people are more common. The countries
| with the highest percentages of left-handed people are
| around 12-13%.
|
| In countries that drive on the right then drivers use
| their dominant hand for any controls that are on the
| inward side and their other hand for the control that are
| on the outward side of the driver.
|
| Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles
| exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The
| dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission,
| and anything on the center console such as the climate
| and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation
| system.
|
| In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-
| handed people, with the possible exception of the
| exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers.
| Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on
| stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've
| read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions
| in left and right drive models instead of reversing them
| like they do the rest of the controls.
|
| Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things
| on the center console make a difference? If everyone
| obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make
| enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone
| obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.
|
| If someone for example tried to type in a destination
| using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system
| console while driving I'd expect that they would take
| longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant
| hand, so they would be distracted longer.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating
| things on the center console make a difference?
|
| Large airplanes usually have a pilot on either side of
| the center console, and they AFAIK take turns operating
| the airplane, so if it made a difference, I'd expected it
| to be studied by the aerospace industry. Given that I've
| never seen it mentioned on any of the airplane incident
| reports I've read, it probably isn't a big factor, and I
| see no reason why it would be different for cars.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic
| fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
|
| Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you
| think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about
| Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia
| vs the Western hemisphere?
| scoofy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
| nkrisc wrote:
| The difference is those human-driven cars all have a driver
| who can be held accountable.
|
| If I kill someone with my car, I'm probably going to jail.
| If a Waymo or otherwise kills someone, who's going to jail?
| xnx wrote:
| > If I kill someone with my car, I'm probably going to
| jail
|
| This is rarely true in the US. A driver's license is a
| license to kill with near impunity.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/man-gets-10-days-in-
| jai...
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Should Waymo hire an "accountable" human who would go to
| jail if a Waymo car kills someone?
|
| "Accountability" is fucking worthless, and I am tired of
| pretending otherwise.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Presumably, like Cruise, if the safety rate is appalling
| then they get their permits revoked which is 99% the same
| as jail for a company that only does self driving cars.
| scoofy wrote:
| > If I kill someone with my car, I'm probably going to
| jail.
|
| So this is very much not at all true.
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime/
|
| My entire point is that _we don't care about human lives
| on our roads._ So yelling about the safety concerns about
| Waymos makes no sense.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is
| an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to
| traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors,
| those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you
| even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver
| problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver
| problem.
|
| Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These
| are two different, independent problems. More people die in
| care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't
| mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Exactly, I tell people every order of magnitude more we
| spend on infrastructure reduces the self driving complexity
| as much likewise.
|
| The education bit can't be fixed by the government though
| in the short term, as the outcomes correlate too strongly
| with stable home life conditions (which are in free fall
| over the past 50 years).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And also because America has an extremely strong anti-
| education demographic that is very well represented in
| congress and presidents.
|
| "Parental authority" should not be an educational goal.
| gruez wrote:
| >By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those
| 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even
| need to bother with automation.
|
| 1. [citation needed]
|
| 2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean
| it's an option that actually exists. I'm sure you can dream
| up of some plan for a futuristic utopia where everybody
| lives in a 15 minute city, no private cars are needed, and
| the whole transportation system is net zero, but that
| doesn't mean it's a realistic option that'll actually get
| implemented in the US, nor does it mean that we we should
| reject hybrid or EVs on the basis that they're worse than
| the utopian solution, even though they're better than the
| status quo of conventional ICE cars.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > 1. [citation needed]
|
| Traffic-related death rate statistics for Denmark (being
| 7x lower than the US), Sweden, Norway, Japan. The US does
| _remarkably_ bad on this statistic, even compared to
| Canada.
|
| > 2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't
| mean it's an option that actually exists.
|
| Denmark exists. I've been there. There were cars.
|
| I think the west in general is lagging behind when it
| comes to EV adoption (and given the politico-corporate
| interests of many governments, I don't expect that to
| change). I don't think anybody wants to completely
| abolish cars in general and I think the drive to maintain
| ICE cars with all of their downsides just to support a
| fledgling industry is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer
| money.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| I believe that is caused by having lots of cars driving
| around.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| American roads are uniquely dangerous for passengers in
| cars and for pedestrians compared to other developed
| countries..
| idle_zealot wrote:
| To adapt this to a tech-head mindset:
|
| Imagine that when smartphones were first coming out they
| could only function with recent battery-tech breakthroughs.
| Mass-adoptions was pretty quick, but there was scattered
| reporting that a host of usage patterns could cause the
| battery to heat up and explode, injuring or killing the user
| and everyone in a 5-10ft radius.
|
| Now, the smartphone is a pretty darn useful device and
| rapidly changes how lots of businesses, physical and digital,
| operate. Some are pushing for bans on public usage of this
| new battery technology until significant safety improvements
| can be made. Others argue that it's too late, we're too
| dependent on smartphones and banning their public use would
| cause more harm than good. Random explosions continue for
| decades. The batteries become safer, but also smartphone
| adoption reaches saturation. 40,000 people die in random
| smartphone explosions every year in the US.
|
| The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized
| that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in
| one, a dead friend of a friend, at least. The prevailing
| attitude is that more education about what settings on a
| phone shouldn't be turned on together is the only solution.
| If only people would remember, consistently, every time, to
| turn on airplane mode before putting the phone in a pocket.
| Every death is the fault of someone not paying sufficient
| attention and noticing that the way they were sitting was
| pressing the camera button through their pants. Every phone
| user knows that that sort of recklessness can cause the phone
| to explode!
|
| You as an engineer know how people interact with the software
| you deploy, right? You know that regardless of education, a
| significant portion of your users are going to misunderstand
| how to do something, get themselves in a weird state, tap
| without thinking. What if every instance in your logs of a
| user doing something strange or thoughtless was correlated
| with the potential for injury? You'd pull your software from
| the market, right? Not auto-makers. They fundamentally cannot
| reckon with the fact that mass adoption of their product
| means mass death. Institutionally incapable.
|
| The only responsible thing to do is to limit automobile use
| to those with extensive training and greatly reduce volume.
| The US needs blue collar jobs anyway, so why not start up
| some wide-scale mass-transit projects? It's all a matter of
| political will, of believing that positive change is
| possible, and that's sorely lacking.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _a private company 's equipment blocked the public roads_
|
| That would be like every traffic incident ever? I don't think
| US has _public cars_ or state-owned utilities.
| adammarples wrote:
| Typically people move aside for emergency vehicles
| jdietrich wrote:
| Ask any EMT or paramedic - an astonishingly large
| proportion of human drivers panic in the presence of an
| ambulance and just slam their brakes on.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| My concern is that one company can have a malfunction which
| shuts down traffic in a city. That seems new or historically
| rare. I understand large scale deployment will find new
| system design flaws so I'm not outraged, but I do think we
| should consider what this means for us, if anything.
| mcny wrote:
| I think the blog is strongly hinting us to focus on the
| real problem -- the electrical utility and I have to agree.
|
| The only other option I can think of is to build some kind
| of high density low power solar powered IoT network that is
| independent of current infrastructure but then where is the
| spectrum for that?
| trollbridge wrote:
| A power outage should not cause robot cars to block
| intersections.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Lack of Internet access should not prevent cars - or any
| other devices - from starting, yet here we are.
| gruez wrote:
| >My concern is that one company can have a malfunction
| which shuts down traffic in a city.
|
| That's hardly new. What do you think happens to traffic
| when a semi flips over on a busy interstate, or electricity
| goes out, turning all traffic lights into 4 way stops and
| severely limiting throughput?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It blocks _a single road_ and yet that makes the news and
| people have to route around it and it disrupts a day.
|
| What happens when one company's engineering failure does
| that to _most_ roads?
|
| For reference, the US considers tactically blocking
| traffic to be something that smart terrorists or nation
| state adversaries would want to do to significantly harm
| the US economically.
|
| What do these cars do if Google's entire self driving
| infrastructure falls over because some component gets
| misconfigured? It will happen eventually.
| throwawaysoxjje wrote:
| Why would I be, when I don't have any standard for comparison.
|
| How many human drivers did similar because the power went out?
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| The symbolic irony of this situation is almost too rich to bear.
| xnx wrote:
| Interesting that some legacy safety/precaution code caused more
| timid and disruptive driving behavior than the current software
| route planner would've chosen on its own.
| prpl wrote:
| I suspected this. They were moving, but randomly to an observer.
| I'd seen about 2 out of maybe 20 stopped Waymos navigating around
| Arguello and Geary area in SF Saturday at 6PM. What was worse was
| that there was little to no connectivity service across all 3
| main providers deeper in the power outage area as well - Spruce
| and Geary or west of Park Presidio (I have 2 phones, with Google
| Fi/T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon).
| ec109685 wrote:
| Do Waymo's have Starlink or another satellite based provider
| backup? Otherwise, what do they if cell service goes down and
| they need to phone home for confirmation?
| apexalpha wrote:
| Cell services is usually around for a while when power goes
| down.
|
| I doubt they have more than that.
| trollbridge wrote:
| That seems like a major oversight. Adding Starlink wouldn't
| add that much marginal cost.
| snake_doc wrote:
| Cell towers just need power to keep functioning, starlink
| adds no utility in an urban dense environment with fiber.
| multjoy wrote:
| It would encourage Starlink to put yet more crap into Low
| Earth Orbit and see them fill the atmosphere with barely
| understood pollutants.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > "the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually
| manage intersections"
|
| Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a
| LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just
| disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I suddenly find that I really want an answer to this as well
| because I'm now imagining what might ensue if one of these
| attempted to board a car ferry. Typically there's a sign "turn
| headlights off", you're expected to maintain something like 5
| mph (the flow of traffic should never stop), and you get
| directed by a human to cross multiple lane markings often
| deviating from the path that the vehicle immediately in front
| of you took.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I think that Waymo isn't concerned about those types of
| scenario because they only operate in a limited area, and can
| tune their systems to operate best in that area (EG not
| worrying about car ferries, human-operated parking lots etc)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Right. People still imagine that Level 5 is going to
| happen, and it is at best a long way off. You're talking
| full AI at some point.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Car ferries don't really make much sense in a Waymo-
| ubiquitous world. It's not _your_ vehicle; there isn 't
| really a reason why you would need to have _the same_ vehicle
| on the other side of ferry ride. You 're better off having
| one Waymo network on one side of the waterway, a separate
| Waymo network on the other side, and then a passenger-only
| ferry with a much higher passenger capacity (and oftentimes,
| they go much faster, since you can have hull forms like wave-
| piercing catamarans, hydrofoils, and hovercraft when you
| aren't carrying cars).
| nullc wrote:
| There are some places where a car ferry is essentially a
| bridge and just operate as part of the highway, e.g. there
| are two such instances in sacramento:
| https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-
| me/district-4/d4-projects/d... The rides are about a minute
| long and you very much wouldn't want to change vehicles.
| nashashmi wrote:
| This was found to be one of the early challenges of self
| driving: reading traffic signal gestures of traffic agents. It
| does it. But the jury is out if it does it well.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Your scenario seems to have a lot of overlap with a
| construction worker directing traffic around a road
| construction site. I have no idea if Waymo is any good at
| navigating these, but I am sure there is a lot of model
| training around these scenarios because they are common in
| urban driving environments.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Don't they just have a stop/go board? Whereas an LEO at a
| crossing would have to use hand signals
| bluGill wrote:
| Sometimes, but not always. They may need to stop traffic
| for a moment to get some machine out and then there is no
| board. Sometimes they will tell you an alternate that is
| much faster than waiting as well.
| testfrequency wrote:
| The amount of times this has been asked with no confirmation
| leads me to believe they still do not.
|
| Tesla fanboys gush about how FSD can understand LEO at
| irregular traffic conditions, but no company I'm aware of has
| confirmed their systems are capable.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Teslas currently have a driver in the front who could take
| over in these situations.
|
| Waymo said they normally handle traffic light outages as
| 4-way stops, but sometimes call home for help - perhaps if
| they detect someone in the intersection directing traffic ?
|
| Makes you wonder in general how these cars are designed to
| handle police directing traffic.
| dham wrote:
| It kind of makes sense. Why program or train on such a rare
| occurrence. Just send it off to a human to interpret and be
| done with it. If that's the case then Tesla is closer to
| Waymo then previously thought. Maybe even ahead.
| krisoft wrote:
| > The amount of times this has been asked with no
| confirmation leads me to believe they still do not.
|
| They do follow hand signals from police. There are many
| videos documenting the behaviour. Here is one from waymo:
| https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-
| acro...
|
| Look for the embed next to the text saying "The Waymo Driver
| recently interpreting a police officer's hand signals in a
| Los Angeles intersection."
|
| Or here is a video observing the behaviour in the wild:
| https://youtu.be/3Qk_QhG5whw?si=GCBBNJqB22GRvxk1
|
| Do you want confirmation about something more specific?
| ckemere wrote:
| Is there confirm that it's not remotely controlled at this
| point?
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Tesla FSD would never have this issue according to Elon Musk.
| bagels wrote:
| - written from my flying roadster
| joshribakoff wrote:
| This reads to me, an angry resident, as an AI generated article
| that attempts to leverage the chaos that they caused, for
| marketing purposes -- not as any sort of genuine remorse --
| underscoring why we shouldn't be banning AI regulation in the
| USA.
| nzoschke wrote:
| > we are now implementing fleet-wide updates
|
| That ~1000 drivers on the road are all better trained on what to
| do in the next power outage is incredible.
|
| There will always be unexpected events and mistakes made on the
| roads. Continual improvement that is locked in algorithmically
| across the entire fleet is way better than any individual
| driver's learning / training / behaviorior changes.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Humans seemed to navigate this just fine, even with all the
| Waymo road blocks and without extra training. If every unknown
| requires a software update, this system is doomed to repeat
| this behavior over and over in the long term.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >seemed to navigate this just fine
|
| From my understanding the reason the Waymos didn't handle
| this was because humans were breaking traffic rules and going
| when they shouldn't have been. If most humans navigated it
| correctly, then waynos would have handled this better.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| This attitude is exactly how the Waymos came to handle the
| problem so poorly in the first place. The principal Skinner
| "everyone else else is wrong" bit is just icing on the
| cake.
|
| Can't just program it to be all "when confused copy others"
| because it will invariably violate the letter of the law
| and people will screech. So they pick the legally safe but
| obviously not effective option, have it behave like a
| teenager on day 1 of drivers ed and basically freeze up. Of
| course that most certainly does not scale whatsoever, but
| it covers their asses so it's what they gotta do.
| bluGill wrote:
| traffic safety engineers often have influence on the
| letter of the law. We would all be better off if people
| followed it (humans are bad judges of the exceptions)
| flutas wrote:
| It's mentioned in the article, the real problem was they
| kept trying to contact remote support to "verify" the light
| was out. Leading to a backlog of requests which they
| couldn't get through fast enough.
| xnx wrote:
| Humans do dumb stuff like drive their cars into flowing
| floodwaters and they show no signs of stopping. The Waymo
| Driver (the name for the hardware and software stack) is
| getting smarter all the time.
| docjay wrote:
| Humans do indeed drive into floodwaters like fools, but a
| critical point that's often missed when talking about how
| self-driving cars will make the roads safer: you don't.
| Self-driving cars can potentially be safer in general, but
| not necessarily for you in particular.
|
| Imagine I created a magic bracelet that could reduce
| bicycling related deaths and injuries from 130,000 a year
| to 70,000. A great win for humans! The catch is that
| _everyone_ would need to wear it, even people that do not
| ride bikes, and those 70,000 deaths and injuries would be
| randomly distributed among the entire population. Would you
| wear it?
| xnx wrote:
| I don't understand the analogy. No one is being forced to
| stop driving and take autonomous rides. If I am a better
| than average driver (debatable), I'm glad to have below
| average drivers use autonomous vehicles instead.
| docjay wrote:
| If you're on the road with one you're wearing the
| bracelet. If you're driving one you're wearing two. I
| don't mean to sound so sour, I was hoping the analogy
| would alias that into the background a bit, it's just
| that the hoopla around self-driving cars is causing
| people to skip reading the footnotes.
|
| Safe vs Unsafe isn't as simple as who gets a 10/10 on the
| closed course test. Humans are more predictable than
| random chance would allow, and often even when drunk or
| distracted. I can't count how many times I've seen
| someone wobbling on the road and knew to stay back. You
| can also often tell when someone might yank over into
| your lane based on them flying up in the other lane,
| getting just in front of you in that lane then wiggling a
| bit, clearly waiting for the first chance to pull in
| front of you and take off. There are lots of other little
| 'tells' that, _if you're a defensive driver_ , have
| avoided countless accidents.
|
| Being a prudent defensive driver goes out the window when
| the perfect speed limit adhering driver next to you goes
| to straight to -NaN when someone drives past it with
| Christmas lights on their car, or the sun glares off
| oversized chrome rims, or an odd shaped vehicle doesn't
| match "vehicle" in the database, or, or, or.
|
| * I'm very much not saying that the example I mentioned
| above is reason enough, I'm saying that I'm not sure
| enough thought is being put into how many more pages I
| could go on, and I'm just some schmuck that worked for
| some number of years on the underlying technology - not
| the guy watching it fail in imaginative ways on the road.
|
| Something said earlier that really overestimated what's
| happening: it doesn't get smarter, it gets another "if"
| statement.
| flutas wrote:
| as recently as 3 weeks ago, the Waymo driver was also
| driving into floodwaters.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1pem9ep/h
| m...
| UltraSane wrote:
| The average human driver is much worse than waymo.
| yonran wrote:
| The blog post makes no mention of the cellular network
| congestion/dropped packets that affected people during the power
| outage. I had bars but was unable to load websites for most of
| the day. Were Waymos unaffected by the network problems, or were
| request timeouts encompassed in the word "backlog" used by the
| blog post?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The networking on AVs is usually redundant across multiple
| cellular networks to deal with coverage and outage issues. They
| also use business sims, which usually have a slightly higher
| network priority than consumers. If waymo's also negotiated to
| use one of the infrastructure QCIs instead, it would take some
| seriously disastrous network conditions for them to experience
| meaningful congestion.
| schwede wrote:
| Sending power outage context to the vehicles does not seem like
| enough of a response. I hope at least they have internal plans
| for more. For large, complex systems, you want multiple layers of
| protections. The response feels way too reactive when they could
| use this incident to guide improvements across the board.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| >The situation was severe enough that the San Francisco
| Department of Emergency Management advised residents to stay
| home, underscoring the extraordinary nature of the weekend's
| disruptions.
|
| Waymo cannot point to this as an extenuating circumatance when
| they where a major contributing factor.
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