In ATL this happens often enough that it&#x27;s not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don&#x27;t do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to drive through deep water.

They can simulate &quot;driving out of a raging fire&quot; but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy &quot;world model simulation&quot; doesn&#x27;t actually mean much<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waymo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simulation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waymo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...</a>

It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what&#x27;s way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they&#x27;ll be back without problems.

Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.

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

The fact that they aren&#x27;t a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.

I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don&#x27;t they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren&#x27;t exactly an unusual event to begin with.

Not at all — they&#x27;re working on cheaper cars that they&#x27;re testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.

I&#x27;m glad a very wealthy company is investing in hard tech R&amp;D. Irrespective of the projected financial outcome.

Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don&#x27;t see how they will ever be practical!

I think Google can handle paying for any number of $250k cars to get a good share of the future of transportation.I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.

All cars require a workforce to maintain though.

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

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

Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That&#x27;s been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn&#x27;t do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being &#x27;pulled over.&#x27;These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it&#x27;s the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.

&gt; The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.This is also a huge disadvantage because any flaws in the software that don’t show up in a slow rollout will be present in every single car.It’s a contrived example, but say a new billboard campaign rolls out that causes every car to immediately veer away from it.

Oh come on. Not even driving anywhere in Europe; higher difficulty levels would be Turkey , India, Russia, Egypt. Add countryside for extra points. Add harvest season in countryside for unique achievement. Add rainy&#x2F;snowy season in countryside to master this game.

The final boss will be driving in Rome

Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?If it is just taking a regular DL test, then waymo, Tesla and others would be driving all across the US by now. They already have a higher standard

A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.

A human has to pass a test to be able to drive. A human (for the most part) doesn&#x27;t just unknowingly drive into floods.Why aren&#x27;t we holding computers to AT LEAST the same expectation as humans.

&gt; This is only the 10th city they&#x27;ve deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there&#x27;s significantly inclement weatherYou may be relieved to hear Waymo is rolling out to Portland, Oregon. It&#x27;s not in the south, and with over 150 rainy days per year, it ranks among the rainiest US cities.

Better is an arbitrary statement. By number of jobs robots lose, by number of sexual assaults by taxi drivers they win. Pick the wights for very factors and you can select anything as the best in category.Safer, cheaper, etc are less arbitrary.

Well, only one Waymo got stuck in that flood, while at least two human-driven cars did, so by pure counting metrics they are better lol. But in my experience driving around them Waymos are much much better than most Atlanta drivers, not that that&#x27;s a high bar

I&#x27;m not sure why you would say there&#x27;s no significant inclement weather in Atlanta. The flooding this week was not super common, but also not unheard of. It rains here a LOT in the summer

It&#x27;s a delay. The question is how long? Doesn&#x27;t seem unfixable.

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

If your premise is &quot;robotaxis are so much better than human drivers&quot; then this is almost a disaster. This is only the 10th city they&#x27;ve deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there&#x27;s significantly inclement weather. It does not bode well for their expansion plans.

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

&gt; Presumably they haven&#x27;t had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.They should have done that flood training when they weren&#x27;t putting people&#x27;s lives at risk. It&#x27;s not as if this was a situation that no one could have anticipated would arise. Over half of all drownings in a flood happen because of people driving into them. They&#x27;re just lucky that they stopped service before they had more blood on their hands, but the fact that they were willing to experiment on the public first is concerning.

To me this doesn&#x27;t seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges.Presumably they haven&#x27;t had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.

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

&gt; The &quot;responsible adults&quot; know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast.I wouldn&#x27;t call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers &quot;chasing perfection&quot;. The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.I&#x27;ll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.

Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly.In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?

&gt; A part of growing up is learning to put up with &quot;good enough&quot;.&quot;I feel content with good enough in this case.&quot; - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a TeslaYour growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren&#x27;t a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn&#x27;t think about the most basic 101 case of &quot;what if it isn&#x27;t a perfectly dry and sunny California day&quot; because thinking isn&#x27;t on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.

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

The &quot;responsible adults&quot; know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with &quot;good enough&quot;.A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.If you think that &quot;flooded roadway&quot; is a case that&#x27;s handled gracefully by every human driver, and it&#x27;s the AI that&#x27;s uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you.Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of &quot;water flood engine damage&quot; cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of &quot;is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out&quot;.

I&#x27;m bullish on AI as a replacement for Uber from airports well behaved climates I frequent but bearish on how long it&#x27;ll take to actually make a damn for me needing my car in Ohio until the mid-late 2030s at this rate. It&#x27;s just so close and so far away at the same time.

I was (I think the search bar will prove this out) a pretty committed skeptic of driverless cars, but I&#x27;ve come around on them in some use cases. I&#x27;m not optimistic about them on highways. But they solve some important problems in regional&#x2F;local transit.We&#x27;re contemplating standing up an EV shuttle service in Oak Park. It will fail. As I understand it, we&#x27;ve piloted non-EV versions of a shuttle service; they failed. The problem is that in small local areas, the staffing for a useful transit service is too expensive; that&#x27;s because &quot;useful&quot; imposes constraints about responsiveness, coverage, and most of all hours of service, which mean the service won&#x27;t pencil out with the ridership it&#x27;ll get.An autonomous vehicle transit service in our muni would probably work fine; it&#x27;s a strict grid system with very low speed limits (AVs will, in our area, be strictly better drivers than the median human drivers --- this isn&#x27;t a statement about human fallibility so much as an observation about scofflawry in our area). And if the product existed, we could afford it, because we wouldn&#x27;t be paying fully loaded headcount costs for 2+ shifts of drivers at epsilon levels of utilization.For whatever it&#x27;s worth, I don&#x27;t really have &quot;autonomous vehicles&quot; and &quot;LLMs&quot; in the same bucket in my head. I&#x27;m bullish on both, but for very different reasons. It usually doesn&#x27;t occur to me to think of Waymos as &quot;AI&quot;, though, obviously, they are.

Many people don&#x27;t drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.Even on two lane roads: if an idiot overtakes into oncoming traffic there is usually just enough space for three vehicles next to each other. Can a Waymo move sharply to the right so there are two cars on each side with the overtaking idiot in the middle and all just fit on the road? I had to do that maneuver at least twice.Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?Can you open the Windows and get out if the thing decides to drive into a lake?I don&#x27;t know, currently defensive driving is the better option.

&quot;No DUI&quot; is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn&#x27;t as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn&#x27;t have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It&#x27;s really, really bad.AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn&#x27;t get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn&#x27;t get tired, doesn&#x27;t get impaired, doesn&#x27;t lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s true for human drivers, frankly.

The option that doesn&#x27;t exist in America is to get the bus.Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.The bus had its own community, so I had my &#x27;bus buddies&#x27; and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn&#x27;t dissapoint.There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper &#x27;windscreen&#x27;. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?Maybe. But maybe not.The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that &#x27;pulled out on the bus&#x27;, that was a highway maintenance issue.There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and &#x27;our&#x27; bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn&#x27;t as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn&#x27;t the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from &#x27;traffic&#x27;, as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.

I will posit something that guides my own thinking about this; robotaxis will never drink and drive. I&#x27;ll take whatever flavor of mistake they conjure over that. I can deal with stupidity, I cannot (and don&#x27;t want to) deal with malice.

One of the biggest challenges with self driving cars is that the cars must be substantially safer than human driven cars.Human driven cars kill tons of people. Everyday in the US 115 people wake up who will be dead from a car accident by midnight.But if a self driving car kills one human? Your company and mission is cooked.Besides the immense engineering challenge, the bar is also way way way higher.

I&#x27;m not aware of any self-driving widely available ten years ago. I just took my Model Y over Highway 1 in California without requiring human intervention (other than when I chose to pull the car over).Obviously when these things can become fully autonomous isn&#x27;t absolutely clear, and there may always be some discomfort with a probability of failure without a human chain of responsibility.But, given ten years ago this didn&#x27;t exist at all for consumers, and it now more reliably does? It doesn&#x27;t seem insane to think ten years from now, it might address more edge cases, and be safer and more effective.Why would you look at the general trend and assert jettisoning the effort?EDIT: It seems some of the tech started rolling out 2016; my mind mentally was thinking 2015. So maybe this started about a decade ago. Though still, the trajectory is a decade of these systems going from limited assists toward greater autonomy with demonstrable progress.

I actually took a waymo down North Ave (where one got stuck) a few weeks ago and it was very pleasant.I&#x27;m pretty conservative about this stuff but the waymo is genuinely nice to ride in.

This is very much expected while the kinks are worked out. The reason Waymo is rolling out their vehicles in Atlanta in partnership with Uber is precisely for scenarios like this. Standard Uber service provides a backstop for when times when Waymos can&#x27;t fulfill rides.

Tbf, I think you’re just experiencing a downside of living in NYC. I’ve only ever been there as a tourist, but I wouldn’t ever dream of renting a motorcycle in the city for the reasons you mention.For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate.Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general.I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)

Motorcycling used to be one of my biggest hobbies.I live in NYC now. Drivers here are some combination of utterly selfish and mindlessly distracted. You can&#x27;t even trust them to stop at red lights. It gives me a huge amount of pause riding here.&quot;Cars are dangerous, necessary in many places, but often driven by irresponsible people&quot; is a huge problem that needs solving. Waymo seems to have been doing a pretty fantastic job at it.And even if they couldn&#x27;t figure out how to route around floods, floods are rare. They&#x27;re still a net benefit to society.

The reason they can&#x27;t do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.

I’ve just been to Austin where self-driving cars are everywhere but found to my disappointment that they can’t do trips to the airport.To your point, knowledge work, as a whole is a much larger and complex domain than self-driving.

VLAs (vision-language-action models), which are offspring of LLMs, and their versions that are more suitable to edge devices are being used in self-driving to add common sense to path planners (&quot;don&#x27;t drive through a police standoff&quot;, things like that).

AI as commonly discussed is just pretty-general intelligence that is very economically valuable. Not AGI outside of the true believers.And can we discuss AI drivers and AI LLMs in the same paragraph? One is a special application of trying to emulate a very particular human embodiment, with all the sensory challenges. The other is a brain in a vat. Both can fail and flourish independent of each other, or at least I see little overlap.

This is really my bear case against AI. I am not against it. I actually think it is really neat! But we have been working on driverless cars for how long and spent how much? And still things like a flooded roadway completely throw them.Tesla failed to deliver driverless cars but now is pivoting to the much more complex fully autonomous robots. And we can’t get AI to stop hallucinating facts, but any day we are going to be at AGI in a few years? I get people want these things to happen, but I just don’t see it happening any time soon. The whole tech industry feels built on what maybe, someday, possibly, could happen but most likely won’t, but we are all going to act like is a sure thing and is just around the corner.Are there no responsible adults left at these tech companies?

jeep snorkels are for air intakes for engines. electric cars don&#x27;t have air intakes. they have air cooling for batteries... I suppose you could snorkel those.

What happens when you you start floating?I guess water propulsion... and a rudder?

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind.Why can&#x27;t Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla&#x27;s capabilities?

I like both approaches. The fact that both exist is a clear win for the rest of us as consumers.Tesla&#x27;s approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that&#x27;s great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.

You can have intelligence with lidar.You can have even more intelligence with both.

Naaah, Tesla has no edge in intelligence either. It&#x27;s just a PR piece to sell to investors.

This is why I personally feel like Tesla&#x27;s approach is more likely to &quot;win&quot;. The fundamental blocker to self-driving cars is not sensing &#x2F; sensor fusion, it is intelligence. And the Tesla approach seems much more likely to achieve functional intelligence than Waymo&#x27;s.

Ask the car, in the sense you can, why it drove into the water.Then ask the human.I&#x27;m not sure you&#x27;d walk away the idea that they have equivalent intelligence. The human at least knew the water was there and took a risk, the car, presumably, had no idea what was in front of it and drove into it anyways.

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

As far as I can tell from these articles, driving into a flood has happened twice to Waymos, once in Texas and once in Atlanta? It does seem like it&#x27;s pretty uncommon.

That being said... it&#x27;s actually somewhat uncommon for humans to drive into flooded streets. To the degree that people think it&#x27;s notable enough to take videos and post them to social media. I don&#x27;t have the data, but would be interested to see how many times per passenger mile travelled human-directed and remotely-operated vehicles like Weymos drove into flooded streets.I can appreciate the cameras and lidar on the Weymos don&#x27;t give their remote operators a lot of good data about the depth of water on the road-way. As you point out, humans in cars often don&#x27;t get this right. I think the humans that don&#x27;t drive into deep water are the ones who a) give any amount of water on the roadway a big NOPE and b) people familiar with the local environment and use multiple visual clues to judge the true depth of the flooding.

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

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

They never advertised that they did. Its not even real true AI. They just struggle with new scenarios.People drive into floods too. They just don&#x27;t get sensational articles written about it, just posted on reddit.

Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking &quot;I&#x27;ll easily make it&quot; and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.

The problem is they&#x27;re not designed for that. They aren&#x27;t spending resources on some master control networking system because in 99% of use cases that won&#x27;t be useful anyways as most of the traffic being dealt with isn&#x27;t other waymo&#x27;s willing to communicate.There might be some level of adoption where they would, but honestly we&#x27;re back to &quot;but what about trains&#x2F;trucks?&quot;.Half the problem with evacuations is people don&#x27;t want to leave behind their stuff to get destroyed. You&#x27;d basically be better off getting a fleet of semi&#x27;s with some quick and dirty cube system thrown up than a bunch of automated sedans.

&gt; atleast there might be less gridlockI&#x27;ve never lived in a hurricane area, but when I think of news coverage of problematic evacuations, they&#x27;re showing people stuck on highways, not people stuck in urban traffic grids.It&#x27;s a throughput problem. Computer controlled &quot;car trains&quot; with shorter following distances can boost traffic throughput, but I don&#x27;t think that would be enough to make evacuation of large cities actually feasible. The highway system is simply not built for that use case. Especially since evacuation often occurs during inclement weather that reduces capacity.AFAIK, most places try to figure out how to make shelter in place work, because mass evacuation is likely to end up with many people facing the weather event while on the highway.You could theoretically do better with busses and trains, things, but there&#x27;s likely not enough busses that are setup for long distance travel available: lots of municipal bus fleets are setup for alternate fuels which is great for emissions but makes it hard to travel to a neighboring state, because there may not be appropriate fueling opportunities on the way. Etc, etc.

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

&quot;assuming the self driving cars don&#x27;t do something stupid&quot;This is a big assumption.This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can&#x27;t be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.

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

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

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

I mean the logical conclusion is a dedicated lane for automated cars..At which point we&#x27;ve reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.

While this is going to be an overly optimistic scenario: Imagine how smooth a hurricane evacuation would go if _everyone_ used a self-driving car to do the evacuation - atleast there might be less gridlock than there is during any usual hurricane evacuations. And assuming the self driving cars don&#x27;t do something stupid that causes every car behind it to essentially lock up and stop movingThat said, I know a scenario like that would never happen, probably for the best.

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

&gt; No one should be driving in a hurricane.I agree, but there are a number of people here in Florida who will do it or die trying (emphasis on the die trying)

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

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

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

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

This is a classic case of: if the situation is not in the training data then the model is unequipped to handle it.We&#x27;ve seen the phenomenon before. We&#x27;ve been warned against the phenomenon before, and we&#x27;ll see it again in other contexts in the future for sure.

There is a lot of speculation here about no one at Waymo having thought of these problems and about a lot of potential solutions.This problem is one of thousands of very well known problems, it&#x27;s simulated, and a number of solutions are in place. BUT the system is far from perfect.While not perfect, Waymo is extremely safe for riders in the cities it&#x27;s deployed in; because it&#x27;s deployed only in validated domains where they have very high confidence of your safety as a rider. But if it were perfect, and could operate at full scale, it would already be rolled out nationwide to millions of vehicles.These real world experiences will definitely up the prioritization of this bucket of problems. There are _so_ many buckets that it&#x27;s quite a challenge to prioritize without (as safely as possible) learning from real world experience.The hard work of building the complex models and systems to increasingly accurately judge when a scenario is drivable without being overly cautious (aka increasing increasing the precision while not decreasing recall) is what most of the team works on every day.As that gets better and better, they can scale up more and more.And if you&#x27;re interesting in helping, they&#x27;re definitely hiring: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.withwaymo.com&#x2F;jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.withwaymo.com&#x2F;jobs</a>

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

Recent and related:Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they &#x27;drive into standing water&#x27; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48151767">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48151767</a> - May 2026 (214 comments)

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

They can drive through surprisingly deep water, but you&#x27;d still rather avoid it for a lot of reasons. Dangerous loss of traction and risk of getting swept away, soaked passengers will want a refund, and a sopping wet interior will take the vehicle out of service for a while.

You also have to consider the bouyancy of wheels and body panels not yet filled with water which will kill traction, or if the water is moving it doesn&#x27;t take a lot to push vehicles around.Most cars crossing water don&#x27;t get stuck because the intake is blocked by water but because they either floated or get pushed away by the flow (or slammed into the water hard enough to break stuff). If you maintain forward movement and dont float most cars will keep going in water 4-6 inches above the intake height because of the wake and bubble of the engine compartment. You only really benefit from a snorkel if you are offroading through water where there may be unseen holes because submerging your entire engine and drivetrain that deep is still a horrible idea even with a snorkel.Also if you don&#x27;t have a direct motor on each drive wheel you still have to worry about water entering differentials and transfer cases even if the electronics are perfectly sealed.

Yep if they are watertight they will float, if they aren&#x27;t, they&#x27;ll fill up with water.

Deep water can still damage an EV by getting into connectors, sensors, wheel bearings, brakes, and cabin electronics.They can also float just like a regular car.

Another reason water and ICE cars don&#x27;t mix is the wiring harness. Even if you don&#x27;t flood the engine, you&#x27;ll be having trouble with the electrical for the rest of the car&#x27;s life. (Or, at least, that&#x27;s the conventional wisdom)

Maybe a dumb question, why do electric cars have issues with water?My understanding was that ICE cars have trouble because water get&#x27;s drawn into the engine. Water in the engine causes it to stall. And the engine must have air in flow and out flow.An electric car doesn&#x27;t need air in the same way (no oxygen to ignite with gasoline, no air to compress and expand).Shouldn&#x27;t electric cars to much better at driving through water?

&gt; Alternatively, just don&#x27;t run Waymo operations during flood&#x2F;flash flood warnings.FTA&gt; the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,”&gt; But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory.

Their fleet is constantly scanning the area with lidar, which is assembled into maps. If those maps are in 3d rather than a 2d road grid you can calculate puddles very accurately with no extra sensors:- Find the edge of the water using vision or lidar- look up the ground height at that position in your map data. That is the water level- run a flood fill of the local 3d map starting from that point, with that water level. That gives you an exact shape of the puddle- for any point on your planned path, you can now check if the point is in the puddle (per the flood fill above) and how deep the water is (difference between puddle&#x27;s water level and ground height)- use that either as a go&#x2F;no-go for a planned path, or even feed this into your pathfinding to find a path with acceptable water levelThe main limitation is that it assumes that the ground hasn&#x27;t changed. It won&#x27;t help in a landslide, or on muddy ground where other cars have disturbed the ground. But for the classic case of the flooded underpass or flooded dip in the road it should be very accurate

The vehicles have enough information to make the determination. Ground data is available in the point cloud and usually labeled as such. Water sometimes shows up in point clouds, sometimes it doesn&#x27;t depending on conditions and wavelength.If the apparent road surface is higher than the mapped ground surface, probably a puddle. If your point cloud has a big hole, also probably a puddle.This assumes you aren&#x27;t doing ground plane removal, of course. But it&#x27;s quite likely that Waymo is using a heavily ML approach these days, and I can imagine the poor thing getting very confused if it&#x27;s not an explicit training goal.

Do you how often you get flash warnings in Atlanta? And local roads flood far more often than flash food warnings are issued.If you can’t handle this issue, you really can’t operate in Atlanta.

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

I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a good solution right now. You can&#x27;t just go based on surrounding traffic because humans are also stupid and flood their cars all the time.You could maybe use short-wave infrared cameras combined with ground penetrating radar, but it&#x27;ll get real expensive so probably not commercially viable.I think the only &quot;good&quot; solution is to have the car be overly paranoid, and if it detects water on the roadway that&#x27;s bigger than some arbitrary diameter (to rule out mud puddles), then the car has to assume its a flood, stop, and escalate to a human or change the route.Alternatively, just don&#x27;t run Waymo operations during flood&#x2F;flash flood warnings. Maybe we as a society need to top forcing everything to still operate normally during natural disasters. It&#x27;s OK to shut things down when safety calls for it, and that applies to human drivers too. If areas are flooding, stay home.

In many situations, the depth of the water doesn&#x27;t matter as driving into it will likely result in death.

What 3 year old is judging the depth of a puddle before jumping in?Regardless, consider what you are saying: how can you seriously compare a computer to a (young) human and your response is disappointment that the AI doesn&#x27;t quite measure up? If it&#x27;s comparable to a child today it will be comparable to a teen in a decade!

I feel like re-reading this sentence a few times sends me right to the twilight zone of AI psychosis.It’s 2026 and self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a puddle and a flooded street, something a 3 year old can do.Google literally just got off stage telling us that AGI is almost here. Wake me up when this doesn’t feel like an NFT ape fever dream.And here we are talking about this like “oh gosh golly I wonder if this is some simple thing that could have been easily solved but they were trying to avoid regressions”Get out of town, man.I wish every dollar spent by investors on Waymo went into more frequent public bus service instead. A regular-ass bus with a human driver.

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

Oh, boy. I guess that means they haven&#x27;t gotten to the snow phase of the testing yet.

Inconvenient, but I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re erring on the side of safety here. Waymo is doing a surprisingly great job at expanding their network.

Self-driving divining rods <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dowsing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dowsing</a>

During the “winter”, sure, but it dumps rain during the same and there are flash floods occasionally. I agree with the parent comment that Miami is a great area to test - especially given that the bad weather is seasonal. They can run 24&#x2F;7 during the good weather seasons.Also, the drivers in Miami are a bit more unpredictable than the average driver around the country in my experience, so good challenge cases for self-driving development.

Doubtful. They probably just pause service when it rains. Miami weather is ideal most of the time.These self-driving companies have made very little progress on dealing with weather for how long they’ve spent on the problem.

I assumed they went to Miami to develop their foul weather capabilities. It&#x27;s still pretty early.

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

Is it so hard for LiDAR&#x2F;Camera to detect flood water on road. Water on a road looks like a flat surface to sensors.

I imagine it is hard to determine how deep the water is. There is a lot of training with small puddles (ignore) and not much with deep water.Still, it should be cautious as any human driver would be.

Didn&#x27;t ALL Waymos at once pulled over recently because it started raining?This ain&#x27;t Arizona - Atlanta has REAL weather.

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

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

hard part is that cars should drive through shallow water... but how to know the depth?given accurate mapping + realtime imaging, this should be possible albeit a Big Project(tm).

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

... but their World Model said it was ok to drive through the flood.Slide 3 in &quot;Extreme weather conditions and natural disasters&quot; section:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waymo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simulation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;waymo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...</a>

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

This is just part of the slog that autonomous driving was always going to be.Many many years ago I happened to be in a conversation with one of the guys on a team that participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. It was only the second such race after the 2004 one, but arguably the one which set off the autonomous driving race we see today. (Sebastian Thrun&#x27;s team came in 2nd.)I went into the conversation thinking it was going to be an extremely challenging but tractable sensors + control-systems problem. But by the end of the conversation I was like, OMG this is going to be a long-haul slog of solving an unending stream of problems, some potentially even AI-complete (i.e. requiring human-level judgment.)We mostly discussed why his and most other teams failed and the failures were so myriad and so technically intractable that I could not see a path to full self-driving for at least two decades. And all of this was offroad, so it didn&#x27;t even approach the challenges of sharing human-occupied streets. I cannot remember any details unfortunately, but I remember that one car got stuck in a loop due to a problem that would have been trivial for a human to bypass... but that required human-level judgment. As an analogy it was something like a soft obstacle that could safely be driven over. But for the car to know that it would require a database and an &quot;understanding&quot; of all possible obstacles. An LLM could have helped, but back then they were still firmly in the realm of SciFi.So the only feasible solution was to painstakingly identify all the edge-cases and work through them slowly, carefully, one-by-one. Which is what Waymo has been doing. This is also why when Elon made his &quot;full self-&quot;driving announcements I knew he had absolutely NO idea what he was talking about, and he was likely going to move fast and break people.Flooded streets is just another &quot;bump on the road&quot; to full self-driving, but it seems we&#x27;re actually getting there now. In retrospect, my 2-decade estimate was surprisingly accurate, I have no idea how I landed on that particular number!

Well except that there were incidents of cars getting stuck in floods with passengers before they paused the service.A closer analogy would be &quot;&quot;Chicago O&#x27;Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm after 3 planes slide off the runway due to ice&quot;Absolutely I think there will be a disconnect between when people think they should be able to drive somewhere (ie to work in a no-visibility blizzard) and when ideal self-driving cars would allow themselves to operate. Maybe society will adjust to be more flexible to natural conditions, or maybe people will get frustrated and drive themselves into the poor conditions as always.

I think another way of framing it is &quot;Waymo pauses Atlanta service due to weather conditions&quot;, which doesn&#x27;t sound at all unreasonable to me. It&#x27;s no different from &quot;Chicago O&#x27;Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm&quot; or whatever.I think that self driving cars won&#x27;t ever be able to handle every condition out there, and so there&#x27;s probably a time when the system will be paused &#x2F; shutdown when conditions aren&#x27;t safe to drive in. Honestly, I wish we could do this with human drivers for that matter, too, but some will press on even when they shouldn&#x27;t...

Humans have a hard time judging how deep water is too! Turns out neither Lidar nor vision&#x2F;cameras have the right ability to sense water depth.

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

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

We get popup thunderstorms here and those often mean zero visibility conditions even without a flood. It&#x27;s just part of life in the spring and summer with all that chaotic moisture coming off the Gulf. We might get a few minutes warning. If your robot can&#x27;t handle that then you&#x27;re going to have a bad time.

It can&#x27;t mean that, there&#x27;s a lake there!

Self driving cars are not going to be accepted if they have only marginally better success rates than humans. Just look at the news. Every minor self driving incident is endlessly magnified by the media while millions of human-caused accidents are just a part of life. That&#x27;s just how our brains work. All major decisions are made primarily based on emotion, not analytics.

A frontal cortex isn&#x27;t enough; there are plenty of corner cases that humans fail at too. The real test is if self-driving performs on par, or better than, humans in the vast majority of cases. If it saves 50,000 lives a year to go with self-driving, it&#x27;s a net-win even if there are a few people who die in situations where they would have survived with a human driver behind the wheel.

Not only are people slow to react to unusual situations, but this is taken advantage of by city designers to force people to slow down.Random planters in the middle of the road? Streets that narrow and then widen? Drivers start slowly creeping along, which means they are less likely to injury pedestrians.

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

Humans don&#x27;t handle all corner cases. People can be slow to react to completely novel or surprising situations. There will be corner cases where humans generally do better than a machine, but the simple rule to slow down and come to a halt if things look too weird or confusing will almost always be the right answer.Ideally, driverless cars will one day be better drivers than humans and this will save tens of thousands of traffic deaths per year. Holding up progress because cars will be confused in extremely rare or improbable situations will cost more lives than it saves.

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

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

The driving ML model will take care of the next 10 seconds of driving, in a fast loop deciding what steering and throttle commands to give.The LLM will apply the high level reasoning needed to deal with longer time horizons and complex decisions, like deciding that the best way to reach the car wash 100 yards away is by walking.

how would a llm helpmaybe a little biological brain engineered to think it is a car with api access to the car hardware via the llm?imagine you get into the car and in the center console you just see a floating brain in vat like fallout

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

You&#x27;re missing the obvious. Waymo trains with human driver data, and idiotic humans drive into deep water constantly. Oh, you want Waymo&#x27;s to drive better than humans?Deep Thought paused for a moment&#x27;s reflection.
&quot;Tricky,&quot; he said finally.

That&#x27;s the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it&#x27;s some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.

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

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

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

Thousands of Waymos recalled after robotaxi swept into a creek <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;cwy2011dl4xo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;cwy2011dl4xo</a>&gt; It follows an incident on 20 April in San Antonio, Texas, where an empty Waymo vehicle entered a flooded road and was swept into a creek.Nobody in it but sounds serious enough.

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

Clearly they haven&#x27;t actually had any serious problems getting stuck or anything because it&#x27;d be all over the news.I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re barreling into foot+ deep water.I think they&#x27;re driving into shallower &quot;perfectly navigable but still deep&quot; puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive like a high end chauffeur.

Waymo uses lidar. There&#x27;s lots of information about it on the web.

The spinny things on the vehicle are LIDAR.

Lidar is much less accurate in the rain.

does Waymo use Lidar or is it like Musk&#x27;s &quot;cost saving&quot; cameras only

If they only would use lidar. Oh wait…

It&#x27;s an interesting illustration of how widely and quickly misinformation spreads, though.

Your assumption that Waymos are &quot;(somewhat) autonomous&quot; is wrong, which is why your questions and conclusion don&#x27;t make any sense

I thought Weymo&#x27;s were supposed to be &quot;supervised&quot; by humans in the Philippines. Maybe driving in circles in the suburbs and driving into flood waters happens only when the cars are out of mobile data range? Did Weymo pay their mobile phone bill? Does the (somewhat) autonomous system on the car decide when to flag a human for help? I would have expected a human to be watching all the time. Are they experiencing labor problems in the Philippines? Maybe Weymo doesn&#x27;t want to pay their remote operators as much as the remote operators want to get paid?

What are the chances that google just shuts down waymo once they get whatever they need from it. Weren&#x27;t there other ambitious projects under google that had a similar fate?

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

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

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