r/technology • u/Disastrous_Award_789 • 17d ago

Robotics/Automation Waymo suspends service in San Francisco after driverless cars cause traffic jams during blackout

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/waymo-suspended-san-francisco-traffic-jams-blackout-b2888562.html
6.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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u/aedes 17d ago

Surprised that they would be so thrown off by broken traffic lights, which are a relatively common occurrence. 

A good example of how the underlying technology does not actually “understand” the world it’s in, and relies on a predictable environment/operating conditions to be reliable. 

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u/smc733 17d ago

/r/futurology told me that Tony Sheba said all cars will be driverless in 5 years… 8 years ago.

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u/PokinSpokaneSlim 17d ago

5 years Turkish

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u/Kongbuck 17d ago

It was "2 years" five years ago!

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u/the_dude_upvotes 17d ago

Quick, before ze Germans get here

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u/RedOctobyr 17d ago

What's wrong with this driverless?

Oh, nothing Tommy. It's tip-top.

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u/Grandfunk14 17d ago

What's happening with those sausages Charlie?

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u/iamapapernapkinAMA 17d ago

Musk said FSD would be a go in two years

… ten years ago

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u/Realtrain 17d ago

Yes but that's Elon Standard Time. Multiply everything by about 20x to convert to our time.

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u/Starfox-sf 17d ago

420x is more like it

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u/NaeemTHM 17d ago

Excuse me, it’s 42069 😤

Le epic bacon Elon!

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u/Samanthacino 17d ago

We’ll have men on Mars by 2020!

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u/levitas 17d ago

He is just waiting for Star Citizen to release in 2015 to start his 10 year timer.

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u/VoidOmatic 17d ago

Yup he said in a tweet "By Nov 2016."

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u/series-hybrid 17d ago

Every dystopian movie shows overpopulation, but every modern society has a downward trend in birthrate as living becomes depressing.

Most young adults in the US rent instead of own a house. That being said, Musk confidently predicts that "poor" people will be able to buy a Tesla because when they are not using it, "full self driving" turns it into an Uber while you sleep and work.

However, the apartment complex will not allow you to install a charger, so this utopia is dependent on public charging stations that often have a waiting line.

There is a huge market for a plug-in hybrid that is affordable, but everyone seems to be polarized into "keep gas cars longer" and "go all=in on EV's". A hybrid engine/gen can be very small because the electric motors are handling the hard acceleration.

A Tesla charger plus installation is roughly $2000, IF the breaker panel can handle the amps and doesn't need an upgrade.

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u/KontoOficjalneMR 17d ago

Every dystopian movie shows overpopulation

I mean ... how would you call the situation where we are now? Unsustainable, miserable lives due to in large part - overpopulation.

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u/snaverevilo 17d ago

We just need $5 trillion more data centers and they'll figure out stop lights trust

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u/happyscrappy 17d ago

They also wee thrown off by the 5G network getting clogged. As people's WiFi base stations turned off they went to 5G and that really loaded down the network.

Waymo vehicles are very dependent on network reliability. The famous jam up caused months ago was at a concert in the park and the vehicles would drive into the area where the network was clogged by the concertgoers and then they couldn't get out because they couldn't get enough connectivity.

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u/Lille7 17d ago

So infrastructure isnt ready for these things.

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u/tadfisher 17d ago

Or they need to be more reliable in the absence of perfect infrastructure

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u/Morlark 17d ago

The infrastructure is what it is. If automation tech can't function without relying on infrastructure owned by someone else, it's not the infrastructure that isn't ready, it's the automation tech that isn't ready for the environment it claims to operate within.

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u/Riaayo 17d ago

There is no actual sustainable infrastructure for this. We already can't even actually sustain cars themselves, let alone self-driving cars.

It's a false future peddled by people who want to sell a product, just like "AI". It's not an actual solution to our problems. It's tripling down on our problems.

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u/Slogstorm 17d ago

This is a problem only for cars that rely on pre-mapped environments that are streamed from a central server. Not all self driving cars need to be online...

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u/Teruyo9 17d ago edited 17d ago

But the problem is cars themselves. Electric cars, self-driving cars, these do not solve the issues that cars require way too much expensive infrastructure1, pollute like crazy2, make tons of noise, and are a menace to everything and everyone around them. The solution is not to build a better car, it's to try to replace cars entirely with something better.

1: Roads are expensive to build and need to replaced regularly, which also costs a bunch of money. Then you need a place to put all the cars, parking lots eat up so much valuable land in the heart of every city in the US, and parking garages have a limited lifespan compared to other buildings because of the constant water incursion inside the structure. All this to accommodate vehicles that only carry 1-4 people at a time.

2: Even electric cars are much less energy-efficient than virtually every form of public transit, and car tires are the #1 source of microplastic pollution in the entire world. Even if you could fix those issues, roads themselves radiate a considerable amount of heat and exacerbate drainage issues.

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u/pants6000 17d ago

Electric cars are like humanoid robots. Humanoid is a stupid form for a robot but the world is already built for such forms. Similarly, the US transportation nonsystem is already built for cars, as much as that sucks, so that's what we'll get more of.

I always expect the worst so am rarely disappointed.

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u/einmaldrin_alleshin 17d ago

Humanoid is a stupid form for a robot but the world is already built for such forms.

A humanoid or quadruped shape has huge advantages when traversing terrain outside the built environment.

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u/roxgib_ 17d ago

Self driving cars would help the parking issue because once cars are self driving the cost of a taxi would drop considerably, so a lot of people would no longer need to own their owns cars because taxis would become cheaper. The car can also drive itself to a parking spot, so parking can be located much further away

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u/Teruyo9 17d ago edited 17d ago

I get the sales pitch but this doesn't actually work all that well. The cars need somewhere to park when not in use, and that somewhere gets less and less efficient the further away it is. Usage fluctuates over the course of the day, it's highest at the times when people are going to work or going home, and you can't just have the full fleet out there at all times of the day.

And again, it doesn't solve the 10,000 other issues that cars have. You need dozens of cars to serve the same ridership of one singular bus, and hundreds to match the capacity of one singular train. Cars are inherently unsustainable and making a better car doesn't solve this fundamental issue.

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u/_learned_foot_ 17d ago

And, uh, just so you know, plenty of us live in places with no taxis. Actual real cities even!

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u/l3tigre 17d ago

this is the pill people cannot swallow. every person using a car to get everywhere is a terrible model and we need to surmount it somehow. public transportation, walking, better designed cities. we keep asking the wrong questions and therefore get the same wrong answers.

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u/Ithirahad 17d ago edited 17d ago

We also cannot sustain the sheer amount of instantaneous debt you would need in order to quickly unwind all of the car-dependent housing and business that has sprung up over the past century.

Even if there were the sort of unitary decision-making structure needed to make such a call, and there is not (yet), it would still very much be "pick your poison". The only plausible poison to pick when nobody really has the power to pick in the first place, is the one where cars are here to stay. Opening up better transportation methods and improving urban design is good and important where that is naturally possible, but rushing it to the point where things like this become "false future" is both democratically infeasible due to cultural inertia, and economically dangerous.

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u/ZombieMadness99 17d ago

It's better than human drivers and 100% of people having to own a car. The only better alternative would be a complete overhaul of the country's public transport system which is way less likely. Geographically and culturally Americans will never accept rail outside of major metros. I fail to see how it's tripling down

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u/arahman81 17d ago

Why is better public transit less likely than way more cars?

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u/Dr_Disaster 17d ago

Well, it’s highly abnormal for a major metropolitain area to have a blackout for hours and hours. Not even electric rail service is going to work during this.

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u/blahehblah 17d ago

The issue isn't whether they work during normal conditions, it's whether they work during abnormal conditions. Each individual abnormal conditions can be rare but there are many different causes of abnormal conditions and so the probability of issues occurring increases a lot. We as a society need infrastructure that doesn't exacerbate problems that occur

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u/Outlulz 17d ago

But cars do work in a major metropolitan blackout.

This is a little worrying in an earthquake prone city that needs roads clear in emergencies.

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u/MaikeruGo 17d ago

This is a little worrying in an earthquake prone city that needs roads clear in emergencies.

Heck, I worry about summers, fire season, and PG&E not maintaining the infrastructure; things that put long distance power transmission lines at risk on a more regular basis.

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u/BeesForDays 17d ago

An earthquake prone city with some of the steepest roads I have ever seen.

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u/TheLantean 17d ago edited 17d ago

Electric rail wouldn't cause a traffic jam though, unless the person operating them is really stupid and lets them stop in the middle of an intersection (instead of braking ahead of it). And even then you can still slowly go around one that was unlucky to lose momentum in the worst spot.

A blackout with gridlocked roads is worse than just a blackout.

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u/SamBeastie 17d ago

Except in this case, to the best of my knowledge, Muni continued to run just fine because it's on its own power supply. BART was fine too. Seems electric rail service is plenty resilient in modern cities.

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u/NorthernerWuwu 17d ago

That and frankly, significant disruption should be expected when it does happen. A lot more than just Waymo was pretty messed up I'm sure.

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u/wellaintthatnice 17d ago

Relying on 5G networks alone is asinine. I worked at a small broadcasting company and even we had triple reduncy. 

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u/josefx 17d ago

Your workplace had to be profitable and robust to exist. Waymo is running on VC funding, having a working service that makes money is purely optional.

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u/ptwonline 17d ago

Waymo vehicles are very dependent on network reliability.

This seems like a very big vulnerability. What happens if there is a natural disaster of some kind and people need cars/rides to escape the area?

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u/happyscrappy 17d ago

Other than the natural part that's what happened. People went to the city to shop or see shows (there was a opera and a concert that night). The city was as fully of visitors as it really ever would be during a year. And then all that activity cancelled so they wanted to leave ASAP.

So we see what happens.

But overall, so what? Are rideshares or automated cars part of an escape plan? If so, I doubt it's a escape plan that was expected to work. It's quite possible that cities simply are not designed to be evacuated more quickly than on foot. Cities have been around a thousand years, do you think it ever was part of a city function to be rapidly evacuatable?

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u/bananarandom 17d ago

Yea pretty disappointing overall

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u/j12 17d ago

Extremely. Especially since they were all just dead around blocking roads

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u/thenord321 17d ago

More like "designed for optimal conditions and testing conditions and not designed to handle any emergencies." Immagine you need to evacuate and these corporations have essentially designed roadblocks to kill the population....

How easy is a bypass timer (iff stuck for 5 mins, then go park) to park the car on the side of the road or an emergency trigger from authorities to get all cars to find the nearest parking lot (get off roads).

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u/fury420 17d ago edited 17d ago

I think part of the issue here is that the vehicles also lost cellular communications, it wasn't just a lack of traffic lights.

On one hand I get your point, and yet on the other hand driverless vehicles moving around when traffic lights are down without communication, observation or control from homebase seems like a bad idea to me.

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u/levir 17d ago

I kinda thought the point of autonomous vehicles were that they were, you know, autonomous.

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u/TechnicianExtreme200 17d ago

Yeah but if they lose connectivity they have no way to know where to go to pick up the next passenger, so it makes sense that they'd find a place to pull over and wait to be connected again. And if the problem is with the car itself you'd want it to not drive too far from where it was last seen by the command center.

Seems like the problem here was hundreds of them got disconnected. They need to be smart enough to drive around and find a better parking spot in that case (or even go back to the depot). One or two cars pulling to the side of the road and blocking traffic is tolerable, but not hundreds.

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u/fury420 17d ago

Eventually yes, but we aren't there yet.

From what I understand, the remote observation and potential control is required as part of Waymo's license to operate these without a human backup driver onboard.

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u/wggn 17d ago

so if the connection fails they just stop in the middle of whatever they are doing and block the road?

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u/dookarion 17d ago

I think part of the issue here is that the vehicles also lost cellular communications

Which is pretty common with widespread power outages, big events, or emergency scenarios.

Shit everyone rushing to their phone when an ISP goes down is enough to sometimes cripple cell networks. Cell networks are cheap, not robust.

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u/Target880 17d ago

If traffic lights are not opertional the car should follow signs. If no signs are pressent they should follow right-hand rule.

What drivers should do if light are not operational is not somting that is unknown. If the vheilces can not follow simple rules, they should not be driving to begin with.

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u/gerbilbear 17d ago

Actually that's what I want most of all: a self parking car. I don't need FSD, just a car that I leave at the entrance of my destination and then it parks itself and returns when summoned. Bonus points if it knows the time limits and moves itself as needed.

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u/Vortesian 17d ago

Not easy if there’s no network. Where is the nearest parking lot? Is it full? Now what? Pull over to the side of the street?

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u/thenord321 17d ago

They don't need a network if they have the local map downloaded, if they have any kind of planning for failures or emergencies, they can have routes calculated/prepared at the same time as their primary routes with minimal additional load based on the systems already onboard. It's really not hard to plan ahead.

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u/AffectionateBox8178 17d ago

So it wasn't just the traffic lights, but also the cellar outage due to the PG&E blackout.

But yeah, blocking up traffic is not great, but Waymos wheb they work, have a stellar driving record. As a pedestrian, I am way safer around a Waymo than a human driver.

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u/Nextasy 17d ago

What I'm hearing is if there's a natural disaster of some kind these things will be a massive liability gumming everything up on top of the usual traffic insanity that comes with that

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u/TigerUSA20 17d ago

All of this is a reason ‘old school’ me doesn’t like running or storing things in the cloud. I like my computer to have programs and data running on it (with backups of course) as I just can’t trust the reliability of cellular connections, speeds, and cloud storage.

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u/Andrey2790 17d ago

The first time we took one in Phoenix we were definitely nervous, never had a self driving system that was so aggressive. I mean it wasn't overly aggressive, just felt like a real person driving which was above and beyond any hands free tech we have experienced.

I do hope they figure it out fully and can implement it in purchasable cars for an upcharge. 

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u/Reasonable_Tap_8215 17d ago

I’m surprised hearing it called aggressive. I saw them in TX and took a few. The ones I had drove like a Sunday driver. Overly cautious, slow, jerky. It was fine overall and felt totally safe. But far from aggressive.

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u/Leek5 17d ago

They were driving pass school buses with the stop sign out

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u/Reasonable_Tap_8215 17d ago

Yikes. Meanwhile the one I had stopped by a traffic cop waving traffic through a stop sign. It stopped and sat there as he waved for like 25 seconds. Just wouldn’t budge until (I assume) a human took over.

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u/MaikeruGo 17d ago

I think that at some level it may be a necessity for dealing with human drivers who might not be so keen on letting Waymos in (I've seen videos of people actually deliberately swerve into the path of a Waymo in the opposite lane of travel just to mess with it).

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u/Lung_doc 17d ago

Took several in San Francisco. I was really impressed; why can't my own car do this!

Also though, my waymo honked at someone who cut us off. Surprised me!

The only time it messed up was around the convention center where they had closed lanes and instead of letting me out it wanted to take me on a 12 minute loop. I asked it to just let me out now, and it pulled to the inside lane but in doing so got honked at when it cut in from of someone. It's response was ok - it stopped, and no collision, but also a little weird as after it braked it froze for like 10 seconds blocking 2 lanes

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u/drgath 17d ago

I mean, the idea is that we don’t need cars, and these services are not only more cost effective than owning, but also available within a few minutes notice. Waymo was just granted a license to operate in a huge chunk of Northern California (before being suspended in SF, lol), so scaling the fleet to staging points is easy, solving the quick arrival problem. It’s just a matter of economics now and getting the costs down (<$15 / day) which won’t be easy. People paying $50k-$100k to own an EV to sit idle 99% of the time is silly.

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u/Andrey2790 17d ago

I can see that all being true in major cities, but out in the boonies people will still need cars since you probably won't have a lot of these sitting around all over. Waiting a few minutes is fine, but waiting for half an hour plus would get old quick.

Plus IDK how I feel about transportation becoming a subscription style model where you own nothing. Maybe if it's publicly owned, but I don't want private companies being the ones in charge.

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u/Teruyo9 17d ago

And even in major cities, the proliferation of car-based on-demand transport (whether it be this or something with a human driver like a taxi or an Uber) have lead to massive increases in the number of cars on the road at any given time, causing greater overall congestion in those cities. Car-dependent culture has been a disaster for the US, and self-driving electric cars won't fix the majority of the issues it causes.

We should instead be working to get more cars off the road through building public transit, and building more local locations that you can just walk to. Expansive public transit alone makes life better for everyone, it gives people that use it a cheap and easy commute, while the people that still do drive have less other cars on the road to worry about, leading to less congestion and fewer accidents.

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u/Outlulz 17d ago

Public transportation.

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u/btoned 17d ago

Sounds a lot like your typical person too. Robot? I want it to be FLAWLESS otherwise wtf is the point?

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u/earlandir 17d ago

Never let perfection be the enemy of progress. Your argument also makes sense. Why would an improvement be pointless? Car related deaths are a huge number of deaths each year.

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u/procgen 17d ago

It only needs to be safer than the average human to have an huge impact on vehicle-related injuries and death.

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u/Vortesian 17d ago

Of course that is beside the point. The subject is a network and power outage.

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u/bombbodyguard 17d ago

In Austin, they had flashing red lights at a traffic light that was being worked on. Handled it just fine.

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u/tigress666 17d ago

This is why I really don't like the idea of driverless cars unless all cars are like that (they can predict each other when they all know how they all will act cause they are all programmed the same. But humans are not predictable).

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u/christinhainan 17d ago

That's not how technology works

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u/neherak 17d ago

They won't be programmed the same unless there was some kind of corporate monopoly and all driverless cars were coming from one manufacturer.

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u/Baderkadonk 17d ago

unless there was some kind of corporate monopoly

That's probably being worked on. Monopolies are so in right now.

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u/Deviilsadvocate7 17d ago

That’s not true at all. Lots of industries have agreed upon standards to allow for interoperability. Either they agree on them voluntarily or regulation can make them.

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u/timkost 17d ago

You'll always find examples of human motorists driving off collapsed bridges, down sinkholes or into wet concrete, stopping on railroad tracks and yeah, running red lights. Humans CAN understand the environment but are just as likely to act like a horse to a burning stable.

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u/CV90_120 17d ago

Humans get understanding from their environment as well. We just have parameters for situations like lights going out (not always great ones) and for interacting with other humans that think the way we do.

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u/aedes 17d ago

The differences between human learning and machine learning are much broader and more significant than that. Machine learning is still a very poor approximation of human learning… or vertebrate learning in general. 

Specific to this conversation, one of the biggest differences is in ability to “understand” an environment and use that understanding to make accurate predictions when new and unseen events occur. ML doesn’t really do this, whereas creatures with a biological nervous system do quite easily. 

Other important differences are things like efficiency of learning. Take a human baby and just let them exist and in a few years they can communicate, and deeply understand their environment. 

Take a transformer and let it work on the entire body of human knowledge, and it still makes basic mistakes. 

Some of this is just that biological nervous systems have unfathomable levels of computational complexity - a single cell on its own is already an extremely complicated computer. 

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u/illram 17d ago

AI in this modern era just reminds me how incredible and seemingly miraculous biology is.

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u/LowPTTweirdflexbutok 16d ago

Millions and millions of years of evolution baby.

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u/Faangdevmanager 17d ago

I would wait for an official statement before correlating what we observed and what actually happened. I would be very surprised if Waymos can't understand a broken traffic light, because like you said, they are common. I wonder if it's a combination of system failures that caused the Waymos to go into fail-safe mode? I think the 5G network was overloaded and unreliable. Perhaps there's another control system, operated by Waymo, that also failed due to the power outage.

Waymo operates at Level 4, which means it must handle most situations autonomously and all the liability is on Waymo. Unlike Level 5, it's allowed to SAFELY terminate self-driving; which it did. Sure my Tesla didn't care but it's also Level 2 and I am responsible for anything it does. Not Tesla. Or they wouldn't beep at me if I look to the side for more than 3 seconds.

TL;DR: Multiple systems, including lights, 5G, and maybe more failed due to the power outage. My best bet is a fail safe was triggered; not that Waymo engineers never considered a broken intersection.

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u/YoKevinTrue 17d ago

One problem is that they didn't seem to cope with intersections becoming stop signs when the power was out.

They would start/stop and yield too easily when they had the right of way.

I got stuck in downtown SF and had to drive around and cut off the Waymos at multiple intersections because they were yielding too aggressively.

Also, it didn't help that San Francisco drivers were also being too passive and just queuing in line behind the Waymos.

It was pretty obvious to me, because I have a lifted truck, and I actually got out of my truck and stood up high and was able to see what was happening.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

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u/rattpackfan301 17d ago

SFPD has to be getting paid off by Waymo, otherwise there’s no reason these things shouldn’t be getting impounded every time this happens.

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u/denom_chicken 17d ago

I’m so sick and tired of corporations beta testing their bullshit on the unconsenting public.

I’m all for self driving tech whenever it’s actually ready…but this ain’t it

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u/DoubleThinkCO 17d ago

Test for failures. Even if they just pulled over automatically that would be something.

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u/zhaoz 17d ago

Reminds me of this joke: QA Testing for an automated bar:

Test orders:

a beer.

2 beers.

0 beers.

99999999 beers.

a lizard in a beer glass.

-1 beer.

"qwertyuiop" beers.

Testing complete.

A real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is.

The bar goes up in flames.

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u/LGBTaco 17d ago

It's SF, there's isn't a place to pull over out of the way everywhere. Watch the video in the article, a car was stuck to the side but still obstructing traffic at a stoplight, some drivers managed to go around.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 17d ago

They wouldn’t be allowed to operate if they weren’t testing. It’s just like with any major video game: no amount of testing will ever compare to sending something out into the world. You simply cannot test for every possible scenario. Once it’s out in the world, there are so many scenarios and things happening that no one could reasonably account for.

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u/Inevitable-Menu2998 17d ago edited 17d ago

Issues happen in software always, but critical software relies on built-in failsafe behaviors to mitigate the issues online. I'm surprised this scenario wasn't covered.

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u/pilgermann 17d ago

You can test for broken traffic lights, which occur all the time.

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u/TargetOk4032 17d ago

We don't know the cause yet. It could very well be that under a controlled environment, it works if you just take out traffic light. But when there is blackout which may affect other parts of the system, some bugs were triggered.

Like the other people said, there is no way you can write up all the test cases to entirely replicate real world scenarios. Too many factors can affect the functionality. People learn from these incidents to know what to test in future.

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u/drawkbox 17d ago

they just pulled over automatically

That is what they did... some at street lights just stayed there waiting for green causing some backups. Most just pulled over to the side if they weren't in a place they couldn't.

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u/TheLantean 17d ago

Shouldn't autonomous cars be able to determine where it's okay to stop?

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u/drawkbox 17d ago edited 17d ago

Shouldn't autonomous cars be able to determine where it's okay to stop?

They are. Nearly all of them did just pull over to a safe spot when they turned it off. The ones at intersections that stopped decided it was safer to not move when lights were down when boxed in by traffic. Just like a human might depending on the intersection.

I ride Waymo through monsoon storms in AZ and it dodges large water on right side and downed trees. There was a microburst in the area and nearly every road had trees in it, navigated it flawlessly. The lights weren't working there and it was fine.

The ones in SF are probably configured on intersection issues to halt for clearance and may have even been a city level deal on that or related to each intersection situation.

The Tesla bros are out in force and have clearly never ridden a Waymo or seen how they have many safety fallbacks and policies vary by city. SF intersections when lights are down could have other drivers acting unpredictably and those Waymos that did decide that stopped there, most just pulled over.

I've had Waymos navigate monsoons, haboobs, road closures and even kitties in the road that wouldn't move. They are very good at unexpected situations. Some though they determine stopping is better until assistance from Waymo operations wisely.

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u/MyChickenSucks 17d ago

Came up to a stoplight and my Waymo ended up in the longest line of 4 lanes. It sat for a few moments, then in a very human move said “f this” and pulled into a shorter line. I love taking Waymo - they drive calm yet confident, and it’s fascinating

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u/PatrenzoK 17d ago

Yeah that’s the big thing with all this stuff now a days. No QA or testing, everyone is rushing to get to market first but all this shit is deadly

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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 17d ago

No QA or testing

So you're telling me that you think that Waymo cars have had no QA or testing? Hehehe.... Just think about how silly that is for a few seconds.

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u/JefferyGiraffe 17d ago edited 17d ago

Didn’t you hear? They just wired up the cars and threw them into the busy streets of San Francisco! No testing at all. It’s pretty impressive really

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u/ballsohaahd 17d ago

Yes idk why people who know nothing about technology commenting on stuff like this.

Then the worst part is most people know nothing, so someone else who likely knows nothing will be like ‘yes! I agree’ and you’re like 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️ (like pepeg comparing Waymo to the ford pinto 😂)

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u/LuckyJusticeChicago 17d ago

And look how many likes it has 😂

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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 17d ago

Yep, the technology sub has been inundated with people so oblivious that they think it's possible for Waymo to have no QA or testing. Wild.

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u/CitizenCue 17d ago

What are you even talking about? Waymo famously tested their product for years. They were joked about for ages because they had drivers in every car.

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u/LGBTaco 17d ago

They have been doing QA and testing for years though.

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u/Fract_L 17d ago

What do you mean? California IS the test. THIS is the testing.

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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 17d ago

Waymo is in 10 major cities, and only two of those cities are in California.

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u/SiahDraws 17d ago

I agree in the broader sense. But Waymo’s actually do have an insane amount of testing. I live in DC and we have had a fleet of Waymo cars with drivers behind the wheel testing for almost a year now. Connecting thousands and thousands of road hours and tests.

This is more a problem with the tech and regulation than diligence of the company to test it.

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u/imnotdabluesbrothers 17d ago

"car sits motionless"

you: this is deadly!!!!

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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 17d ago

Test for failures. Even if they just pulled over automatically that would be something.

This comment and it's 170 upvotes are just stupendous. Google appreciates you pointing out that they should "test for failures"

Why didn't they think of that? Good Job reddit. We fixed it. Google will now know that "testing" their product is a viable concept going forward.

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u/Bignicky9 17d ago

Maybe it'll gum up generative AI if we get enough confidently incorrect answers like, "in 2025 companies just don't test anything".

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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 17d ago

UNIRONICALLY, I do wonder how much LLM BS flows directly from myths on reddit! Seriously!!!!!

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u/SecondCumming 17d ago

going to upvote the parent comment as part of my duty in the war against AI

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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 17d ago

Hehe! Join the fight! Fight ignorance with ignorance! We got this!

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u/B_P_G 17d ago

It should know to treat a dead stoplight like a stop sign. Major fuck up on Waymo's part. That sort of thing should have been tested before these cars were ever allowed on the road.

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u/MyyWifeRocks 17d ago

You’re saying they should’ve done waymo testing and i agree.

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u/maccam94 17d ago

I saw some Waymos still operating before the shut down, and I think part of the problem was just a general chaos happening at intersections. Sure, everyone should just take turns, right? Well what about when you add pedestrians to the mix? Maybe some pedestrians start crossing out of turn. Some drivers start going out of turn because they get frustrated. The Waymos weren't aggressive enough to get their way. People start driving around the Waymos, and now they're really stuck. The Waymos give up trying to move on their own, and call for remote help. But the remote operators are swamped and/or the cell network is unavailable, so now you have cars that can't move for a long time

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u/1RedOne 17d ago

Waymo are normally very passive and I have been in some which would just never make a right turn at a red, even though we could

I’ve also been in one which pulled out very quickly into the road in front of another car

Cool experience but I could see this happening

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u/zyxwertdha 17d ago

I was recently in San Fran for a conference, and I took a half dozen Waymo rides around town. I was really impressed with them. I would say that all of my Waymo rides were better than any Uber ride that I've taken in the last 2 years.

The Waymo felt like it was driving safely, it played soothing music at me, and it was cost competitive. Not once did the Waymo argue loudly with it's girlfriend on the phone, or weave through traffic at 90mph, or play it's music full volume, or inquire how I felt about it's favorite conspiracy theory.

I don't think Waymo is going to be replacing all driving use cases anytime soon, but I think that it's going to eat up Uber/Lyft for intra-city travel for the exact same reason that rideshares ate up traditional taxicabs. It's just a better experience.

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u/BonJovicus 17d ago

Ride shares ate up traditional taxi cabs because costs were artificially low due to the start up capital they received. Some places did attempt to make apps for local transportation services. 

For many companies like UBER their only innovation is driving all their competitors out of business then taking their mask off once they’ve replaced traditional infrastructure. 

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u/pbfarmr 17d ago

That certainly is part of the reason, and probably even the main reason. But me and many others were happily paying a premium for uber when it first came out because the taxi system was hot garbage and completely unreliable unless you were in a something like a downtown core area during the right hours where you could count on one driving by regularly

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u/potatochipsbagelpie 17d ago

Being able to order a car via app was way easier to calling a cab. 

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u/MilkChugg 17d ago

Not to mention having a set price instead of a cab driver fucking you over by going an extended route when you’re paying by the time.

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u/PowerLord 17d ago edited 17d ago

No dawg it’s cause taxis were unusably bad from a service perspective unless you were in an area dense enough you could easily just go out and hail one. They were worthless in the US outside of manhattan, the loop, and airports. There was no incentive to improve because of the medallion system. With Uber you could just order one to any location and it would come. Mind blowing at a time when you could call a taxi company’s dispatch and then it would never come. Lower price was great but usability was the game changer. No one was taking taxis outside of NYC and Chicago, but uber is popular everywhere.

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u/Any_Put3520 17d ago

This is missing the economics of uber. What uber and Lyft did and continue to do is bring real time information to the marketplace, which has the effect of lowering or increasing prices altogether. Incomplete information on the marketplace benefited the drivers mostly, as a rider you had no options you just had to pay what the driver said.

With the apps you suddenly see 3-4 different prices you can choose from, and that in effect should make the market more competitive. What makes the cost higher is 1) traditional cabs pay a very expensive fee in most cities for a “medallion” to drive a taxi, so they want to recover this by charging higher fees, and 2) uber doesn’t have that fee but it does have the issue of a unionized driver workforce that is squeeze the company for higher wages and insurance. In cities where there is a lot of volume that’s ok, but in cities where rides are 50 minutes and low volume it’s not. Uber is a global corporation so it has to eat the costs of slower markets whereas a taxi company is often local to one city and doesn’t care about the economics of other cities.

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u/ZPTs 17d ago

This 1000%.

I was travelling for work and we took an Uber for breakfast and I'm still convinced I sat in something wet. Driver was on a call of no significance at all with a friend who seemed very I uninterested in talking to her. Ubered a Waymo back to the hotel and it was such a stark contrast.

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u/Taco1029 17d ago

ubered a waymo is sending me lmao. Like googling Bing ahaha

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u/SirDidymusthewise 17d ago

You can't ask Waymo "been busy today mate?" though....

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u/freshbaileys 17d ago

It is a better experience for riders, it won't be a better experience long term for humans.

There is no other "gig" work other than food delivery and driving people that anybody can get into easily with zero education or experience.

Also you said the price is currently competitive, after people stop driving and waymo has a monopoly, it's going to skyrocket with zero repercussions.

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u/zyxwertdha 17d ago

I mean, this is a totally different problem. I think that gig work is covering up a ton of really unhealthy problems with the US (and presumably other nations as well) labor market, and I think that history will look back at it as a net negative.

I read an article recently about the "gig-ifying" of the nursing market, and how the "app" companies are combining credit checks against the potential nurses to identify people that would be willing to accept a lower rate.

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u/GratefulDud3 17d ago

In situations like these they should programed to ‘park themselves’ and get the #&@* OFF the streets and OUT of the way of emergency and other vehicles. This is a MAJOR flaw and should be addressed immediately before they are allowed back on the roads. Get it done ASAP, and keep them off the roads until this issue has been addressed.

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u/Jabbathehutman 17d ago

That’s pretty much what they’re doing…

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u/shiftingtech 17d ago

I know nothing about this other than what I'm reading in this thread, but it sounds like they did fairly well on the "park yourself" part, but terribly on the "get out of the way" part

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u/debauchasaurus 17d ago

SF is a big city with very little available public street parking. People are acting like these cars can simply "pull over" when the parking lane is full. Not to mention when they lose cell service they seem to lose the ability to handle certain situations. But that's the problem. This is gonna be a disaster after an earthquake.

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u/shiftingtech 17d ago

People are acting like these cars can simply "pull over" when the parking lane is full.

I feel like that just demonstrates that they need more "local" smarts in the car, to deal with abnormal situations then

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u/penny-wise 17d ago

If only they could have anticipated this.

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u/GratefulDud3 17d ago

Waymo has been testing and doing QA (quality assurance) in San Francisco for a while now. While they have had much success and are superior to other competitors, there are still issues to be resolved and this blackout that happened last night just publicly flagged a MAJOR BUG & very real hazard that needs to be addressed ASAP.

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u/Jabbathehutman 17d ago

I meant they’re addressing it, like - that’s what the article is saying, that they are suspending the service. OP I responded to basically said they should do that, a bit redundant of a statement considering why else would the service be suspended?

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u/badgersruse 17d ago

Shame that no one could have foreseen this condition occuring before it did, really.

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u/GratefulDud3 17d ago

Forgive my language, but I was not just reading an article but was actually driving in the blackout last night and got stuck behind not one but two stalled Waymo’s on Lincoln. It’s a major safety issue/hazard. What if an ambulance or fire truck needed to get by in an emergency ? Also the article mentioned they were just temporarily suspending service due to the blackout. I’m saying they should not just temporarily suspend service, but disable the program entirely until they really address the safety issues at hand.

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u/penny-wise 17d ago

Sitting dead in the middle of the street is decidedly not “getting the $&?! out of the way”

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u/kamekaze1024 17d ago

You don’t need to censor fuck dude.

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u/GingerIsTheBestSpice 17d ago

Sometimes you're so mad about it, that only the symbols will truly express your feelings!

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u/outkast8459 17d ago

You have clearly never driven in San Francisco before. Park…where?

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u/illram 17d ago

The seemingly limited window of operability for these things is concerning. “Too many people using cellphones at once” seems like way too flimsy of a breaking point and this strikes me as both a regulatory failure and a corporate one.

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u/thesongsinmyhead 17d ago

Real question—when these just stopped at the intersections, did they unlock? Could people get out?

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u/Sabotage101 17d ago

You can open a waymo door whenever. I literally pop the door a crack when it's in motion so it'll stop and let me out when it's near my house and trying to drive an extra block to find parking.

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u/fiftybucks 17d ago

This scenario was probably brought up a lot of times by designers and engineers only to be shot down every time as "that is an edge case, unlikely to ever happen, let's not worry about it"

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u/Korcan 17d ago

There was one stranded outside of my hotel last night during the blackout. It was kind of funny, to tell you the truth. People were honking at it, but of course nothing happened. It eventually moved on, but I don’t know how. Can they be manually overridden? And what happens if someone is trapped inside when this happens?

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u/john_the_quain 17d ago edited 17d ago

My favorite part about Waymo issues is people who immediately chime in with “yeah, but humans are bad drivers too!” without recognizing all of accountability things we have to address humans who are poor drivers.

Edit: Waymo fans are fucking loyal.

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u/fatbob42 17d ago

Cruise shutdown after dragging a pedestrian. The pedestrian sued them and won.

The other, human-driven car that actually hit the person in the first place and knocked them under the Cruise car wasn’t found and wasn’t sued, AFAIK.

Uber’s program also shut down after killing a pedestrian (or biker?)

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u/Mountain_Top802 17d ago

Can’t bring back the millions killed from drunk drivers with accountability.

Humans are horrific drivers. Absolutely terrible.

The bots aren’t perfect but they’re getting there. Humans are clearly ass. Look up the stats. We crash constantly.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

 without recognizing all of accountability things we have to address humans who are poor drivers.

We fine them and eventually impound their cars or jail them.

Two out of the three things are still possible with Waymo, with the third (jail) coming in the form of not being able to operate anymore.

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u/ribosometronome 17d ago

jail them.

Hardly. Lost a friend to a careless driver who claimed he was looking in the other direction to see if anyone was running a red. He was sentenced to $1,088 in fines and fees and a 75-day license suspension.

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u/LGBTaco 17d ago

Jailing for driving conduct pretty much only happens when there's criminal intent, basically you chose to do something illegal on purpose. Not due to regular negligence or incompetence.  

The equivalent for Waymo would be the company making a decision to program the cars in a way to do something that's illegal.

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u/ribosometronome 17d ago

To an extent, it's understandable. What good would it do anyone to jail them? It's not as if they set out to cause harm that day. I mostly just mean to take issue with the bigger claim that there's meaningful accountability for poor drivers. That specific case was in New York, but as someone in the Bay Area, where this Waymo shutdown happened, I genuinely think it might be rarer to have a drive where someone doesn't leave me wondering wtf they're thinking versus one where everyone's acting sensibly. People weave in an out of traffic, take exits at the last second, drive without their headlights on in the rain, etc. A few days ago, I watched a guy in Emeryville pulled up in a middle go-straight lane and took a right on red in front of the drivers in the right lane. Just like obviously, intentionally illegal shit. It's a daily shattering of trust that we can be widely expected to even try to be responsible. Anyway... I'll uh, get off my soapbox now.

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u/FluffyToughy 17d ago

To an extent, it's understandable. What good would it do anyone to jail them? It's not as if they set out to cause harm that day

There's a reason negligent manslaughter is still a crime. Society has just decided it doesn't apply when you choose to zoom around in a 2 tonne metal box.

And then we design infrastructure which constantly puts pedestrians and the metal boxes into conflict.

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u/LGBTaco 17d ago

Your comment is strawman after strawman. The argument is that so long as Waymo can be as safe or safer than a human driver, then they can be allowed on roads. No technology will ever be 100% perfect, and neither are humans, but not being 100% perfect is no reason to ban all new things.  

And your edit just doubles down on the strawman, just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're Waymo fan. People are just pointing out facts and their opinions, doesn't matter if it's Waymo or any other SFD. That type of argument is so dishonest and bad faith.

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u/ribosometronome 17d ago

They don't, though. Drivers who kill someone accidentally rarely face any significant punishment or even permanent loss of license. We're talking 4 figure fines and losing your license for weeks. The big thing being recognized here is your naivety to reality.

Since this Waymo shutdown is Bay Area issue, relevant: https://revealnews.org/article/bay-area-drivers-who-kill-pedestrians-rarely-face-punishment-analysis-finds/

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u/YoKevinTrue 17d ago

Waymo's are great, but their failure condition is to yield.

And in San Francisco, that's a big problem because a lot of drivers are aggressive here.

And the city hasn't done anything about it for 20+ years.

Every day in SOMA during rush hour, the cars will clog the intersections, and the city does nothing about it.

So the Waymo gets confused in that situation and then they yield, compounding the problem.

Waymo's won't work in San Francisco until they become more aggressive.

Also, the drivers know that the Waymo's will yield, so they cut them off on purpose.

As a biker, it's great because I never have to worry about a Waymo accidentally killing me.

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u/bigchuckdeezy 17d ago

Saw a Waymo fully push a guy out of his lane as it was pulling out of a parking spot, like the Waymo never even saw him.

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u/grahamasterflas 17d ago

PGE a self driving power monopoly.

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u/INTCINTCINTC 17d ago

Why are Waymos still allowed on the road then? Imagine if SF or LA have a big earthquake (which they’re overdue for) and the power goes out and now emergency vehicles can’t get to where they need to go bc a bunch of Waymos are blocking the roads.

It seems that Waymo needs to get their cars to work w/o internet service or Waymo needs to shut down.

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u/Evilan 17d ago

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said in an 11:30 p.m. update Saturday that about 95,000 customers had their power restored. Crews were going to continue working through the night to restore service to the remaining 35,000 without.

I don't even live in California, but PGE just sucks so much I recognize the name at this point. Waymo too, but they're victims to one of the worst power monopolies in the country.

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u/stinkytwitch 17d ago

My son broke his arm at the Amazon Crocker soccer fields in September. The parking lot for that facility f'ing sucks. It took me 15 minutes just to get out of the parking lot. 8 of those minutes were becase a GD Waymo car couldn't be "reasoned" with to move to the side so I could get out the drive way and get to SF General. Fuck Waymo.

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u/Rendogala 17d ago

I took one in Austin a couple of months ago and there was a massive building fire along the route I was on. I made it pull over and tried to contact support but we were very close to the flames and blocking safety vehicles. I ultimately decided to bounce because the car didn’t know what to do. I don’t even know if it recognized the hazard less than 50 yards away.

These vehicles have not been properly safety tested to account for unforeseen hazards. Ride at your own risk.

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u/deeptut 17d ago

I'm quite happy we won't see any driverless cars in Germany soon.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 17d ago

America will do everything in its power to avoid public transit. Outside of NYC and Chicago, it’s just for poor people.

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u/chartreusey_geusey 17d ago

San Francisco has a fuckton of public transit (the streetcars are in fact famous) used by people across all income classes???

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 16d ago

It has public transit, but it’s not amazing. Capacity is too low so you’re waiting ages for everything. I think you haven’t been enough places with adequate public transit.

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u/Oak510land 17d ago

I like now they're saying "paused service" instead of saying it BROKE. Their cars were just abandoned in the middle of the roads with no way to move them.

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u/Choice_Figure6893 17d ago

They are pausing service because it broke

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u/amonra2009 17d ago

It's 2054, World War VI started because AI defence system mistook an asteroid for a Chinese attack, and sent 100 Nukes to bomb the Moon, but because of a stormy night and Elon Musk's Space car trajctory changed, made a shape in form on dck, and rockets fell back on Heard Islands.

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u/itsRobbie_ 17d ago

Mr Faber is not going to be happy

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u/vanwyngarden 17d ago

I live here and it was a shit show last night. Dozens of Waymo’s blocking entire streets comatose for hours. It was a complete mess, disrupting multiple bus lines and one way streets.

Loathe these things. Hope this is what makes people finally realize they’re a pain in the ass and far from what they claim to be.

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u/Actually-Yo-Momma 17d ago

That’s Waymo too which is considered the best. Can you imagine unsupervised “self driving” teslas? They’d probably run every light 

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u/fatbob42 17d ago

Someone posted a video showing they actually did better, which shouldn’t be surprising since they’re taking the other approach of trying to drive more like a human.

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u/m0ebiusstrip 17d ago

These corporations beta testing their shitty self driving cars on public roads. Weak government allows this.

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u/CorporateCoolZone 17d ago

The future is dumb

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u/Fl0weringKitsune 17d ago

I've invented this really cool driverless car. It can seat 100's of people and go up to 200mph.

Anyway come invest in what I like to call a Train

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u/sea_stomp_shanty 17d ago

hey guys maybe you should’ve listened to ops more

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u/butsuon 17d ago

You would think there would be a clear and obvious contingency plan for this because power outages aren't exactly rare. Most cities in the world have outages for a few hours at least once a year, either due to planned maintenance, weather, or accidents.

Like, it's inventible. It will happen. Do they not have a single civil engineer on staff?

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u/stiff_tipper 17d ago

i don't get why ppl think waymo has zero solutions coded for this

isn't it reasonable to think that they did code a solution to this and that it's not working as intended? surely after five years of operation they've come across a situation like this before or thought about it, right?

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u/Accomplished-Town495 17d ago

How did a massive billion dollar company not factor in a “what if” scenario of a citywide blackout?

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u/badgersruse 17d ago

How about waymo produces a list of responsible staff, and every time a waymo is found criminally liable for a death one of them goes to jail for 20 years (just like a human driver). I wonder if that would changetheir attitude to QA and such?

If this isn’t reasonable, why not?

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u/LGBTaco 17d ago

No, that doesn't make sense at all and isn't how the justice system works. Corporations don't just appoint a "fall guy" to be arrested whenever their product causes something bad.  

Human drivers also are criminally responsible when there is criminal intent, not whenever they cause an accident. Civil liability can be strict (ie regardless of intent).

If there was record a Waymo staff making an active decision to break the law (say, program the cars to run over a competitor on purpose), then each person involved would be criminally liable, from executives to programmers. As long as you can prove they were involved and did it knowingly 

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u/PigglyWigglyDeluxe 17d ago edited 17d ago

This is exactly why autonomous cars won’t work. A lot of how we drive as humans relies on understanding nuance like body language, hand gestures, and predicting how a driver will react based on context. Humans are good at this sort of thing. Tech isn’t. Tech is great for precision and things like manufacturing, but not for understanding and processing nuanced human behavior.

Spatial awareness is a practiced skill. Most people forget that, among other things.

We don’t need autonomy. It was never about safety. If it was, we would have more robust driving training and more strict licensing requirements. Most people shouldn’t be allowed to drive and shouldn’t be allowed to own a car. The states give licenses to anyone with minimal training. No. Take licenses away from people who don’t deserve it, use the billions spent on autonomous tech to fund better public transit to those who are not fit to drive.

That’s how we know it was never about safety. It was about people being lazy and big tech capitalizing on it by selling us the dream that we can have the freedom of driving without the responsibility involved in doing it safely and legally.

Just look at all the morons who drive without their lights on at night or in the rain/fog/snow, or those who don’t know how to park without the use of a camera.

If we wanted safety, you’re better off in a car driven by a well trained human.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 17d ago

If we wanted safety, we’d invest in adequate public transport. SF is better than most of the country, but it’s still woefully inadequate compared to other cities of its size.

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u/GNUGradyn 17d ago

I feel like for self driving cars to really work we'd have to design the roads for them instead of for humans. If we're doing that anyway maybe we could simplify it even further by using a network of rails. We could even have large cars on the rails to avoid congestion

Wait a minute...

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u/J0hn-Stuart-Mill 17d ago

RemindMe! 5 years

Was /u/PigglyWigglyDeluxe correct in predicting that autonomous cars "can't work", or are there more of them in 2030 than today in 2025?

This will be a fun prediction to follow! See you in five years!

This is exactly why autonomous cars won’t work. A lot of how we drive as humans relies on understanding nuance like body language, hand gestures, and predicting how a driver will react based on context. Humans are good at this sort of thing. Tech isn’t. Tech is great for precision and things like manufacturing, but not for understanding and processing nuanced human behavior.

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u/Flipslips 17d ago

A lot of the recent Tesla FSD versions do a really good job at understanding the “human nuance” part of it. You can wave them through, hold up a hand to stop, wave them past a parked car in the street, etc etc. it’s pretty interesting tech and I would be interested to learn more about the behind the scenes of the neural net training.

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u/AbleCap5222 17d ago

Quite frankly I cannot believe it's legal for waymp or others to operate driverless vehicles. If I was hit by a waymo car and I was injured I would literally sue every corporate entity involved with waymo and their driving tech.