by dhbradshaw
17 subcomments
- To me this doesn't seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges.
Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.
The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
by etempleton
14 subcomments
- 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?
- An infinite number of comments about how good/bad/etc this is, and nobody seems to have noticed that it is literally a report of exactly one waymo getting stuck in flooded water that caused this.
I live in Atlanta. This was 3-4 inches of rain in 30 minutes, which is uncommon and was unexpected enough that the flash flood warnings were not issued until well after the flooding occurred.
The reporting doesn't mention it, because it doesn't fit the narrative, but does anyone want to guess how many human drivers got suddenly stuck in the flood?
I know it's more than 1 because there were 4 cars people abandonded on my street alone!
I'm not even on that flooded or busy of a street.
- Driving through an obviously flooded street thinking "I'll easily make it" and getting stuck in the middle? Yeah, these cars have achieved human level intelligence.
by jvanderbot
3 subcomments
- 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.
by Findecanor
1 subcomments
- This is a classic case of: if the situation is not in the training data then the model is unequipped to handle it.
We've seen the phenomenon before. We've been warned against the phenomenon before, and we'll see it again in other contexts in the future for sure.
- Maybe a dumb question, why do electric cars have issues with water?
My understanding was that ICE cars have trouble because water get's drawn into the engine. Water in the engine causes it to stall. And the engine must have air in flow and out flow.
An electric car doesn't need air in the same way (no oxygen to ignite with gasoline, no air to compress and expand).
Shouldn't electric cars to much better at driving through water?
- 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 'drive into standing water' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151767 - May 2026 (214 comments)
- I wonder how much of this is trouble perceiving water depth vs integrating that understanding into the larger driver model without creating regressions elsewhere.
- Self-driving divining rods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing
- Is it so hard for LiDAR/Camera to detect flood water on road. Water on a road looks like a flat surface to sensors.
- I assumed they went to Miami to develop their foul weather capabilities. It's still pretty early.
- 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.
by mancerayder
0 subcomment
- Oh, boy. I guess that means they haven't gotten to the snow phase of the testing yet.
- I wonder if the decent wade depth (500mm/20") of the i-pace's they use was input as a constraint.
- Inconvenient, but I'm glad they're erring on the side of safety here. Waymo is doing a surprisingly great job at expanding their network.
by InfiniteRand
0 subcomment
- 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
- 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).
- I guess sometimes you have to take a step backwards for making progress with something.
- I saw a Waymo for the first time IRL last week in Atlanta. It stopped on a narrow street for about 5 minutes to wait for the person to come out. The people in the cars behind it were not happy!
- Humans have a hard time judging how deep water is too! Turns out neither Lidar nor vision/cameras have the right ability to sense water depth.
- This is just part of the slog that autonomous driving was always going to be.
Many many years ago I happened to be in a conversation with one of the guys on a team that participated in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. It was only the second such race after the 2004 one, but arguably the one which set off the autonomous driving race we see today. (Sebastian Thrun's team came in 2nd.)
I went into the conversation thinking it was going to be an extremely challenging but tractable sensors + control-systems problem. But by the end of the conversation I was like, OMG this is going to be a long-haul slog of solving an unending stream of problems, some potentially even AI-complete (i.e. requiring human-level judgment.)
We mostly discussed why his and most other teams failed and the failures were so myriad and so technically intractable that I could not see a path to full self-driving for at least two decades. And all of this was offroad, so it didn't even approach the challenges of sharing human-occupied streets. I cannot remember any details unfortunately, but I remember that one car got stuck in a loop due to a problem that would have been trivial for a human to bypass... but that required human-level judgment. As an analogy it was something like a soft obstacle that could safely be driven over. But for the car to know that it would require a database and an "understanding" of all possible obstacles. An LLM could have helped, but back then they were still firmly in the realm of SciFi.
So the only feasible solution was to painstakingly identify all the edge-cases and work through them slowly, carefully, one-by-one. Which is what Waymo has been doing. This is also why when Elon made his "full self-"driving announcements I knew he had absolutely NO idea what he was talking about, and he was likely going to move fast and break people.
Flooded streets is just another "bump on the road" to full self-driving, but it seems we're actually getting there now. In retrospect, my 2-decade estimate was surprisingly accurate, I have no idea how I landed on that particular number!
by renegade-otter
0 subcomment
- Didn't ALL Waymos at once pulled over recently because it started raining?
This ain'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.
- ... but their World Model said it was ok to drive through the flood.
Slide 3 in "Extreme weather conditions and natural disasters" section:
https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
- Nashville is paused too. I don’t know why.
- I think another way of framing it is "Waymo pauses Atlanta service due to weather conditions", which doesn't sound at all unreasonable to me. It's no different from "Chicago O'Hare pauses flight departures due to a winter storm" or whatever.
I think that self driving cars won't ever be able to handle every condition out there, and so there's probably a time when the system will be paused / shutdown when conditions aren't safe to drive in. Honestly, I wish we could do this with human drivers for that matter, too, but some will press on even when they shouldn't...
by voidUpdate
0 subcomment
- I'm honestly slightly surprised that "the road markings suddenly completely vanish" doesn't raise some kind of internal warning to the system
by dev_l1x_be
0 subcomment
- Biblical.
- My guess in the North East in the winter there will be similar stories.
- I think I made a HN comment a few months/years ago about driverless cars having problems with floods across roads after watching a downpour in Kuala Lumpur flood half a street in minutes. The road was down to one lane and drivers in both directions took it in turns to use that one lane. That would be a difficult situation for a driverless car to handle.
- 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's just part of life in the spring and summer with all that chaotic moisture coming off the Gulf. We might get a few minutes warning. If your robot can't handle that then you're going to have a bad time.
- It can't mean that, there's a lake there!
by selimthegrim
0 subcomment
- Coming to New Orleans soon...
by colordrops
5 subcomments
- 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.
- anyone has any videos?
- I mean if they did this to avoid accidents and road congestions for other human drivers then it makes sense.
- Waymo, who's arguably the most competent operator by far, cannot handle Atlanta. But TSLA and its Potemkin village-like robotaxi service trades at 380 PE. Figure that one out.
by BobBagwill
1 subcomments
- You're missing the obvious. Waymo trains with human driver data, and idiotic humans drive into deep water constantly. Oh, you want Waymo's to drive better than humans?
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
by cucumber3732842
3 subcomments
- Clearly they haven't actually had any serious problems getting stuck or anything because it'd be all over the news.
I don't think they're barreling into foot+ deep water.
I think they're driving into shallower "perfectly navigable but still deep" puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive like a high end chauffeur.
by micromacrofoot
1 subcomments
- 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
- Can we please stop this experiment.
- [flagged]
by thway-exwaymo
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by maryamshafaqat
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by Rekindle8090
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- Mandatory "FSD next year!" /s
Teasing aside can you imagine how fucking scary it must be to be in a self-driving car that drives straight in flowing water? Damn.
- does Waymo use Lidar or is it like Musk's "cost saving" cameras only
by retrocryptid
1 subcomments
- I thought Weymo's were supposed to be "supervised" by humans in the Philippines. Maybe driving in circles in the suburbs and driving into flood waters happens only when the cars are out of mobile data range? Did Weymo pay their mobile phone bill? Does the (somewhat) autonomous system on the car decide when to flag a human for help? I would have expected a human to be watching all the time. Are they experiencing labor problems in the Philippines? Maybe Weymo doesn't want to pay their remote operators as much as the remote operators want to get paid?
- If they only would use lidar. Oh wait…
- What are the chances that google just shuts down waymo once they get whatever they need from it. Weren't there other ambitious projects under google that had a similar fate?
by Guestmodinfo
0 subcomment
- Maybe the solution is to put in more billions. Every fad creates jobs.
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