How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?
Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.
The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.
I'm very happy they're moving fast so hopefully fewer people die in the future
They're one-of-one still. Having ridden in a Waymo many times, there's very little "move fast and break things" leaking in the experience.
They can simulate power outages as much as they want (testing) but the production break had some surprises. This is a technical forum.. most of us have been there.. bad things happened, plans weren't sufficient, we can measure their response on the next iteration in terms of how they respond to production insufficiencies in the next event.
Also, culturally speaking, "they suck" isn't really a working response to an RCA.
How's that for a real world trolley problem?
This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"
> If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.
I honestly wonder how leftists manage to delude themselves so heavily? I'm sure a bunch of politicians really have my best interests at heart. Lol
It's very clearly proven that hitting a pedestrian with 50 km/h is exponentially more dangerous than hitting them with 30 km/h. It's very clearly proven that having physically separted bike lines prevents deaths. It's very clearly proven that other measure like speed bumps, one-way streets, smart traffic routing prevents deaths.
And I am not even going to respond to your idiotic "leftist" statement.
> And I am not even going to respond to your idiotic "leftist" statement.
This says more about you than it does me. Taking the most cynical view possible, at least a for profit company has a profit motive to keep me alive unlike a bureaucrat. A bureaucrat doesn't lose their salary if traffic deaths go up. In fact, if a problem gets worse, they often receive more funding to fix it. If a government road is dangerous, you cannot easily fire the government and switch to a competitor's road.
The success you mentioned in Helsinki wasn't a triumph of law; it was a triumph of engineering. The question is not whether we want safety, but which system—a state monopoly with no financial penalty for failure, or a private entity that faces financial ruin if it kills its customers—is more likely to engender it.
That's what they're learning and fixing for in the future to give the cars more self-confidence.
This kind of attitude to me indicates a lack of experience building complex systems and responding to unexpected events. If they had done the opposite and been overly aggressive in letting Waymo’s manage themselves during lights that are out would you be the first in line criticizing them then for some accident happening?
All things being considered, I’m much happier knowing Waymo is taking a conservative approach if the downside means extra momentary street congestion during a major power outage; that’s much rarer than being cavalier with fully autonomous behavior.
Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition? After some number of seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop condition. Apparently here they overloaded the control center. That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that. That's good for scaling.
Almost certainly no - you don’t want the vehicle to enter a tunnel, then stop half way through due to a lack of cell signal.
Rather, areas where signal dropouts are common would be made into no-go areas for route planning purposes.