I've seen several places in England (and at least one in the western United States) where they have fords.
For those not familiar, water runs over the road full-time, and people are expected to just drive through it like it's no big deal. Except for right after a storm, when it is a big deal. It's essentially the intersection of a road and a stream where a bridge should be, but nobody ever built one.
And a collection of videos https://www.youtube.com/@jawalton2001/videos - it goes without saying, these aren't major thoroughfares.
Also, there's a quizzical cow up the road a bit and now I want to live in this place. Thanks.
The engine gets damaged when water gets into the piston chamber i think. Water compresses less than air so important things bend or crack if the engine is running too long with water in it.
I wonder how electric cars fare with deep water.
The ground clearance for my EV is 7 inches. The manual specifies it can handle 18 inches of water.
I don't know if that's the point where water messes with the electronics, or a swift current would start to move it sideways.
Flotation might also be a possibility?
Also why I don’t like pressure washing anything mechanical.
E.g. Drove through a heavy rain storm and my ecu decided one of my wheel speed sensors was faulty and suspended my abs and traction control. Even after drying it out on a nice day of driving, the error persisted but I was able to reset it with my vehicle specific obd reader and not an issue again. Ugh.
Stick in the ground will do it.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
At least when the average depth is shallow enough you’d want to cross in a normal vehicle.
If you can’t walk the crossing, then under no circumstances should you drive it.
I was travelling in a group to eat lunch with friends once, after heavy rains. We reached a site where the road needs to fit under a bridge and is known to flood, there's standing water, and the driver figured it's probably not too high, he drives in and nope, water over the air intake, bye bye engine and we walked the rest of the way to lunch
I absolutely should have said "No, don't" but the plan says we have to drive under that bridge, there is no plan B. Of course plan A being "Wreck car" is a stupid plan, but the bias meant I didn't say "No" and I should have.
You wouldn't die there, just trash the car, the flooding is localised - but there are definitely other sites around here where in flood conditions you could die if you drove into water that's deeper than you realised.
Oh man, that brings a memory of a old roadtrip. We were guests at a house of a old british lady in a olive farm in southern france - and dinner was ready.
It was also unusual cold, so the fire in the chimney was burning very hot. And apparently it was not build for that, as the isolation and already some wood outside the chimney on the roof was suddenly starting to slowly glow and burn. In other words, the roof was literally starting to be on fire. But they were already sitting at the table and seriously wanted to eat first and care about the problem that the house was burning later. Well and so they did. So we put out the fire and ate later.
The bias isn't really about hunger, humans just tend to stick to an existing plan even once available evidence suggests that plan can't work, that's why those "Low bridge, divert" signs are less effective than you'd expect, why Olivia Rodrigo's "Fuck it, it's fine" is so recognisable for relationships, and why pilots end up scud running in a little plane after setting off in marginal visual conditions.
You'd have to hold off for a few weeks every season change while the ice hardened up/melted or get stuck in it (thankfully I tended to get there after someone else found out).
Frankly, you never know when you’re going to have a bad day - I managed to inflict several thousand euro of repairs on my pickup a few months back driving through water that didn’t even come up to the axles - because unbeknownst to me some shithead mouse had chewed through the top of the fuel hose, and water got into the diesel.
So, I expect driverless cars to struggle just as much as humans do.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-676414...
They have been known to make that mistake. To use the word "frequently" demonstrates a misunderstanding between number of incidents and total miles driven. It also ignores that humans often drink and most of these types of accidents happen after 2am and most often in the state of Florida.
> equipped with a water sensor
Car washes will be fun.
> DARPA Grand Challenge
The problems the grand challenge ignores are more important than the ones it solved.
I am saying this, because I noticed that they typically start with a low-tier restrictive permit to operate (with a rather small number of cars in the fleet). Then they run it for a year or two, iron out edge cases particular to a given city (e.g., climate particularities, crazy spaghetti junctions in ATL, etc.), and log a lot of data. Then they take that data, go to the city/state, say "we have all this data that demonstrates we were very above the board while running the test pilot program, we are safe, and now we want to expand out of a very limited test pilot program."
And then it either goes well (Bay Area, LA, etc.) or goes off the rails for other reasons (often failing earlier for entirely unexpected reasons, like the pushback against it from taxi driver unions in NYC).
My point being, I could be entirely wrong, but I don't think that they literally map every single inch of the road before being allowed to operate. I just don't see it as being possible in any large populated city, given how often things change there. Just in 3 years living at one apartment in Seattle, I had a road directly adjacent to me changed from 2-way to 1-way, and then had 3-4 lanes that were basically highway entrances/exits (a block away from me) created and the whole area being rerouted entirely.
https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...
Tesla is less "HD", they have standard maps like we all think of, and a lane level "see-ahead" system where they basically just grab a satellite image tile, and align it with what the car sees for "FSD".
Images of the cars screens show "project rodeo controls" is the only reason I say that we know these are validation vs mapping.
Waymo is not the only company making lidar maps right now either. I've seen UPS deliver trucks with retrofitted lidar scanners on the roof now. I've even seen this on a police car already, looked like a black rooftop industrial ventilator on a 2ft mast installed directly on the crown victoria roof.
If the car comes to a road covered with water, and that road is in the database, and the water level appears low compared to the historical level of the road in the DB, then the car could cross. if the road is not in the DB, then a different decision might be made.
This is similar to humans: you might make different decisions depending on whether you know the road well or not.
One car with an issue of first coincides with rain on a less used road?
Satellite monitoring is also available for detecting extensive road work which they could use to invalidate and send out something to remap.
This first requires knowing you're in a flooded section. That's the gap here, is it not? My point is that you can't use descent AS a "flooded zone" detection because then your speed, by the harsh mistress of psychics, is very limited everywhere you go, flooded or not, because stopping distance has to be kept very short since just a few feet of overshoot, when your flood detection triggers, is the difference between ruined engine or not.
Maybe that's their fix, if a flat mirrored surface is detected, slow way down, because perceiving depth of muddy water before getting in it is hard.
Apparently they were built in just a few months.
I suppose I could inform them somehow, but it's not worth the bother.
Yet thousands of cars doing 60 mph through a cornfield and over a river doesn’t trigger a “maybe a freeway was built here?”
Verifying indepenantly is probably the reasonable response
But if you’re not going to some brand new addeess on a road that didn’t exist six months ago, Apple maps are just so much more readable and usable. Sucks thst the fata isn’t as good, but damn does it show what a difference colors, fonts, and tasteful selection of what to show and what to hide nakes,
I routinely have to drop into Google maps (international travel, and some newly developed areas) and it always feels like time travel to a 90’s website. Except for the whole “data is current” thing.
But yes, this wouldn't work for other self-driving systems that don't rely on HD maps.
You think you know how deep it is under because you've taken that road many times before (or in your case you have historical laser measurement)
But you don't know:
- Maybe the road under fully collapsed
- Maybe the flow of water is extremely strong, so you need to accurately estimate that too.
Aggregating this data in something close to real-time, verifying and corroborating that the change to the road model is real and correct, and then pushing those model updates to every vehicle that may need it almost immediately is not really a solved problem.
I have always believed that when people cite statistics on Waymos beating human drivers on safety statistics, that is only in the case of the happy path, or "happy road". The safety statistics could plummet in specific scenarios that lack training data or forethought, and they could crop up at any time.
Also I suspect many “unforeseen” circumstances happen regularly. The unforeseen part is “what” and “when.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/waymo-trai...
“I’d rather survive 100% of the time in situations that happen 0.01% of the time than survive 99.9999@ of the time in situations that arise 99.99% of the time”
The problem with both is they effectively require the vehicle to be in the water already. They need something that can tell depth before the vehicle has to slow down.
Unfortunately, those get screwed up in climates where there is salt used on the roads.
Also, the sensor didn't work in that context either as condensation kept forming on it.
Since the densities differ, water will cause the rod to rotate. But since the masses are the same, bumps will create no net torque around the pivot point and thus no rotation.
ASCII art diagram:
F------(x)------C
(x): pivot point
F: float
C: counterbalance
I'm sure there are other ways like sensing the electrical resistance of the water.
Or just let the float sensor bounce. It's underwater when it stops bouncing and is continuously in the up position.
Road grime, break dust, grease, grit, etc will contaminate the shaft and make it stick, potentially telling you that youre:
A) Never in water
Or
B) Always in 2.5" of water because the sensor is stuck.
Assumes there's no abrupt cliff to fall off... but short of the ability to make a 3d map underwater that seems inevitable.
Did that get anywhere?
<jk>
And that is the difference. In a Waymo you are a prisoner, in your own car you can turn around.
In order to drive reasonably humans need to drive through water that is 6-12in deep on occasion. That's just how it is. Near me it's whenever the storm drain at the bottom of the hill clogs.
As opposed to the "don't ever allow for rare/unexpected events where following too close leads to a collision" stupidity based take.
I've never made that mistake; I'm not aware of anyone I know doing it. I very rarely see it myself, except on news footage. Of course it happens some time somewhere but that says nothing about frequency.
> That's a tough problem
Not really. Don't drive where you don't know it's safe. Definitely don't drive into moving water - puddles only, and only if not too deep: I can usually figure it out based on the rest of the road - unless it's a sinkhole, the geometry is somewhat consistent - and especially by looking at objects in the water such as other cars driving through it. Sorry your friend isn't competent to figure it out.
People here are always quick to defend the autonomous cars, like a close friend. How often will we fall in love with a technology or company? It always distorts the truth.
I suppose we can redefine 'a lot' to mean many things, but 99.9..% don't do it.
It's the exhausted talking point of the autonomous vehicle industry that humans are awful drivers and we are better. What is sad is seeing HN users doggedly repeat it like PR reps - it was the first line of the original comment, even though irrelevant to it - as they've done with other passions like Uber, Musk's entities, etc.