That's the reality. For both them and Apple.

By the way, can these robotaxis handle intersections that aren't at 90 degrees?

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

They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

testing cannot prove the absence of bugs. It can only prove that you didn't find any, which is a completely different thing

"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "

I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.

Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.

P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.

It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.

But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.

To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.

Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.

Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?

This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.

Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.

The fact that they aren't a usual event is probably exactly the challenge here.

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

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

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

I think Google can handle paying for any number of $250k cars to get a good share of the future of transportation.

I expect that in 10-20 years, all cars will be self driving.

The cost of Waymo cars is immaterial right now. They are not production models, they are test mules. So you might as well make them nice-looking.

Real mass-production cars will be comparable with regular cars in price. The sensor suite is not _that_ expensive.

All cars require a workforce to maintain though.

Hard disk drives were the size of washing machines. I don't see how they will ever be practical!

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

As someone who grew up in a flood-prone area… yeah. Yeah, they do. Sometimes more than once per person.

Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?

This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.

I have seen plenty of videos online that suggest that this is a true fact.

Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That's been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.

Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn't do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being 'pulled over.'

These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it's the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.

Come to an Indian city. You'll have cars, 2w, auto, cows coming from 7 directions everywhere.

Rome? How about Napoli or Palermo?

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

Are you suggesting every DL holder knows all the driving conditions?

Quick, what should one do when the car starts drifting in ice? How about aqua planing?

If it is just taking a regular DL test, then waymo, Tesla and others would be driving all across the US by now. They already have a higher standard

A Waymo is already a dramatically safer driver than a human, and it isn’t even close.

There have been, and will continue to be, many cases drive into flood zones and die.

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

Safer, cheaper, etc are less arbitrary.

> This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather

You may be relieved to hear Waymo is rolling out to Portland, Oregon. It's not in the south, and with over 150 rainy days per year, it ranks among the rainiest US cities.

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

It's a delay. The question is how long? Doesn't seem unfixable.

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

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

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

Yeah, while the "average" person might be able to gracefully handle these situations there's still a lot of people who do things that to me seem obviously silly and avoidable.

Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.

FYI, 59 days since the last incident apparently: https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com

> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast.

I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.

I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.

Floods might be an edge case in the Bay Area, but if you're trying to drive along the Gulf of Mexico it's probably something you're going to want to plan for. I'm not sure that adding an override will help by the time your car is submerged in six feet of water.

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

Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly.

In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?

> You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.

This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.

> A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".

"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla

Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.

The false equivalence of emotional maturity with being able to chase production is really telling.

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

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

Many people don't drink and drive either. You can drive defensively, choose your own route.

Even on two lane roads: if an idiot overtakes into oncoming traffic there is usually just enough space for three vehicles next to each other. Can a Waymo move sharply to the right so there are two cars on each side with the overtaking idiot in the middle and all just fit on the road? I had to do that maneuver at least twice.

Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?

Can you open the Windows and get out if the thing decides to drive into a lake?

I don't know, currently defensive driving is the better option.

"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.

A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.

Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad.

AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.

Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.

The option that doesn't exist in America is to get the bus.

Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.

The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.

We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.

Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn't dissapoint.

There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper 'windscreen'. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.

Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?

Maybe. But maybe not.

The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that 'pulled out on the bus', that was a highway maintenance issue.

There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and 'our' bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.

At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn't as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.

One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn't the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from 'traffic', as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.

I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.

Tbf, I think you’re just experiencing a downside of living in NYC. I’ve only ever been there as a tourist, but I wouldn’t ever dream of renting a motorcycle in the city for the reasons you mention.

For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate.

Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general.

I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)

The reason they can't do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.

VLAs (vision-language-action models), which are offspring of LLMs, and their versions that are more suitable to edge devices are being used in self-driving to add common sense to path planners ("don't drive through a police standoff", things like that).

jeep snorkels are for air intakes for engines. electric cars don't have air intakes. they have air cooling for batteries... I suppose you could snorkel those.

What happens when you you start floating?

I guess water propulsion... and a rudder?

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

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

While I agree with basically all of this, and find the FSD on my Tesla to be quite useful, a question pops into my mind.

Why can't Waymo ALSO develop the same smarts and just also solve the sensor fusion issue such that they can use the right set of sensors in the right environmental conditions, and then leapfrog Tesla's capabilities?

You can have intelligence with lidar.

You can have even more intelligence with both.

I like both approaches. The fact that both exist is a clear win for the rest of us as consumers.

Tesla's approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.

If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.

Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that's great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.

The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.

Naaah, Tesla has no edge in intelligence either. It's just a PR piece to sell to investors.

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

Whoosh...

The problem is they're not designed for that. They aren't spending resources on some master control networking system because in 99% of use cases that won't be useful anyways as most of the traffic being dealt with isn't other waymo's willing to communicate.

There might be some level of adoption where they would, but honestly we're back to "but what about trains/trucks?".

Half the problem with evacuations is people don't want to leave behind their stuff to get destroyed. You'd basically be better off getting a fleet of semi's with some quick and dirty cube system thrown up than a bunch of automated sedans.

> atleast there might be less gridlock

I've never lived in a hurricane area, but when I think of news coverage of problematic evacuations, they're showing people stuck on highways, not people stuck in urban traffic grids.

It's a throughput problem. Computer controlled "car trains" with shorter following distances can boost traffic throughput, but I don't think that would be enough to make evacuation of large cities actually feasible. The highway system is simply not built for that use case. Especially since evacuation often occurs during inclement weather that reduces capacity.

AFAIK, most places try to figure out how to make shelter in place work, because mass evacuation is likely to end up with many people facing the weather event while on the highway.

You could theoretically do better with busses and trains, things, but there's likely not enough busses that are setup for long distance travel available: lots of municipal bus fleets are setup for alternate fuels which is great for emissions but makes it hard to travel to a neighboring state, because there may not be appropriate fueling opportunities on the way. Etc, etc.

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

"assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid"

This is a big assumption.

This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can't be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.

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

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

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

I mean the logical conclusion is a dedicated lane for automated cars..

At which point we've reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.

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

> No one should be driving in a hurricane.

I agree, but there are a number of people here in Florida who will do it or die trying (emphasis on the die trying)

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

.. well until it hits the flood

>soaked passengers will want a refund

This is so funny. I can imagine customers floating along in their Waymo thinking, "wow I need a refund for this".

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

Yep if they are watertight they will float, if they aren't, they'll fill up with water.

> Alternatively, just don't run Waymo operations during flood/flash flood warnings.

FTA

> the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,”

> But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory.

Their fleet is constantly scanning the area with lidar, which is assembled into maps. If those maps are in 3d rather than a 2d road grid you can calculate puddles very accurately with no extra sensors:

- Find the edge of the water using vision or lidar

- look up the ground height at that position in your map data. That is the water level

- run a flood fill of the local 3d map starting from that point, with that water level. That gives you an exact shape of the puddle

- for any point on your planned path, you can now check if the point is in the puddle (per the flood fill above) and how deep the water is (difference between puddle's water level and ground height)

- use that either as a go/no-go for a planned path, or even feed this into your pathfinding to find a path with acceptable water level

The main limitation is that it assumes that the ground hasn't changed. It won't help in a landslide, or on muddy ground where other cars have disturbed the ground. But for the classic case of the flooded underpass or flooded dip in the road it should be very accurate

The vehicles have enough information to make the determination. Ground data is available in the point cloud and usually labeled as such. Water sometimes shows up in point clouds, sometimes it doesn't depending on conditions and wavelength.

If the apparent road surface is higher than the mapped ground surface, probably a puddle. If your point cloud has a big hole, also probably a puddle.

This assumes you aren't doing ground plane removal, of course. But it's quite likely that Waymo is using a heavily ML approach these days, and I can imagine the poor thing getting very confused if it's not an explicit training goal.

Do you how often you get flash warnings in Atlanta? And local roads flood far more often than flash food warnings are issued.

If you can’t handle this issue, you really can’t operate in Atlanta.

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

What 3 year old is judging the depth of a puddle before jumping in?

Regardless, consider what you are saying: how can you seriously compare a computer to a (young) human and your response is disappointment that the AI doesn't quite measure up? If it's comparable to a child today it will be comparable to a teen in a decade!

During the “winter”, sure, but it dumps rain during the same and there are flash floods occasionally. I agree with the parent comment that Miami is a great area to test - especially given that the bad weather is seasonal. They can run 24/7 during the good weather seasons.

Also, the drivers in Miami are a bit more unpredictable than the average driver around the country in my experience, so good challenge cases for self-driving development.

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

Not only are people slow to react to unusual situations, but this is taken advantage of by city designers to force people to slow down.

Random planters in the middle of the road? Streets that narrow and then widen? Drivers start slowly creeping along, which means they are less likely to injury pedestrians.

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

Tesla's already doing it too

The driving ML model will take care of the next 10 seconds of driving, in a fast loop deciding what steering and throttle commands to give.

The LLM will apply the high level reasoning needed to deal with longer time horizons and complex decisions, like deciding that the best way to reach the car wash 100 yards away is by walking.

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

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

It's an interesting illustration of how widely and quickly misinformation spreads, though.