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Posted by rwoll 2 days ago

Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams(missionlocal.org)
303 points | 436 commentspage 3
HardwareLust 1 day ago|
"the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company’s control"

Well there's your problem.

markdown 1 day ago||
I don't understand why everyone is talking about the cars when the bigger issue is why the critical infrastructure (lights) don't have batteries for backup.
NetMageSCW 16 hours ago|
Because that would be prohibitively expensive (possibly even after the arrival of LED bulbs).
Tempest1981 2 days ago||
How did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?
delichon 1 day ago||
Here's an example of it doing well:

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2002699317409186219

cjsplat 1 day ago||
The Tesla example is a single oncoming car, clear right of way, and ample time in a simple 4-way intersection.

The Waymo video has over a dozen cars, at least 6 pedestrians crossing streets (many more on the sidewalks), and is a 5-way intersection.

These are cherry picked examples. Either advertising or propaganda.

HardwareLust 1 day ago||
That's a really good question.
alistairSH 1 day ago||
Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?
cjsplat 1 day ago||
I saw plenty of Waymos managing to make it through intersections. They were slow and tentative, but definitely made forward progress.

I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone, presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos were lacking connectivity.

There is of course also a possibility that the total demand exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human intervention.

isodev 1 day ago|||
I think it’s clear that both use cases are a must have during an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos shouldn’t be online during such times at all.
jerlam 1 day ago||
First responders get the highest priority of cellular networks even in non-emergency situations (FirstNet).
AlotOfReading 1 day ago||
FirstNet is AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile have their own alternatives (FrontLine and T-Priority, respectively). QCI is a fun rabbit hole, because some of these networks share the first responder QCIs with certain business use cases.
nerdsniper 1 day ago||
I didn’t notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.
scoofy 1 day ago|||
I was in the affected area and we effectively lost all but messaging. Not the whole time, but definitely while I was ordering takeout at a place with power. I couldn't get an image to send to a friend.
torham 1 day ago|||
I lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but plenty were down.
1970-01-01 1 day ago||
Obvious failure should be obvious. Get out of the streets. What happens when one gets a flat tire? Surely it doesn't just stop in the middle of the street, right??
bni 2 days ago||
Not looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.
kylehotchkiss 1 day ago||
Did anybody get stranded on the bart?
jeffbee 1 day ago|
No, but they ran through stations that lacked power, so in the sense of being dumped out far from your actual destination, yes.
ursAxZA 1 day ago||
Honestly, I’m just glad this stopped before a major accident happened.
bink 1 day ago||
It was predicted by many, including me. It'll be a lot worse in an earthquake where power and cell service are out and there's debris and road damage. Good luck to our first responders.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688847

rvz 1 day ago|
The proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all along.
TZubiri 1 day ago|
I thought this was trivially verifiable due to regulation and latency analysis.

If they truly rely on teleoperation, that's at least 20ms in the best case, and can grow a lot with interference.

I always assumed these things have some autonomy.

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