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Posted by rwoll 2 days ago

Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams(missionlocal.org)
305 points | 437 commentspage 4
tiahura 1 day ago|
How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?
tanvach 1 day ago||
Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out (didn’t know about it, we were going to Japan town from the Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One advantage of building unsupervised system from public version that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.

Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency vehicles pass safely.

andsoitis 1 day ago|||
Treats it as a four way stop.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-A701F7D...

jerlam 1 day ago||
[flagged]
GMoromisato 1 day ago|||
https://x.com/edgecase411/status/2002630953844552094

Looks like it treats it as a 4-way stop. Is this because Tesla has more training data?

gertlex 1 day ago||
I'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when, not training data, that results in the two behaving different.
brianwawok 1 day ago|||
50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a stop.

Don’t think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.

JumpCrisscross 1 day ago|||
> Is this because Tesla has more training data?

Its human takes over. FSD is still Level 3.

(Robotaxi, Tesla's Level 4 product, is still in beta. Based on reports, its humans had to intervene.)

AlotOfReading 1 day ago||
FSD is level 2. Level 3 doesn't require the human driver to monitor the outside environment, only take over when requested. Tesla also doesn't report data from FSD under L3 reporting requirements anywhere in the US.
EA-3167 1 day ago||
[flagged]
joshka 2 days ago||
I for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
dzhiurgis 2 days ago||
I thought LIDAR solves for this lol
pif 1 day ago||
[flagged]
elzbardico 1 day ago||
As a society, as a whole society, opposed to our narrow interests and point of views as typical affluent HN dwellers, do we really NEED this kind of shit?
StanislavPetrov 2 days ago||
If you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100% digital currency!
cess11 1 day ago||
I think I prefer trains and buses.
chroma 1 day ago|
SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or exit there.

Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing for them, but it can be solved with software improvements. Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs, so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.

But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.

cess11 1 day ago||
Living in social rot and keeping unmanned little autos for those that can afford it seems even more nasty than what I initially had in mind.
mlpro 1 day ago||
Waymo should do a bit more research in reliability and explainability of their AI models.
laweijfmvo 1 day ago||
So basically no answer from Waymo other than to boast about their numbers? Why not just be transparent?
jerlam 1 day ago||
The "boast about numbers" wasn't from Waymo, it was from their investors, and it was earlier this month and not during the service suspension.
krisoft 1 day ago|||
What do you mean no answer? They are suspending their operations. That is their answer.
NetMageSCW 1 day ago|||
Read more carefully, Waymo didn’t boast about their numbers and that part of the story was unrelated to the issue except as a measure of impact their shutdown could have.
nextworddev 1 day ago||
Because they are currently trying to raise money at 100bn valuation
asdff 2 days ago|
It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs

porphyra 2 days ago||
I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
mingus88 2 days ago||
The power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.
porphyra 2 days ago|||
True but the comment I replied to mentions a different case where a Waymo got stuck for half an hour at a parade.
fragmede 1 day ago|||
"the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was probably congested by all the city residents using theirs instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during the outage.
mingus88 1 day ago||
In my neighborhood, Xfinity goes out every time we lose power.

Even with my generator and UPS powering my modem, the outage is not resolved until mains power comes back

These monopolies aren’t required to have uptime in the same way the POTS network was.

We had a week long outage last year and people were driving 15 minutes out to get cell signal to catch up on their data

patrick451 2 days ago||
Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on the road.
Ukv 1 day ago||
Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-distribution scenario would count against this, but may be rare enough to not significantly affect the average.
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