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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.
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...
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.
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.
Apparently they were built in just a few months.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.
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:
Also include a small spring to keep the float in the down position.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.
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.
IOW 3,800 Waymo vehicles aren't currently sat spinning their wheels in water.
Though the idea of a single rider calling for a Waymo and slowly one-by-one 3,800 Waymos drove into a flood and were washed away ...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/robotics/empty-waymo-ro...
Every time an issue is found, no matter how minor, it's fixed and updated everywhere. From now on, every car of that model (and future models, and related models) will no longer have that problem. Several passes of that improvement cycle, and self-driving cars become safer (and more efficient/comfortable/etc) than human drivers. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.
It's likely they patch this and cause 2 other bugs in the process.
"AI/ML" has delivered far more complete testing criteria than any "QA expert" has. It's absolutely crazy to me the number of people who defend the status quo in software testing when software quality has been on the decline for over a decade. But sure. "AI/ML" is the problem, not shit developers who never considered that angle in the first place.
The inference would come from standing water slowing down the vehicle and likely require steering correction, in combination with some machine vision for identifying standing water.
Then there's the advantage of being Google and having hundreds of thousands of people in the same area using Google maps and navigation. Accelerometers in phones can detect crashes pretty reliably. There's a good chance they can reliably detect deceleration from standing water and report the location of the hazard.
It just creates alarmist headlines for what's really an over the air update, although "recall" is still currently a regulatory accurate term in the vehicle space
Cars, especially EVs, have many similarities to being gigantic phones. Imagine if a routine software update from Apple was called a "recall", that functionally describes what's happening here
NHTSA should at least distinguish between "omg we have to get these cars off the road and bring them to the shop immediately!" versus "over the air software update"
Because the nuclear options is any heavy rain cancel rides, but that seems to hurt their service model.
That said, FSD seems quite capable of routing around standing water in many cases (e.g. https://xcancel.com/planoken/status/2030754820462633031, https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1pw9f2m/fsd_navig..., https://xcancel.com/BLKMDL3/status/1991862465328779317, https://xcancel.com/JVTacoma/status/2046313902749921638), so handling the remaining cases seems more like a model intelligence / data issue rather than a sensor limitation. Lidar beams generally bounce off mirrorlike surfaces without returning to the sensor, so I think all lidar would tell you about standing water is "there's something shiny/reflective within this region of the image", which you already know from cameras+headlights.
https://abc7news.com/post/san-francisco-leaders-press-waymo-...
Engineering hours are finite, so if they're spread across interpreting signals from two different sources, they might not go deep enough to make either one as good as it could be.
Having your engineering resources more focused on a particular approach might actually yield better results.
I say this as someone who's dealing with LiDAR + vision vs pure vision in a different domain, and at this point, I actually think our pure vision systems are better.
For very complex things like AVs, it is critically important to keep the number of such variables down, since each acts on complexity & workload not as an addition but more like a quadratic, or worse—combinatorial explosion.
Here the goal is avoiding driving into the water in the first place.
“Wash away maaaaan, take him with the floooood”
Think of any abnormal weather events that would make news headlines such as Lightning, blizzard, snow storms etc
This need to be simulated
Or the litmus test would the developers ride in such a product at such an event?
Forty years later touch wood I have not yet broken myself or a car ...
A "recall" is stating that the defective version of the product in the field must be "removed/recalled" and replaced/updated with a non-defective version at the manufacturer's expense. It just so happens that the removal and replacement of defective software from the field can occur remotely.
The important part is that the manufacturer delivered a defective product that risks your safety, that fixing that safety defect is the responsibility of the manufacturer, and the system is unsafe until that occurs.
Look, you can't make progress without getting your feet wet and then diving straight into the deep end.
We're still in the early days of self driving cars, and as much simulation and miles as they have, they're still constantly getting exposed to real world conditions that are new to them. The world is dynamic, so this will always remain true.
It remains to be seen where we'll converge on capability, incident rate, and acceptance.
In that context I think comparing it to the average human driver makes a lot of sense, because even if you personally are an even better driver, or even if human drivers are better at some specific things, we have more than enough data to show that Waymo reduces accident rates overall in their current rollout.
I think we're already there with Waymo as the example. We may later choose to diverge from this now-accepted path, but for the moment we have a blueprint, and fixing edge cases with a software update is apparently acceptable, if you just look at all the Waymos operating legally right now.
>A product recall is a request from a manufacturer to return a product after the discovery of safety issues...
I think using the term for a software update is abusing the language a bit. And may confuse people who have a real recall where the thing has to go to the dealer.
We really need a better term for when an urgent software update for a vehicle is issued. The extreme majority of the population completely misunderstands it when a "recall" is done when it's actually just an OTA software update.
https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
Or did you mean strictly in operation?
(Of course there is also scope for debate about how much world model today's LLMs have; it seems like it's more than none even though it has to be built out of token-shuffling parts. But that's not relevant here.)
https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY
He posts on an internet message board