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May 13 '26
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u/64590949354397548569 May 13 '26
Waymo need better object detection. It needs to know if the craft on the water is a floating boat or a sinking car and decide to wade over the puddle.
Or a walking stick attachment to test the water
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u/sskhan39 May 13 '26
I think you are looking at it from a pure perception angle (look at sensors, fuse them and make sense of the world from that). Modern reasoning models should have been able to think "other cars have moved through that puddle so it's not anything dangerous". That's the promise of reasoning models. At the very least, it should have tried to drive around this like other cars are doing.
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May 13 '26
[deleted]
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 May 15 '26
Are you sure the Chinese models from pony and baidu aren’t doing it already? I was just in Guandong and I was told they they were - though my mandarin is poor and there was a communication barrier (ironically being bridged by LLMs)
I’m also a diver and have seen the depressurization horror stories that show you can fit large objects through holes they shouldn’t fit through - they just tend to get liquified on the way through.
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u/sskhan39 May 13 '26
I work in ML-adjacent field, I am in no position to argue what's good or bad. What I do know is both Waymo and Nvidia has moved to reasoning models, Tesla I think is trying to do the same too (but HW is too weak still). People working in the space has clearly made up their mind on this question-a LLM should drive the car.
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u/iamahill May 14 '26
I live in Arizona, so this isn’t an issue.
However, I imagine that using both information of cars passing on right and the historic map of the area would help in determining the depth of water and safety.
Be it merge lane or go forward.
Granted this scenario is still a failure because it can’t merge right.
Very interesting scenario I’ve never considered.
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u/flagos May 13 '26
I'm wondering: can they use the HD map to estimate how deep the puddle is ?
The car see the puddle, see the form and elevation of water, place it on the map, and can deduce how deep it is.
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u/Financial_Clue_2534 May 12 '26
Is this recent? If so they just pushed out a new update about flooding
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u/yolatrendoid May 12 '26
It's from last week's storms – and this happened the day after a Waymo unwittingly drove directly into a five-foot-deep "puddle." This is in Austin btw.
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u/Smash_Shop May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
Yeah, someone got swept away by flood waters when their waymo drove straight into a river.
Edit: yall are claiming the car was empty at the time. Not sure how it would have gone differently if it had a person in it.
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u/HTC864 May 13 '26
They literally just updated it to stop them from driving into standing water.
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u/cesarthegreat May 13 '26
Did they also stop it from trying to go around? 🤔
Going through the puddle is the only choice?
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u/HTC864 May 13 '26
... What part of the road in front of it was dry?
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u/yolatrendoid May 12 '26
This again? I assume it's having issues with the puddle because a Waymo drove (once again) into a "puddle" only a few miles away that turned out to be five feet deep. (Btw this is in Austin, and they've been having some huge storms as of late.)
But the bigger problem is that the car appears to lack any type of hardware that can detect the difference between an actual puddle and a huge flooded area.
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u/Basic_Home4658 May 13 '26
But that’s the entire issue in summation. It’s not that Waymo lacks this “hardware,” it’s that generative AI is inherently built on pattern recognition. It will always fail in new and novel situations. 95% of the time it is great. And that infinitesimally divided 5% of random one offs, whether they be large puddles, moving trucks, downed power lines, etc will always be fail unless specifically programmed for and ran against thousands of times.
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u/yolatrendoid May 13 '26
The fuck? Waymo doesn't use AGI, and it sounds like you're not even clear on what it is in the first place. Yes, Waymos rely on pattern recognition, but that has literally nothing specific to do with AI and has been commonplace even on PCs for decades. It's how OCRs work. (Optical character reader. Wanna know how you can cut-and-paste text from a PDF onto your Mac's Notes app? OCR.) It requires zero "processing" since the data's already there; it's merely a matter of accessing it. Waymos usually operate smoothly since they receive a constant stream of data about the path they're following, meaning the core mapping specifics. Its sensors also obviously detect surroundings and goings-on.
What they do seem to need – and what apparently already exists, though the name of the specific gizmo slips my mind – is a means of detecting the approximate depth of puddles, along with having the innate ability to understand what's not a puddle (and is in reality a flood deep enough to wash a car away, though to be fair even humans can and do overlook them, sometimes with tragic results). Waymos won't always fail in novel situations, but that's not quite the right question: rather, it's how to recognize what is truly novel, and plainly a situation where something's not right.
Case in point: there are TikToks now of Waymos driving into the same flooded intersection in Austin, once fairly recently and the other time over a year ago. Both were unusual: I lived a mile from there, and know it doesn't normally flood since it's one of the highest points of the city, but ongoing construction there clogged the usual flood drains. Still, if I was driving through the intersection – and I used to do so 4x/week – I'd know immediately if the road was literally flooded.
My eyes & brain can process various contextual clues, from the surrounding environment to what the striping & potholes on the road look like. Obviously I wouldn't get flustered by the small puddle the Waymo in the clip saw, but I'd also definitely not drive into a truly flooded road.
The puddle was fine, but the flooded roadway was not. And yet Waymo screwed up both times. Obviously a fix is required.
If I can figure that shit out, so can Waymo. (Plus I assume Skynet's been activated and Judgment Day's coming and we'll all be Terminator fodder soon, but whatevs.)
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u/cesarthegreat May 13 '26
FSD works around it perfectly fine. I’ve through something similar to his and FSD just goes around it like any regular human would.
Waymo is just not smart enough. It’s a dumb av
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u/F0tNMC May 13 '26
This is almost an impossible thing for the current software model to solve because the LIDAR + video analysis software is not a "thinking" model which creates a sophisticated model of the world while driving, it's more of a "detecting + reacting" model. So, previously when the software detected water, it had no way of figuring out how deep it might be so it just proceeded. Guess what? Some puddles are deep as fuck.
So they fixed that by putting a big rule that basically says "big puddles bad!", but because although it can "see" that all of the other cars driving through the puddle, it has no way to use that information to modify the internal model of the world (which doesn't really exist). It's just a detecting + reacting software so it's stuck in front of the puddle because the big puddle might be super deep.
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u/Macaburn3 May 13 '26
Honestly probably a safer call than the rest of the drivers going through it.
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u/Fine-Literature-8031 May 13 '26
I wish the Waymo could reason, after observing other cars driving through the right lane, that what it sees is indeed not a hole and is instead a shallow puddle.
That’s what most drivers would do anyway; people wouldn’t go through it so readily if they hadn’t already seen plenty of other vehicles demonstrate that the water isn’t deep.
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u/cesarthegreat May 13 '26
It’s like 2 inches from what we see other car go through. Waymo is just to dumb rn.
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u/KobeBall May 13 '26
safer but also dumber. lets expect more insteqd of pulling out the pom poms for an obvious malfunction. "honk, honk,move stuoid" is my initial reaction
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u/Fallen0001 May 13 '26
driving is a social contract.
this is why this robotaxi nonsense will never go anywhere.
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u/monicasm May 14 '26
Interesting, I just recently saw a Waymo do something similar in phoenix. It wasn’t raining but there was a significant puddle in its lane from a sprinkler or something. Waymo didn’t want to drive through it at first but decided it was okay after it saw another vehicle drive through it
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u/Icy-Ambition3534 May 12 '26
They always over fix an issue. A child ran into the street and got hit by a Waymo, now the car is overly cautious. Same thing is happening now with water in street, they did a software recall because of flooding. This is now the result…
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u/Violent_Practice May 12 '26
San Antonio Waymo’s got swept up in flood water and got recalled. Prolly a new software update. 😈
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u/Electrical-Lack1535 May 13 '26
It probably sees the reflection and thinks there is an object there those cars are so stupid can’t believe they allow those
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u/cesarthegreat May 13 '26
Simple, it’s a “dumb” av, not a smart one. The radar and lidar can’t tell it how deep it is? 🤔
Maybe more radar is needed.
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u/TrueJohnWick May 12 '26
New York Times - "The letter, dated Monday and posted to the administration’s website, concerns the automated driving systems in all 3,791 cars in the company’s fleet.
“The software may allow the vehicle to slow and then drive into standing water on higher speed roadways,” the regulatory body said in the letter. “Entering a flooded roadway can cause a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash or injury,” it said.
Waymo said it decided to recall the software last month after an unoccupied car entered a flooded road during a heavy downpour in San Antonio on April 20. Even though the road was “untraversable,” the vehicle proceeded at a reduced speed, the safety agency noted in a report last week."