A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨tonytins@pawb.social⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.engadget.com/transportation/a-san-francisco-power-outage-left-waymos-self-driving-cars-stranded-at-intersections-172316970.html

Several of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles were seen stuck in the middle of San Francisco streets following a significant power outage that took out the city’s traffic lights. Waymo responded to the power outage by suspending its ride-hailing services in the city, but images and videos on social media showed the self-driving taxis stopped at intersections with hazard lights on.

“We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread power outage,” Suzanne Philion, a spokesperson for Waymo, told Engadget in an email. “Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with city officials, and we are hopeful to bring our services back online soon.”

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fuzzywombat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This is really bad. You need to have emergency service vehicles able to move around the city. Blocking road like that could mean life or death for some. Public road isn’t some playground for doing beta testing. Waymo needs to be heavily fined for putting public at risk.

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- xthexder@l.sw0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Honestly, I’m happy they picked this as a default “car doesn’t know what to do” scenario. From what I’ve seen Tesla’s default is to just ignore the unknown thing, they I wouldn’t be surprised if Robotaxis would have just treated all the blank lights as green.
  
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  - Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    What’s the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?
    
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  - AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It can be tough not to. Earlier this fall I was out of town and drover through an intersection before realizing no there was a traffic light there. Since it was night and the light was out, I had no reason to expect one so I effectively treated it like a green light.
    
    I’m probably not the only one: next time I went past that intersection the city had placed cones and temporary stop signs
    
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- unphazed@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Police and firefighters would love to have an excuse to go demolition derby on these things I bet.
  
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  - naticus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    They’d probably love to, but wouldn’t. Lithium fires could make a bigger problem than slowly going around them.
    
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- _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  As long as the car isn’t moving, this is the best thing they could do. Emergency vehicles can drive around cars that aren’t moving. There should be plenty of room in any intersection for multiple vehicles.
  
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  - AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It seems like one of the first things you’d want a self driving car to do is to pull over
    
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  - cheesybuddha@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Until it’s multiple self driving cars getting stuck in that intersection
    
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Godnroc@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Sure are a lot of things to account for with these self driving car things. It would probably be way easier if they were separate from pedestrians and maybe limited on where they can go.

Trains. I want them to just be trains.

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- Barbarian@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Adam Something, is that you?
  
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- DampSquid@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I want horses
  
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  - HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    i want zeppelins
    
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IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This is one of the many edge cases that I’ve been convinced will keep self driving cars from becoming mainstream unless/until true AGI is achieved.

A few years ago I stopped at a red light next to a construction site. I was watching the traffic light, so at first I didn’t notice a cop at the construction site trying to wave me through the red light. He finally took a few steps towards me and yelled to get my attention. Only then did I realize he was waving me through, so I did just that. I seriously doubt any current self driving car would recognize a police officer (and not just a random pedestrian) that’s overriding the traffic signal like that.

Another edge case, coincidentally at the same intersection a few years earlier was when there was a car fully engulfed in flames as I drove up. I could hear sirens in the distance, and the cars in every direction were making sure to safely get out of the way of the approaching fire trucks. At least one or two cars cautiously crossed on the red to get out of the way. Again, I doubt any current self driving car would have navigated that situation anywhere nearly as well as a human.

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- tomiant@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Easy. Give police the ability to remotely control driverless cars.
  
  I mean, that is going to be a thing they will implement anyway.
  
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  - FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    If you give police a backdoor to control self-driving cars, somebody is going (to hack it and) use it to kill somebody.
    
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  - finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yes, let’s give the group that has extensive abuse and corruption issues with nigh zero accountability new ways to hurt people.
    
    If anything, we should be advocating against remote vehicle control for the myriad security and safety issues that would introduce.
    
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- etchinghillside@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Do I really trust humans to perform much better when traffic lights are out?
  
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  - IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I can recognize when a police officer is directing traffic at a dead traffic light. I can also recognize the intent of other drivers who may wave, flash their headlights, etc. I doubt any current self driving cars can accurately recognize any of those.
    
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- AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I almost tested that first example but was too slow. I had a one month free trial of self-driving and approached a similar construction site where I didn’t see the officer at first …… thinking “I wonder what the car would do?”
  
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VeryInterestingTable@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think the best solution is more self driving cars and more Generative AI.

My favorite food is chalk.

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- Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Would you like some glue with that?
  
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Soup@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m sorry, so besides not wanting to pay a person to drive the vehicle, the fuck does this service actually provide again?

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- zbyte64@awful.systems ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It makes stonks go up
  
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Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m curious about what cloud service caused a couple of these cars to shit the bed. They’ve been designed to handle a lot of the compute locally. They can’t even been driven from a remote operator - the vehicle mostly troubleshoots sticky situations itself.

I can’t imagine this is the first time their fleet has encountered a traffic light that’s out or cell towers that’s are not responding. They do half a million rides a week in cities that have infrastructure blinking in and out of service constantly.

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- IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It wasn’t a cloud failure. The self driving cars are highly dependent on traffic lights being red/yellow/green. With the signals inoperative the cars don’t know what to do. Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.
  
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  - grue@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.
    
    That by itself ought to automatically disqualify any such driverless car for use on public roads.
    
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  - AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    And then on top of that, since a ton of people were then connecting to cell service since their WiFi was out, that meant the cell towers were so overloaded they couldn’t send data to operators that the car requires to be started up again, like multiple camera feeds, a 3d scan of the surroundings, etc.
    
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  - Jesus_666@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Even ignoring the police officers, aren’t there clear rules for what to do when traffic lights are turned off?
    
    In Germany, an inactive traffic light means that traffic control reverts to any present traffic signs (stop/yield/priority road). If none are present, the default rules for entering an intersection apply (which in Germany are to yield to any traffic coming from your right).
    
    All of those rules already must be implemented for autonomous driving so why the hell couldn’t they implement a hierarchy?
    
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  - Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Weird. If that’s the case, how hasn’t this been more of an issue? This isn’t the first time a light has gone out in SF.
    
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- Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  cell towers not responding definitely not a first time. happened years back because of a music festival, and there were like some dead cellular spots in san francisco that held them back a while back as well.
  
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- someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  C’mon you don’t even have to read the article, just the blurb OP quoted to figure out it wasn’t cloud.
  
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cheesybuddha@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yea, so what was wrong with Taxis anyway? At least we regulated those

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- itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  We’ve managed to create a society where people are upset about technology doing the work that people used to do. We’ve just completely lost the plot haven’t we
  
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  - cheesybuddha@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Or, we managed to create a society where people are upset about new, unregulated, and, according to the article in question, potentially dangerous technology being implemented with little regard to the public good.
    
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- Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  no, its the gouging taxi drivers do.
  
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