IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.

As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets

We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!

> It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets

No one who works for them thought of flooded roads.

That’s reassuring.

It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.

Floods aren’t a usual even.

Have you ever even been outside?

I’ve lived in a place where it flooded every year or two. It floods regularly where I live now too.

Locals know which roads to avoid and not to drive into a flood.

Rain is one thing, but despite the rain Oregon is almost dead-last among all the states in terms of flood risk. It gets constant drizzles, not sporadic deluges.

I'll be relieved when I hear that they did it without killing anyone. Considering they didn't bother to work out how to handle floods before they put people's lives at risk everywhere else, it's not all that reassuring that they're now going to YOLO it in Portland

Agreed, this happens here every year, it's why we built O4W park the way it is, and built many other drainage structures similarly. We have a real runoff problem. Waymo picked a great city to train the cars on weird weather and weirder roads. :D

I would assume that after the very first instance you would start moving to fix it. To be in a position where you have to roll back your plans doesn't seem like a simple "delay."

The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?

As far as I know, nobody has been hurt from floods while in a Waymo. They hide their safety data from the public though (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...) so it's hard to say for sure. They've certainly been involved in crashes, killed pets (I actually give them a pass on the bodega cat), run over elementary school children, etc. Waymo has said it's only a matter of time until they kill someone and they've got plans for how to handle deaths caused by their cars, but they expect the public to accept those deaths.