A blackout has reminded Waymo where its limits are

More than 10 years ago, a user named karmafrappuccino posted a meme that would go down in the history of memes (if there is any history of memes) with the name confused Travolta. Since then, the image of Vincent Vega with a coat in his hand and looking from one side to the other completely clueless in Mia Wallace’s living room has been used countless times.

Last weekend, the Waymo of San Francisco experienced their own Confused Travolta.

Detained. That’s how the Waymo cars ended up last weekend in San Francisco. Stopped, without reacting and with the emergency lights on. The service of autonomous driverless cars that circulate through the American city completely collapsed after a blackout left the traffic lights in part of the city without service.

In images like the ones in this video Up to five Waymo cars can be seen completely stopped at an intersection haphazardly. Three of them are on the right side, with the emergency lights active, but another two have stopped completely in the middle of an intersection, making life difficult for the rest of the drivers.

For hours. In The New York Times They report that tow truck employees spent hours picking up Waymo cars scattered around the city. The blackout, which had affected some 130,000 residents of the city, ended up causing chaos in the streets after Waymo cars will block intersections and streets.

The company confirmed that it ended up stopping the service. They point out in the newspaper that they contacted the company from the city to demand that they stop the service since it was creating even more problems in traffic. Social networks show videos and photographs of Completely collapsed intersections or streets for Waymo’s self-driving cars.

But why? Well, that’s the big doubt. Because experts consulted by The New York Times They point out that cars should be prepared to save situations like this. In fact, they clarify that it is not unusual for San Francisco traffic lights to have poor visibility or for GPS signals to be lost and cars to work correctly.

The company has clarified that if a traffic light is off, the car understands it as a Stop with exit in four directions. That is, the car should have continued moving forward when the conditions of the intersection permitted it. Something that, We refer to the videosit didn’t happen.

The problem is that cars seem to be trained to deal with turning off a traffic light but not all traffic lights. They explain in The Verge that the car sends a video and images to a human when it finds itself in an exceptional situation that it does not know how to deal with and it shows it the way. The problem is that, in the event of a blackout, it is difficult for the available bandwidth to allow this data to be sent.

The Tesla case. Given the chaos caused by Waymo’s robotaxis, Elon Musk did not take long to score the goal. The reason is that the autonomous driving system has been built on neural networks that They use the data of millions of drivers to show the car how it should behave.

In fact, the company itself, in one of the updates to the FSD, its most advanced driving assistance package, removed 300,000 lines of code in which he explicitly explained to the car how it should behave. Instead, it is the images and data captured by the millions of cars on the road that show each unit what it should do.

This has its drawbacks, such as a car decelerates without reason when encountering a police vehiclebut it has many advantages when it comes to smoother driving. In addition, it is easier to face unforeseen events because with so many cars on the streets it is relatively easy for someone to have faced an unexpected situation, whatever it may be.

Unforeseen. Currently, the biggest enemy of autonomous driving is precisely this: face the unexpected. And it is not the first time that autonomous cars cause images in which streets or intersections collapse due to communication failures or misinterpreting signs and warnings.

For example, one of the cars Cruise ended up running from the police because he didn’t know how he should act when faced with the emergency lights of the car that was chasing him. The car, on that occasion, had to be turned off remotely.

And widespread discontent. Although robotaxis have ended up becoming another part of the San Francisco landscape, to the point of being a tourist attraction, since these services were launched they have provoked all kinds of protests and actions by neighbors against them. Some as simple as putting a cone on the hood.

And autonomous cars have crossed the line of what city residents are willing to suffer. The crossings collapsed due to a blackout have been the latest case but only a few weeks ago a Waymo car ran over a well-known cat in one of the neighborhoods in which they operate. Reactions to the case showed that, although a self-driving car is involved in fewer accidents, we are more critical of the system than when the car is operated by a human.

Not to mention the Cruise case, which ended up losing his license (although he later recovered it before abandon permanently) for being involved, among others, in an incident in which a neighbor was run over and the car instead of stopping He drove over her and parked on her. It was also the case that the failure in one of their cars caused the delay of emergency services in a fire where one person lost their life.

Photo | Waymo and Georg Eiermann

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