Good.
Waymo is recalling its U.S. fleet of robotaxis after one of the autonomous vehicles was swept away when it drove into floodwaters in San Antonio.
The voluntary software recall stems from an incident during severe weather April 20, when a Waymo vehicle “encountered an untraversible flooded section of a roadway,” the company told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Though the vehicle detected the flooded road, it continued into floodwaters at reduced speed.
“We are working to implement additional software safeguards and have put mitigations in place, including refining our extreme weather operations during periods of intense rain, limiting access to areas where flash flooding might occur,” Waymo said in a statement
The vehicle swept away was unoccupied and there were no injuries, but the incident prompted Waymo to review similar scenarios and issue an interim update to its self-driving software. It also suspended operations in San Antonio, a city prone to flooding and where the April 20 incident was the second recent local instance of a Waymo vehicle struggling with flooding.
NHTSA said Waymo also has temporarily narrowed its operating scope to increase weather-related restrictions and updated its service-area maps while it works on a permanent remedy.
Outside San Antonio, passengers should see little impact except during severe weather.
The company said Tuesday it had resumed autonomous operations in San Antonio after its longest-ever shutdown but is still not serving riders.
The recall affects 3,791 vehicles equipped with the Alphabet Inc.-owned company’s fifth- and sixth-generation automated-driving system, according to documents posted to the NHTSA website. Waymo says its autonomous fleet has about 3,800 vehicles.
See here and here. I still think there ought to be a NHTSA investigation over this – as the story notes, there are and have been other NHTSA investigations of Waymo safety issues – but perhaps this was the settlement to avert that. If it really is a software problem and this is the fix for it, then I suppose that’s the big picture. I still think these things need a lot more testing before I’d be comfortable getting into one, but enough people disagree with me on that to make it a moot point.
They are still on the street here as of this morning.