They are rolling these out in New Orleans soon. Standing water is everywhere, and sometimes you have big hidden potholes. You just need to know the roads. Should be fun.
On a normal day it should suffice to train the model to use its judgment and maybe monitor how other cars are reacting to water covering the road, but when it starts flooding everywhere maybe they should pause the service until it dries out.
Sometimes there are not other cars around. Sometimes, I get scared driving on the same roads I know in heavy rain. So I am interested to see how Waymo handles it. I agree a suspended service is nice. The issue with that is flooding is local localized at times, like even block by block. So I don't know how they will make the call to suspend service.
Because the nuclear options is any heavy rain cancel rides, but that seems to hurt their service model.
For people, they hear a news report and avoid affected intersections. With autonomous cars they can have people (or AI or both) monitoring affected areas and blacklisting streets and intersections in real time.
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