Clearly they haven't actually had any serious problems getting stuck or anything because it'd be all over the news.
I don't think they're barreling into foot+ deep water.
I think they're driving into shallower "perfectly navigable but still deep" puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive like a high end chauffeur.
> One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.
Thousands of Waymos recalled after robotaxi swept into a creek https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2011dl4xo
> It follows an incident on 20 April in San Antonio, Texas, where an empty Waymo vehicle entered a flooded road and was swept into a creek.
Nobody in it but sounds serious enough.
That title sounds so much more dramatic than it seems it actually was. I imagine headlines like: “Billions of python 3.14.4 programs were recalled today when a bug was found in the core itself. No word yet on whether the successor product, Python 3.14.5, will avoid a similar fate. How long will we tolerate being used as test subjects in the developer’s risky games?”
How would you phrase the headline? I think it's pretty accurate, they have pulled thousands of vehicles out of service and completely stopped service in two cities, and the reason is literally that one of their cars was swept into a creek (in addition to other flood-related incidents). I can't think of a way to make the headline any more clear.
This isn't like other software "recalls" where the result is just an over-the-air update or a request to bring your car to a dealership when you have time, in this case they have actually physically removed the recalled vehicles from the road.
To use your analogy: if a bug in Python caused the PSF and package managers to actually make 3.14.4 unavailable and companies started taking Python services offline until a fix was found, yes that would be a really big deal.
> This isn't like other software "recalls" where the result is just an over-the-air update or a request to bring your car to a dealership when you have time, in this case they have actually physically removed the recalled vehicles from the road.
But that is what it was: the remedy in the recall was an over-the-air update and was already universally applied several weeks time before the recall was actually formalized.
Also seems linguistically complex, since the dictionary meaning of recall is an "official order to return item to a manufacturer", but Waymo doesn't sell the vehicle itself.
There was one in Atlanta that made the local news where it went too deep and stalled out, was stuck for over an hour.