Waymo has issued a voluntary software recall for 3,791 of its robotaxis following an incident in which one drove into a flooded street. The recall covers vehicles across the company’s fifth and sixth-generation systems, according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. During the incident, one of the company’s unoccupied vehicles drove into standing water, which it had already identified as untraversable. The robotaxi kept driving anyway, just at a slower pace. No injuries were reported. The filing describes the spot as “an untraversable flooded section of a roadway that has a 40 mph speed limit.” Waymo says a permanent fix is coming, and until then, it has tightened weather-related limits in its software and edited its maps so the fleet steers clear of problem areas. A patch, not a cure Such over-the-air software updates are a common occurrence at driverless car companies, which riders rarely notice. A new map ships overnight, some parameters get adjusted, and the cars behave a little differently the next morning. Advertisement Advertisement Still, this is the first recall of the sixth-generation system, a platform that was only launched earlier this year and is supposed to be the production-grade version of the company’s technology, built to run across multiple vehicle types. For most of its life, Waymo has stuck to dry, sunny places such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta. The weather is rarely the issue in those markets, and the cars can lean on training data that doesn’t include much in the way of slush or flash floods That’s about to change. Boston is on the expansion list, as are New York and Washington, DC. These three cities get hammered by the weather in different ways at different times of year. Advertisement Advertisement Mid-Atlantic flash flooding can shut down highways in minutes, and New England winters need no introduction. Water on the road makes the challenge harder. Even experienced drivers misjudge how deep a puddle goes. A few inches can kill an engine, and a foot or so can shove a car off line entirely. What Came Before Waymo’s fifth-generation system, which runs its Jaguar I-Pace fleet, has been recalled five times already. Past issues included cars driving past stopped school buses and a Phoenix incident where a vehicle hit a telephone pole. The software recall notwithstanding, the sixth generation is already being deployed in the Zeekr-built Ojai minivan and Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, while talks with Toyota are currently underway to develop next-generation autonomous platforms As these new models move into wetter climates, they’ll need more than just a software patch, and flooding is now on the list of things the new system has to learn. Sources: NHTSA, The Verge Read the original article on GEEKSPIN. Affiliate links on GEEKSPIN may earn us and our partners a commission.
Liked by Samuel Turner, Matthew Walker
Liked by Samuel Turner, Matthew Walker
Liked by Samuel Turner, Matthew Walker
