At the end of September, heavy rainstorms, accompanied by lighting and hail meant several rainfall in a short period of time. The city’s Waymo vehicles, used to driving in the warm, dry climate of the desert region, did not know what to make of the surface water and stopped dead in their tracks.
There were reports of riders being stranded mid-journey and vehicles having to be towed away from water covered roads. The problem appears to have been that the vehicles autonomous systems had not been exposed to rain-covered roads and could not tell if a body of water was just surface water or if it was several feet deep.
Waymo halted its operations in the city from Friday to Sunday and told local news channel 12News that the vehicles will learn from the event and data gathered as a result. It said that the storms which saw the most rainfall in seven years would be “critical weather data to continually refine the vehicles’ ability to navigate and respond to extreme weather”.
The Waymo app has rider support to call emergency services or riders can call emergency services directly and the first responder teams will work with the company to extricate vehicles that find themselves in emergency situations.
To date, most of the trials of Waymo vehicles have been in cities with relatively stable climates, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, but the company is conducting trials in Philadelphia, followed by New York City and Denver, all of which are subject to more diverse weather patterns.
www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/move-over-tesla-and-waymo-here-comes-tensor-2025-09/
As the cricketing world would say, “Rain stops play”