Todd Burch
14-Year Member
A drop from 99.99% to 95% uptime as a result of heavy precipitation implies extremely heavy rainfall occurs nearly 5% of the time—over 430 hours a year.A car with Waymo-level capabilities would either continue working or degrade gracefully (go into safe mode, pull over, and temporarily stop) during a torrential downpour. A Tesla tends to panic and fail abruptly. Clearly no car can drive in a Cat 5 hurricane. The difference is 99.99% uptime vs 95% uptime, and the manner in which the car handles the extreme conditions when encountered. For Robotaxi, the car will have to fail gracefully enough that it can safely pull itself over and stop. Red flashing "System Error: Take Control Immediately" is not an option.
Such rainfall events in reality occur more along the order of 0.1% of the time or less. The overwhelming majority of those cases are under intense cumulonimbus cells and are therefore fleeting. Most last on the order of around 10 minutes.
If an autonomous car has to pull over during an extremely heavy precipitation event (as many humans do), it would have almost no impact on robotaxi uptime. How many people are going to demand to load or unload a robotaxi during such events, or are unwilling to pull over to the side of the road for the ten or 15 minutes to wait to let it pass?
Further, just because you get red hands of death on the current system doesn’t mean a RT-ready version of the software would immediately give up and quit. That’s just the way it’s currently programmed.
AI can already detect cancer cells in medical imagery before oncologists can. There are many documented cases of this. There’s no reason to believe a camera-based system can’t handle the task of pulling over as an extreme rainfall event begins.
Many humans are able to and do pull to the side of the highway and park during extreme rainfall events. The remaining ones engage their hazards and drive slowly. It’s just not a major concern.
This reminds me of all the concerns and hand-wringing people had about mud caking the cameras and rending the FSD system inoperable. My second Tesla was one of the first AP1 vehicles (Oct 2014 build Model S). Ever since that time I have never seen a single issue reported where someone’s AP or FSD system has failed as a result of mud caking the lenses.
Much like range anxiety, these are issues manufactured by the human mind that are inflated to be a larger concern than they actually deserve to be.