Self-driving car boss confesses that autonomous vehicles lack 'common sense'
An autonomous vehicle executive has warned that self-driving cars still lack "common sense" after thousands of Waymo robotaxis were recalled following a flood-related incident in Texas.
Self-driving cars still lack "common sense", an autonomous vehicle executive has admitted, after thousands of Waymo robotaxis were recalled in the US following an incident involving a flooded road.
The recall affects almost 3,800 Waymo vehicles using the company’s fifth and sixth-generation automated driving systems after an empty robotaxi drove into floodwater in San Antonio, Texas, and was swept into a creek.
According to a notice published by the US Department of Transportation, the software "may allow the vehicle to slow and then drive into standing water on higher speed roadways".
During the incident, the vehicle reportedly stopped in a flooded 40mph zone before attempting to continue through the water instead of turning around or finding another route. The robotaxi was recovered downstream four days later.
Igal Raichelgauz, chief executive of AI company Autobrains, said many driverless systems are still too reliant on learning from repeated examples rather than understanding situations logically.
He said: "One of the biggest gaps in autonomous driving AI today is common sense."
Raichelgauz explained that many systems are trained by repeatedly feeding them examples of road conditions and traffic behaviour.
He said during the Financial Times Future of the Car event: "If you want the car to react to a red light, you have to feed it a lot of examples.
"Eventually you would need to see thousands or millions of examples just to react to a traffic light, and this limits those systems.
"We want to pass the knowledge through reasoning. Learning by examples is important, but it is not enough — we need systems that can reason and adapt to situations beyond the training set."
Waymo has faced several recent incidents involving its autonomous vehicles.
Residents in Shoreditch, east London, recently complained about Waymo cars repeatedly entering a dead-end road before reversing while sounding loud warning alarms. Another vehicle reportedly drove into an active police cordon in north London last month.
In San Francisco, a power outage last year caused multiple robotaxis to stop simultaneously, creating traffic congestion across the city.
Waymo said safety remained its "primary priority" and confirmed additional software safeguards were being introduced alongside improved extreme weather operations.
