How many Waymos does it take to completely block an intersection? Quite a few! But unfortunately they managed to do so.

You have probably heard the myth that once an AV encounters a difficult situation, the great news is that it will never happen again. That somehow the machine learning will be able to “learn” from a single incidence and then spread the “knowledge” to all of the AVs. Well, it simply isn’t true. Machine learning, which is a truly powerful tool, simply gets befuddled when there isn’t enough data. This means it can never handle rare situations. AVs simply cannot “learn” how to handle rare problems. So you get Waymos illegally driving past stopped school buses, even after a “software upgrade”.

And clearly Waymos still are completely unable to handle stop lights that are out, even though they had lots of experience with such situations during a power outage in San Francisco. In fact, Waymos are still so bad at handling rare situations like non-working traffic signals that they managed to plug up pretty much every lane in a large intersection. Havoc ensued. Hilarity did not.