> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.

There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy.

There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from.

It's a genuine frustration here.

Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them.

Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.

>I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better.

This has been the MO for "tech companies" for the past 20 years. Meanwhile I'm told I'm paranoid when the industry of "move fast or break things" decides to move into mission/safety critical industries and use its massive wealth to lobby for deregulation to maintain its habits.

We certainly have BS regulations done to constrain competition. But I'd wager a good 80% of them exist for good reason.

Surely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.

I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time, right?

In cases where the traffic signal is not working, it is known that the FSD has to take on a more challenging role of reading traffic agent gestures. I think they have that functionality built in. But not when neither traffic signal is working nor traffic agent is present.

The basic thing is to treat everything like a four-way stop sign.

In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.

> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos

Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked?

We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.

During Japan's 2011 earthquake, many roads were gridlocked by human drivers.

I'm surprised the don't know to treat it as a 4-way stop, either. This kind of outage is pretty common in Phoenix, too, which is another major Waymo market. It probably happens to at least some part of the city every monsoon season.

What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.