The problem is they're not designed for that. They aren't spending resources on some master control networking system because in 99% of use cases that won't be useful anyways as most of the traffic being dealt with isn't other waymo's willing to communicate.

There might be some level of adoption where they would, but honestly we're back to "but what about trains/trucks?".

Half the problem with evacuations is people don't want to leave behind their stuff to get destroyed. You'd basically be better off getting a fleet of semi's with some quick and dirty cube system thrown up than a bunch of automated sedans.

> atleast there might be less gridlock

I've never lived in a hurricane area, but when I think of news coverage of problematic evacuations, they're showing people stuck on highways, not people stuck in urban traffic grids.

It's a throughput problem. Computer controlled "car trains" with shorter following distances can boost traffic throughput, but I don't think that would be enough to make evacuation of large cities actually feasible. The highway system is simply not built for that use case. Especially since evacuation often occurs during inclement weather that reduces capacity.

AFAIK, most places try to figure out how to make shelter in place work, because mass evacuation is likely to end up with many people facing the weather event while on the highway.

You could theoretically do better with busses and trains, things, but there's likely not enough busses that are setup for long distance travel available: lots of municipal bus fleets are setup for alternate fuels which is great for emissions but makes it hard to travel to a neighboring state, because there may not be appropriate fueling opportunities on the way. Etc, etc.

Why would there be less gridlock if people were in a driverless car instead of a regular car?

"assuming the self driving cars don't do something stupid"

This is a big assumption.

This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can't be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.

Now imagine if the power is out and cell service is down. We saw that happen in San Francisco and it was chaos.

It would be a failure. Turns out they do something stupid. People tested this in sf by calling a bunch of waymos at once for a prank, but I guess that is the best case example of what a panicked evacuation on the service might be like. It was like a ddos attack. They ended up gridlocking themselves and turned it into a real life version of one of those rush hour board games. No one got out of the little area they called the waymos in.

I mean the logical conclusion is a dedicated lane for automated cars..

At which point we've reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.