Over the weekend, San Francisco was hit by a series of blackouts caused by a substation fire that left an estimated 130,000 homes and businesses without power. Nearly two days later, Pacific Gas and Electric reports that some are still without electricity. As a consequence of the event, the city discovered how Waymo self-driving taxis cope when every traffic signal goes down at once: In short, they don’t.
It didn’t take long before individuals on social media began posting footage of stopped Waymos at intersections, with hazard lights blinking. Bloomberg interviewed one rider who reported that his cab stopped functioning about a minute from his destination at a dense crossing. After several minutes of waiting and phoning customer support, he simply got out of the vehicle and walked the rest of the way.
“The problem was that, at the beginning, there were a lot of people crossing the streets because there were no traffic lights,” the rider said. “So I believe the Waymo just didn’t know what to do.”
Waymo temporarily paused service in the city midday Sunday; it’s since been resumed. While its vehicles are designed to navigate crossings with downed signals as four-way stops, the Google-affiliated autonomous ride-hailing company told the New York Times that “the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections. This contributed to traffic friction during the height of the congestion.”
Nevertheless, Tesla CEO Elon Musk still seized the opportunity to advertise how his competing cabs were supposedly undeterred by the infrastructure chaos. That would be impressive, if Tesla’s Robotaxis didn’t still require a human safety monitor behind the wheel at all times.
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