San Francisco power outage brings Waymo robotaxis to a standstill

When a major power outage left tens of thousands of San Francisco residents in the dark weekend, the city’s fleet of high tech self-driving vehicles went offline too. Videos circulating on social media showed Waymo robotaxis clogging up intersections, addled by the sudden absence of guidance from traffic lights. In one video posted to TikTok , a Waymo robotaxi sporting its telltale rooftop cluster of sensors blocks a busy intersection as human drivers stream around it on both sides. “This car did not move for 10+ min – it only left when the passengers ditched the car,” the TikTok user who caught the footage wrote in the caption. In another widely circulated video , at least five of the self-driving cars blocked a neighborhood road, flashing their hazards in confusion. The outage also took chunks of San Francisco’s public transportation system offline and disrupted local businesses during one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year. In light of the chaos, Waymo temporarily paused its service to San Francisco on Saturday evening. “While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events,” a Waymo spokesperson said in a statement provided to Fast Company, adding that Waymo would prioritize “rapidly integrating” lessons learned from the weekend outage. Because self-driving cars rely on a complex array of sensors rather than human judgment, unusual or unexpected events can cause them to behave unpredictably or shut down altogether. Even within normal traffic patterns, self-driving cars like those in Waymo’s fleet sometimes break traffic laws and endanger other drivers and pedestrians. Earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a probe into Waymo following reports that the company’s autonomous vehicles were zooming around stopped school buses, endangering children exiting the bus. An Austin school district reported that the self-driving cars continued to pass its stopped school buses, even after Waymo said it pushed a software fix. San Francisco’s power outage isn’t the first time that Waymo’s fleet has terrorized the city, which regularly serves as a testing ground for new technologies developed nearby – whether residents like it or not . In late October, a Waymo self-driving car struck and killed a beloved bodega cat in the Mission, leading to a public outpouring of feline love and anti- AI ire. San Francisco goes dark More than 120,000 people in San Francisco lost power in the weekend’s outage, leading to strange scenes of a mostly dim Bay Area skyline on Saturday night. By Sunday morning, around 24,000 homes were without power as PG&E worked to get the city back online. By Monday morning, a handful of blocks near Golden Gate Park and around the Civic Center remained affected, with PG&E promising to restore power to those areas by 2 p.m. Pacific Time. According to PG&E, a fire in one of the power company’s substations caused “significant and extensive ” damage, plunging parts of the major West Coast city into darkness for...

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