Robotaxi Waymo suffered a major breakdown on Saturday when a power outage affecting much of San Francisco caused problems with self-driving cars in the city.
About 130,000 residents lost power to their homes and businesses, while the outage also knocked out traffic lights at major intersections, throwing Waymo's robotaxis into confusion. Many driverless vehicles stopped at intersections, which contributed to congestion on top of the disruption already caused by the traffic lights being turned off.
In response, Waymo suspended its robotaxi service while it waited for power and affected traffic lights to be restored.
“We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to widespread power outages,” Waymo said in a statement Saturday. “Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with the City, and we look forward to bringing our services back online soon.”
In a statement to Digital Trends on Sunday, Waymo said it is now in the process of resuming its robotaxi services in the city, adding: “While the disruption to utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adapts to traffic flow during such events. We coordinated closely with the City of San Francisco during the outage. We are focused on quickly integrating the lessons learned from this event and are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve every day.”
The power outage caused by a fire at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation began Saturday morning and the power went out shortly after noon. By Sunday morning, power had been restored to about three-quarters of affected San Francisco customers.
The alarming incident appears to have exposed the weakness of the technology powering Waymo's robotaxis as they were unable to cope with empty traffic lights.
Never miss an opportunity, Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on X that “Tesla robotaxis were not affected by the San Francisco power outage.”
Currently, the Tesla robotaxi is driven by a safety driver who can take control of the vehicle at any time, while the Waymo robotaxi has no one behind the wheel.
The different technologies used in the respective autonomous systems mean that Tesla vehicles may also be better equipped to handle the event of a traffic light failure. Tesla cars, for example, rely on neural networks that process camera images to mimic human decisions in new scenarios. This system means that it does not need to rely entirely on cards. Waymo, meanwhile, uses LiDAR, radar, and updated HD maps, but as we saw over the weekend, struggles with unmarked changes like turning off traffic lights that effectively turn a controlled intersection into a four-way stop.
Waymo explained: “Although the Waymo Driver [Waymo’s autonomous driving technology] designed to treat inoperative signals as four-way stops, the scale of the outages resulted in instances where vehicles remained stationary for longer than normal to confirm the condition of the affected intersections. This contributed to traffic snarls at the height of traffic jams.”
