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Transportation
With street lighting malfunctioning and wireless data limited, the Waymo cars were creating congestion throughout the city.
With street lighting malfunctioning and wireless data limited, the Waymo cars were creating congestion throughout the city.
A blackout hit San Francisco on Saturday, affecting approximately 130,000 customers at its peak, per the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, but it also created another issue: immobilized Waymo vehicles. Numerous posts flooded social media depicting the company’s self-driving SUVs halted in the streets, causing traffic chaos.
Some individuals shared clips of Teslas employing their FSD feature to maneuver through the same streets, while Elon Musk tweeted that “Tesla Robotaxis were not impacted by the SF power outage.” On Sunday evening, Waymo representative Suzanne Philion announced, “We are restarting ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
In response to a request from The Verge, Waymo representative Suzanne Philion issued a statement overnight indicating, “We have temporarily halted our ride-hailing services due to the widespread power outage in San Francisco. Our priority is the safety of our riders and ensuring that emergency services can access the areas they need to work.”
PG&E reported at 2 PM PT that service had been restored for around 114,000 of the affected customers as they continued to work on repairs following a fire at a five-story power substation.
After this article was published, Philion provided an additional statement on Sunday evening:
We are resuming ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area. The outage yesterday was a significant event that led to gridlock all over San Francisco, with non-operational traffic signals and public transit disruptions. While the breakdown of utility infrastructure was considerable, we are dedicated to ensuring our technology adapts to traffic conditions during such occurrences.
“Throughout the outage, we worked closely with city officials in San Francisco. We are committed to swiftly integrating the insights gained from this incident, and we are focused on earning and preserving the trust of the communities we serve daily.
Precisely why the vehicles were stationary remains uncertain, with no available updates found on the company’s social media pages; however, speculation revolved around unreliable wireless data connections, with cell towers either down or overloaded as people lost access to Wi-Fi, and/or street lights that weren’t functioning due to the lack of power.
Such issues have arisen previously, as evidenced by TikTok videos from earlier this year showing Waymos stopped due to a malfunctioning traffic light and during a power failure in Austin, Texas. In reply to a Reddit post illustrating another similar scenario last year, someone claiming to be a former employee commented that the vehicle would send a request to a remote assistant and wait for their feedback before moving ahead.
According to a company blog post, the system contacts a human response agent when the car encounters “unique situations,” providing them with live and recorded footage from its cameras along with a 3D representation of the data from its sensors. However, those may require bandwidth that is hard to find during a major power outage. I couldn’t locate any figures regarding how many remote assistance agents Waymo has on hand at any time, but in November, the company announced it successfully passed a third-party audit by Tüv Süd, a German technology inspection entity that assessed its remote assistance program against industry standards.
Update, December 21st: Included updated comments from Waymo representative Suzanne Philion and revised details from PG&E.
