When 130,000 San Francisco residents lost power over the weekend, the city got an unexpected stress test of its autonomous vehicle future.
For context: Over the weekend, a major power outage struck San Francisco, triggered by a fire at a PG&E substation near 8th and Mission Streets. It affected roughly 30% of the city, knocking out traffic lights, disrupting public transit like Muni and BART stations, and closing businesses amid rainy weather.
Driving the news: Waymo's autonomous self-driving robotaxis struggled significantly when traffic signals went dark.
Waymo vehicles are programmed to treat unpowered traffic signals as four-way stops, which is standard driving protocol.
But on such a massive scale, the vehicles often hesitated longer than usual while assessing the situation with their sensors (lidar, radar, cameras).
This caution is a built-in safety feature to avoid collisions in uncertain conditions.
However, in chaotic and rainy conditions with human drivers maneuvering unpredictably around dark intersections, many Waymos effectively "froze" in place, sometimes mid-turn or blocking lanes, with hazard lights on.
And tons of social media videos are circulating that show clusters of 3-6 vehicles at single intersections compounding the gridlock.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk also took to X and announced that Tesla’s robotaxi services in San Francisco were “unaffected” by the outage.
As a result, Waymo proactively suspended ride-hailing service Saturday evening (around 8 p.m. PST) in coordination with city officials, safely completing most active trips and pulling vehicles over or returning them to depots.
Service remained paused through much of Sunday but resumed by late afternoon/evening on December 21.
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What they’re saying: “Yesterday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with non-functioning traffic signals and transit disruptions. While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events,” Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion told The Verge.
“Throughout the outage, we closely coordinated with San Francisco city officials. We are focused on rapidly integrating the lessons learned from this event, and are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve every day.”
Bottom line: While no one was hurt and the chaos was eventually contained, the situation is a reminder that many AVs are still far from the "set it and forget it" autonomy that has been promised.
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