Waymo’s robotaxis suffered a major outage on Saturday when a power outage across a large portion of San Francisco caused problems for its autonomous 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, causing confusion for Waymo’s robot taxis. Many of the autonomous vehicles stalled at intersections, creating traffic jams that exceeded the disruption already caused by the empty traffic lights.
Waymo responded by suspending its robotaxi service while it waited for power — and affected traffic lights — to come back online.
“We have temporarily suspended our rideshare services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread power outage,” Waymo said in a statement. “Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with city officials and we hope to be able to offer our services online again soon.”
The outage, reportedly caused by a fire at the Pacific Gas & Electric substation, began Saturday morning, with power outages shortly after noon. As of Sunday morning, power had been restored to about three-quarters of affected customers in San Francisco. Waymo has yet to confirm the extent to which it has resumed its robotaxi operations.
The worrying incident appears to have exposed a vulnerability in the technology of Waymo robotaxis, as they were unable to deal with empty traffic lights. Daily Sparkz reached out to Waymo to get more information about what exactly happened to its robotaxis and to find out what the company is doing to prevent a repeat of the incident should a power outage turn off the traffic lights again.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk didn’t miss an opportunity, writing on X: “Tesla robotaxis were not affected by the SF power outage.”
Tesla’s robotaxis currently have a safety driver at the wheel who can take control of the vehicle at any time, while Waymo’s robotaxis have no one behind the wheel.
The different technologies powering their respective autonomous systems mean Tesla’s cars may also be better equipped to handle a traffic light failure. Tesla cars, for example, rely on neural networks that process camera feeds to mimic human-like decisions in novel scenarios, a system that means it doesn’t rely entirely on maps. Waymo, meanwhile, is deploying LiDAR, radar and updated HD maps but, as we saw over the weekend, is struggling with unmapped changes like a traffic light outage that effectively turns a controlled intersection into a one-way street.
