this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections (www.engadget.com)
submitted 2 months ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
67 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Several of Waymo's autonomous vehicles were seen stuck in the middle of San Francisco streets following a significant power outage that took out the city's traffic lights. Waymo responded to the power outage by suspending its ride-hailing services in the city, but images and videos on social media showed the self-driving taxis stopped at intersections with hazard lights on.

"We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread power outage," Suzanne Philion, a spokesperson for Waymo, told Engadget in an email. "Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with city officials, and we are hopeful to bring our services back online soon."

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[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 65 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (13 children)

Honestly, I'm happy they picked this as a default "car doesn't know what to do" scenario. From what I've seen Tesla's default is to just ignore the unknown thing, I wouldn't be surprised if Robotaxis would have just treated all the blank lights as green.

[–] Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca -2 points 2 months ago (11 children)

What's the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't drive.

A LOT of drivers actually don't know the answer to this one!

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 3 points 2 months ago

Most humans can learn on the fly though. If they see people taking turns at a broken stoplight they're likely to follow that example.

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