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 1 month ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
68 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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[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (9 children)

I’m curious about what cloud service caused a couple of these cars to shit the bed. They’ve been designed to handle a lot of the compute locally. They can’t even been driven from a remote operator - the vehicle mostly troubleshoots sticky situations itself.

I can’t imagine this is the first time their fleet has encountered a traffic light that’s out or cell towers that’s are not responding. They do half a million rides a week in cities that have infrastructure blinking in and out of service constantly.

[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago (6 children)

It wasn’t a cloud failure. The self driving cars are highly dependent on traffic lights being red/yellow/green. With the signals inoperative the cars don’t know what to do. Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago

Even ignoring the police officers, aren't there clear rules for what to do when traffic lights are turned off?

In Germany, an inactive traffic light means that traffic control reverts to any present traffic signs (stop/yield/priority road). If none are present, the default rules for entering an intersection apply (which in Germany are to yield to any traffic coming from your right).

All of those rules already must be implemented for autonomous driving so why the hell couldn't they implement a hierarchy?

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