An hour-long power outage in San Francisco, USA, not only left many of the city’s citizens in the dark on Sunday – there were also apparently chaotic conditions on many streets because of the company’s autonomous taxis Waymo stopped along the way.
It is unclear exactly how many vehicles were affected. Videos shared on social media show how the company’s white vehicles blocked roads with their hazard lights on – apparently mostly at broken traffic lights. The cars obviously couldn’t find their way around the area. The company then temporarily stopped operations.
Waymo spokeswoman Suzanne Philion later explained the cause of the outage: As a result, the taxis are actually technically equipped to deal with non-functioning signaling systems. The problem in this case was the quantity. “The sheer magnitude of the power outage resulted in vehicles stopping longer than usual to check the status of the affected intersection.” This led to traffic disruptions.
The failure of the vehicles apparently also has to do with their special design: Waymo equips its taxis with, among other things, light sensors, radars, cameras and detailed maps. It is possible that the cars only had limited access to the map data due to the complex situation. says the US media
.
In contrast, robotaxis were from competitors Tesla, which are based on a different system with a large number of cameras, apparently not affected: Its boss Elon Musk (54) pointed out in an X-posting
that the cars of the company he runs were driving during the power outage.
Waymo is owned by Google parent company Alphabet. About 1,000 of the vehicles are usually in San Francisco and neighboring Silicon Valley. In total, the company operates around 2,500 robotaxis in the USA. Waymo is currently the market leader.
In total, around 21,000 electricity customers were affected by Sunday’s power outage, according to CNBC. The electricity supplier PG&E cited a fire in a substation as the reason, which led to “significant and extensive” damage.