Waymo autonomous vehicle
A significant blackout left the Californian city in the dark — and without traffic lights. Waymo did not explain why the power failure left its autonomous cars “stranded” on the streets, which could indicate a relevant vulnerability in the Waymo Driver system.
It was a weekend of traffic chaos in the city of San Francisco, on the west coast of the United States.
Across the Californian city, dozens of autonomous vehicles were seen standing in the streetsmainly at intersections, after on Saturday morning a significant blackout have left the city without traffic lights.
It’s not yet clear if the vehicles themselves of Waymo become inoperable if they lose connection to the company’s “remote hub”, or if they are unable to deal with the lack of properly working traffic lights and have not received any support from the “hub”.
Waymo, previously known as the “Google Self-Driving Car Project”, responded to the power outage by suspending its transport services in the city, but images shared on social media showed driverless taxis immobilized at intersectionswith the emergency lights on.
“We will temporarily suspend our services transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread blackout,” said Suzanne PhilionWaymo spokesperson, told . “Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with municipal officials, and we hope to be able to get our services back up and running soon.”
The blackout in the Californian city wasi attributed to a fire at one of the substations of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the region’s main energy supplier. The incident began on Saturday morning and, according to PG&E, affected approximately 130 thousand customers. By Sunday morning, the company’s teams had already restored power to around 110,000 of those customers.
Waymo did not explain Why the power failure left your cars autonomous “stranded” on the streets of San Franciscobut the episode may have exposed a relevant Waymo Drive system vulnerabilityr.
On its website, the company owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, states that its autonomous driving system “responds to signals and signaling, such as the colors of traffic lights and temporary stop signs”, which could indicate that vehicles had difficulties when traffic lights were out of service.
The CEO of Tesla, Elon Muskdidn’t miss the opportunity to boast about his freelancers. “Tesla Robotaxis were not affected for the blackout in SF”, Musk in a post on X.
