A San Francisco energy outage left Waymo’s self-driving vehicles stranded at intersections

A number of of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles had been seen caught in the course of San Francisco streets following a big energy outage that took out town’s site visitors lights. Waymo responded to the ability outage by suspending its ride-hailing providers within the metropolis, however images and videos on social media confirmed the self-driving taxis stopped at intersections with hazard lights on.

“We have now briefly suspended our ride-hailing providers within the San Francisco Bay Space as a result of widespread energy outage,” Suzanne Philion, a spokesperson for Waymo, advised Engadget in an electronic mail. “Our groups are working diligently and in shut coordination with metropolis officers, and we’re hopeful to deliver our providers again on-line quickly.”

The facility outage was attributed to a fireplace at one in every of Pacific Gasoline & Electrical (PG&E)’s substations. The incident started someday on Saturday morning, which PG&E said affected roughly 130,000 prospects. As of Sunday morning, the Californian energy firm mentioned its crews have restored energy to about 110,000 of these prospects, whereas engaged on the remaining 21,000 prospects in “the Presidio, Richmond District, Golden Gate Park and small areas of downtown San Francisco.”

Waymo hasn’t supplied an evidence as to why the ability outage left its autonomous vehicles stranded in San Francisco streets, however this episode might have revealed a notable fault with the Waymo Driver system. Waymo signifies on its web site that its autonomous driving system “responds to indicators and indicators, like site visitors gentle colours and non permanent cease indicators,” which may point out that the self-driving vehicles struggled with the out-of-order road lights. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, additionally noticed a possibility to chime in on X, posting that “Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF energy outage.”