A massive power outage in San Francisco on Saturday, affecting approximately 130,000 subscribers, led to another unexpected technological problem in the city. During the outage, reported by Pacific Gas & Electric Company and caused by a fire at a substation, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, were stranded on the streets. Numerous images shared on social media showed the company’s driverless SUVs immobile on the streets, causing severe traffic jams throughout the city as traffic lights failed.

Waymo and Tesla face off: Autonomous driving test during power outage

During this chaos, some users shared videos showing Tesla vehicles navigating the same streets smoothly using their FSD (Full Self-Driving) feature. Elon Musk, in a tweet, stated that “Tesla Robotaxis were not affected by the power outage.” Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion told The Verge that they had temporarily suspended ride-hailing services due to the widespread power outage. The company emphasized that their priority was passenger safety and ensuring the passage of emergency crews.

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Philion, stating that service resumed on Sunday evening, acknowledged that the outage disabled traffic lights and caused a major gridlock. Waymo stated that they are committed to their technology adapting to traffic flow during such events and are working closely with San Francisco city officials. The company said they are focusing on maintaining service reliability by learning from the incident.

No official technical details were shared regarding the exact reason why the vehicles were unable to move. However, speculation points to data connectivity problems caused by overloading or disabling base stations due to the power outage. Waymo vehicles typically wait for confirmation from a remote human operator when encountering complex situations such as malfunctioning traffic lights. Since this system requires live image transmission from vehicle cameras, bandwidth issues during the outage may have prevented the vehicles from receiving commands. Similar freezing incidents have occurred previously in Austin and San Francisco.

What are your thoughts on this incident, which demonstrates how vulnerable self-driving vehicle technologies can be to infrastructure problems? Do you think that a complete overhaul of city infrastructure is necessary for fully autonomous driving?