A blackout in San Francisco revealed a new way for robotaxis to go wrong.
On Saturday, when a major power outage in San Francisco knocked out traffic signals, many Waymo vehicles didn’t pull over to the side of the road or seek out a parking space. Nor did they treat intersections as four-way stops, as a human would have. Instead, they just … sat there with their hazard lights on, like a student driver freezing up before their big parallel-parking test. Several Waymo vehicles got stuck in the middle of a busy intersection, causing a traffic jam. Another robotaxi blocked a city bus. The company suspended its service for several hours.
