The outages hit San Francisco on Saturday, knocking out about 130,000 customers at its peak, according to Pacific Gas & Electric Co., but also creating another problem: Waymo vehicles were stranded. Posts across social media showed the company’s autonomous SUVs parked on the roads and causing traffic jams.
Some people posted videos of Teslas using their FSD feature to navigate the same roads, and Elon Musk tweeted that “Tesla robotaxis were unaffected by SF power outage.”
In response to an inquiry from The VergeWaymo spokesperson Suzanne Fillion sent a statement saying, “We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in response to the widespread power outages in San Francisco. We are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their jobs.” PG&E reported as of 7 a.m. PT that “crews have restored approximately 110,000 customers and PG&E continues to work on restoring the remaining 21,000 customers, primarily in small areas of the Presidio, Richmond District, Golden Gate Park and Downtown San Francisco,” as repairs continue following a fire at a five-story power substation.
Exactly why the cars were not running is unclear, we could not find any public updates on the company’s social media channels, but speculation centered on wireless data connections, cell towers either down or overloaded by people who no longer had access to Wi-Fi, and/or street lights that were not working without power.
However, these problems have occurred before, as seen in a TikTok video earlier this year that showed Wemos frozen due to malfunctioning street lights and a power outage in Austin, Texas. In response to a Reddit post showing another similar situation last year, someone who said they were a former employee commented explaining that the vehicle would send a request to a remote assistant and wait for their response before proceeding.
According to the company’s blog post, when the car encounters a “unique interaction”, it reaches out to a human response agent, providing them with live and recorded views from its cameras in addition to a 3D map being picked up by sensors. However, they may require bandwidth that is difficult to find during a significant power outage. I couldn’t find any statistics on how many remote assistance operators Waymo has available at a given time, but in November, the company announced that it had passed a third-party audit by German technical oversight company Taub Süd, which evaluated its remote assistance program against industry best practices.
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