This is really bad. You need to have emergency service vehicles able to move around the city. Blocking road like that could mean life or death for some. Public road isn't some playground for doing beta testing. Waymo needs to be heavily fined for putting public at risk.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections
(www.engadget.com)
Honestly, I'm happy they picked this as a default "car doesn't know what to do" scenario. From what I've seen Tesla's default is to just ignore the unknown thing, I wouldn't be surprised if Robotaxis would have just treated all the blank lights as green.
It can be tough not to. Earlier this fall I was out of town and drover through an intersection before realizing no there was a traffic light there. Since it was night and the light was out, I had no reason to expect one so I effectively treated it like a green light.
I’m probably not the only one: next time I went past that intersection the city had placed cones and temporary stop signs
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Police and firefighters would love to have an excuse to go demolition derby on these things I bet.
They'd probably love to, but wouldn't. Lithium fires could make a bigger problem than slowly going around them.
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As long as the car isn’t moving, this is the best thing they could do. Emergency vehicles can drive around cars that aren’t moving. There should be plenty of room in any intersection for multiple vehicles.
It seems like one of the first things you’d want a self driving car to do is to pull over
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Sure are a lot of things to account for with these self driving car things. It would probably be way easier if they were separate from pedestrians and maybe limited on where they can go.
Trains. I want them to just be trains.
Adam Something, is that you?
This is one of the many edge cases that I’ve been convinced will keep self driving cars from becoming mainstream unless/until true AGI is achieved.
A few years ago I stopped at a red light next to a construction site. I was watching the traffic light, so at first I didn't notice a cop at the construction site trying to wave me through the red light. He finally took a few steps towards me and yelled to get my attention. Only then did I realize he was waving me through, so I did just that. I seriously doubt any current self driving car would recognize a police officer (and not just a random pedestrian) that’s overriding the traffic signal like that.
Another edge case, coincidentally at the same intersection a few years earlier was when there was a car fully engulfed in flames as I drove up. I could hear sirens in the distance, and the cars in every direction were making sure to safely get out of the way of the approaching fire trucks. At least one or two cars cautiously crossed on the red to get out of the way. Again, I doubt any current self driving car would have navigated that situation anywhere nearly as well as a human.
Easy. Give police the ability to remotely control driverless cars.
I mean, that is going to be a thing they will implement anyway, and probably not restricted to driverless cars.
If you give police a backdoor to control self-driving cars, somebody is going (to hack it and) use it to kill somebody.
Exactly. Any such remote control would have to be trivial for a cop to use, and also need to directly control only the car(s) the cop is currently interacting with. Think of a situation like this where a traffic light is disabled and a cop is there directing traffic. If driverless cars are approaching from multiple directions then how does the cop direct his commands to only the one he’s focusing on at the given moment? Not all that easy when you think about it…
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Yes! Yes it is! Not even close to as big of a problem as giving police full remote control of our vehicles, but, that too!
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Yes, let's give the group that has extensive abuse and corruption issues with nigh zero accountability new ways to hurt people.
If anything, we should be advocating against remote vehicle control for the myriad security and safety issues that would introduce.
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I think the best solution is more self driving cars and more Generative AI.
My favorite food is chalk.
Would you like some glue with that?
I’m sorry, so besides not wanting to pay a person to drive the vehicle, the fuck does this service actually provide again?
It makes stonks go up
I’m curious about what cloud service caused a couple of these cars to shit the bed. They’ve been designed to handle a lot of the compute locally. They can’t even been driven from a remote operator - the vehicle mostly troubleshoots sticky situations itself.
I can’t imagine this is the first time their fleet has encountered a traffic light that’s out or cell towers that’s are not responding. They do half a million rides a week in cities that have infrastructure blinking in and out of service constantly.
It wasn’t a cloud failure. The self driving cars are highly dependent on traffic lights being red/yellow/green. With the signals inoperative the cars don’t know what to do. Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.
Even if there were police officers directing traffic at intersections, the cars aren’t programmed to recognize & respond to them.
That by itself ought to automatically disqualify any such driverless car for use on public roads.
Even ignoring the police officers, aren't there clear rules for what to do when traffic lights are turned off?
In Germany, an inactive traffic light means that traffic control reverts to any present traffic signs (stop/yield/priority road). If none are present, the default rules for entering an intersection apply (which in Germany are to yield to any traffic coming from your right).
All of those rules already must be implemented for autonomous driving so why the hell couldn't they implement a hierarchy?
Weird. If that’s the case, how hasn’t this been more of an issue? This isn’t the first time a light has gone out in SF.
And then on top of that, since a ton of people were then connecting to cell service since their WiFi was out, that meant the cell towers were so overloaded they couldn't send data to operators that the car requires to be started up again, like multiple camera feeds, a 3d scan of the surroundings, etc.
So there's a lot of assumptions in this thread, but this specifically is just wrong. The cars do not need to have a constant connection with camera feeds and logic flowing to and from hq. They do nearly all processing on the vehicle, and comms to hq is used for location, status, etc but absolutely does not require the logic sent remotely to actually drive the vehicle.
I can't list sources because of an NDA (I am the source, nobody else is going to back me up), but I've seen the systems, I've been inside the AZ waymo hq, seem how hq interacts with the vehicles, the location and size of the compute system that does all the logic, I've seen how it works way beyond what the media has seen. I've rode in one of their test mules, with techs answering a slew of questions that I posed, and asked about the hardware and debug/test software that the public simply can't see.
I'm not sure why this happened - most people spouting this or that are just wrong. As of a decade ago, the cars were capable of handling failed stoplight and situations like that. They are also capable of being remotely controlled - someone above claimed otherwise, but they absolutely can be. Only in situations where the car is stuck or acting erratically (you call the hq via a button in the car, and they can pull up the vehicle and see everything about it, and if necessary, take control).
Either someone broke something regarding this situation (handling failed lights, etc) that was previously working, and this is the first time the issue has shown itself... or the power outage hit their ca hq, and when the cars couldn't stay connected for X amount of time, they went to failsafe mode. I'm leaning heavily towards the latter - there is very little data flowing between vehicles and hq (unless remotely diagnosing or controlling), but there is a bit (location, speed, status...), and maybe when hq went offline for a few minutes, it's a safety thing (think about someone trying to steal a Waymo car, for example, by trying to sever the connection, physically blocking it in, etc). That's just speculation though, but it's all I can think of.
My speculation is a safety feature working as intended.
As someone familiar with automation and machine learning, I certainly hope most of the processing is happening in device. It’s just not realistic to have a cloud driven car.
But it makes more sense to have a dead mans switch on the safety operator. “If you can’t connect to the safety operator, you can’t go”
cell towers not responding definitely not a first time. happened years back because of a music festival, and there were like some dead cellular spots in san francisco that held them back a while back as well.
C'mon you don't even have to read the article, just the blurb OP quoted to figure out it wasn't cloud.
Yea, so what was wrong with Taxis anyway? At least we regulated those
Is it brown people? It's brown people, isn't it?
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