"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."
"The company is diagnosing the problem, a Waymo spokesperson told me in a statement: "While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events." The spokesperson added that the driverless cars should have been able to navigate intersections without working traffic lights, but "the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections.""
During a major San Francisco power outage, traffic signals failed and many Waymo robotaxis stopped in intersections instead of pulling over or treating intersections as four-way stops. Several vehicles sat with hazard lights on, creating traffic jams and blocking a city bus; the company suspended service for hours. Remote human-agent assistance may have been unavailable due to connectivity issues during the blackout. Waymo said it is diagnosing the problem and that while vehicles should handle intersections without lights, the scale of the outage caused some vehicles to remain stationary longer than usual to confirm intersection state. Similar past incidents included vehicles stuck in construction and a fatal collision with a cat.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]