Several of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles were seen stuck in the middle of San Francisco streets following a significant power outage that took out the city’s traffic lights. Waymo responded to the power outage by suspending its ride-hailing services in the city, but images and videos on social media showed the self-driving taxis stopped at intersections with hazard lights on.
“We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread power outage,” Suzanne Philion, a spokesperson for Waymo, told Engadget in an email. “Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with city officials, and we are hopeful to bring our services back online soon.”
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.
Police and firefighters would love to have an excuse to go demolition derby on these things I bet.
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.
What’s the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t drive.
A LOT of drivers actually don’t know the answer to this one!
An intersection with the lights no longer working is treated as a stop sign.
I admit I scratch my head at 4 way intersections with blinking yellows on all 4 though. Usually the bigger road gets the yellows for caution, the adjacent lanes have to yield.