A major failure at a substation in San Francisco caused a massive power outage and led to one of the most unpleasant episodes in the history of autonomous vehicles. Waymo Robotaxi, which is practically behind Google, and is considered the most advanced L4 fleet in the USA, immediately lost the possibility of normal operation.
Without electricity, the traffic lights also stopped working, so the autonomous driving system interpreted every extinguished traffic light as a stop sign, which led to vehicles “freezing” in the middle of intersections and creating serious traffic chaos.
An even bigger problem arose when the wireless signal weakened due to a power outage. Waymo then faced what it had been trying to avoid for years: vehicles stalling and remote operators unable to establish a connection and take control. Robotaxis has practically become an immovable object on the road. The company removed the vehicles by towing and temporarily suspended operations in the affected area.
The power outage caused a complete shutdown of the Waymo Robotaxi fleet
This incident also points to a technical failure in the training of algorithms, as Waymo mainly relies on data from limited urban areas, while additional scenarios are filled through simulations and world model approaches. It turned out that the scenario of a mass shutdown of the traffic lights was not sufficiently processed.
Elon Mask also announced on social networks, saying that the Tesla robotaxis vehicles in the same city did not have any problems. Although the Tesla in San Francisco is not yet fully autonomous, the FSD has gone through years of testing with a huge number of real-world kilometers, which has allowed it to function even in conditions where the traffic infrastructure is not working.
This incident comes at a time when the autonomous driving market is changing rapidly. After Cruise’s retirement, Waymo briefly had a “monopoly” in the US, but Tesla is now aggressively entering the space of robot taxi services.
Projections show that Tesla could already have more than 1,000 vehicles in its robotaxi fleet next year, while by 2030 that figure could exceed 30,000.