When a serious energy outage left tens of hundreds of San Francisco residents at nighttime weekend, town’s fleet of excessive tech self-driving autos went offline too.
Movies circulating on social media confirmed Waymo robotaxis clogging up intersections, addled by the sudden absence of steerage from site visitors lights. In a single video posted to TikTok, a Waymo robotaxi sporting its telltale rooftop cluster of sensors blocks a busy intersection as human drivers stream round it on each side. “This automobile didn’t transfer for 10+ min – it solely left when the passengers ditched the automobile,” the TikTok person who caught the footage wrote within the caption.
In one other broadly circulated video, no less than 5 of the self-driving automobiles blocked a neighborhood highway, flashing their hazards in confusion. The outage additionally took chunks of San Francisco’s public transportation system offline and disrupted native companies throughout one of many busiest buying weekends of the yr.
In gentle of the chaos, Waymo quickly paused its service to San Francisco on Saturday night. “Whereas the failure of the utility infrastructure was vital, we’re dedicated to making sure our know-how adjusts to site visitors movement throughout such occasions,” a Waymo spokesperson mentioned in a press release supplied to Quick Firm, including that Waymo would prioritize “quickly integrating” classes discovered from the weekend outage.
As a result of self-driving automobiles depend on a posh array of sensors reasonably than human judgment, uncommon or sudden occasions could cause them to behave unpredictably or shut down altogether. Even inside regular site visitors patterns, self-driving automobiles like these in Waymo’s fleet generally break site visitors legal guidelines and endanger different drivers and pedestrians.
Earlier this yr, the Nationwide Freeway Visitors Security Administration opened a probe into Waymo following stories that the corporate’s autonomous autos have been zooming round stopped college buses, endangering youngsters exiting the bus. An Austin college district reported that the self-driving automobiles continued to move its stopped college buses, even after Waymo mentioned it pushed a software program repair.
San Francisco’s energy outage isn’t the primary time that Waymo’s fleet has terrorized town, which often serves as a testing floor for brand new applied sciences developed close by – whether or not residents like it or not. In late October, a Waymo self-driving automobile struck and killed a beloved bodega cat within the Mission, resulting in a public outpouring of feline love and anti-AI ire.
San Francisco goes darkish
Greater than 120,000 individuals in San Francisco misplaced energy within the weekend’s outage, resulting in strange scenes of a principally dim Bay Space skyline on Saturday evening. By Sunday morning, round 24,000 properties have been with out energy as PG&E labored to get town again on-line. By Monday morning, a handful of blocks close to Golden Gate Park and across the Civic Middle remained affected, with PG&E promising to revive energy to these areas by 2 p.m. Pacific Time.
In accordance with PG&E, a fire in one of many energy firm’s substations brought about “vital and in depth ” harm, plunging components of the key West Coast metropolis into darkness for a number of days. “It is a very complicated work plan and would require the very best quantity of security focus to make sure protected work actions,” PG&E wrote in an replace on its web site. The utility firm, one of many largest within the U.S., reported no accidents to its staff or metropolis residents associated to the outage.
The San Francisco outage is the newest black eye for PG&E, which has confronted criticism, chapter and even prison fees in the middle of offering energy for main swaths of the West Coast. In 2020, the utility pleaded guilty to over 80 counts of manslaughter for the 2018 Camp hearth, which leveled the Northern California city of Paradise, destroying 11,000 properties and most buildings. “Our tools began the hearth. These are the info, and with this plea settlement we settle for accountability for our function within the hearth,” then PG&E President Invoice Johnson mentioned on the time, acknowledging that the corporate’s badly maintained tools ignited the lethal blaze and erased a rural California city from the map.
