San Francisco blackout strands Waymo robotaxis, forcing service pause

A major blackout has slammed San Francisco and left Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxis stuck on streets across the city, forcing Alphabet to pause its driverless ride-hail program in the Bay Area.

Pacific Gas and Electric said the blackout started Saturday afternoon and peaked two hours later, hitting about 130,000 customers.

As of press time, reportedly 21,000 homes and businesses still had no electricity, mostly in the Presidio, the Richmond District, Golden Gate Park, and parts of downtown.

Pacific Gas and Electric said the cause was a fire at a substation that caused “significant and extensive” damage, and it could not give a timeline for full repairs.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a 9 p.m. update on X that police, fire crews, parking control officers, and city ambassadors were sent into affected neighborhoods as transit slowly came back.“Waymo has also paused service,” he said.

Elon Musk says Tesla is unaffected by the blackout

Meanwhile, Elon Musk said via a post on X that:- “Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage.”

Though, it did not take long for people to point out that Tesla does not run a driverless program in the city at all, with his comment section littered with angry users.

Tesla’s local service uses “FSD (Supervised),” which is a driver-assist system that needs a human behind the wheel at all times. Regulators at the California DMV and the California Public Utilities Commission confirmed that Tesla has no permits to run driverless cars in the state without human safety workers ready to brake or steer.

Tesla is trying to become a big player in robotaxis, but its rides today still rely on human supervisors, even in states where the company holds permits for driverless programs. Tesla’s Robotaxi app lets people request a car, but every trip has a human on board. Waymo, on the other hand, leads the market in the West and competes with companies like Baidu-owned Apollo Go.

The outage hit as robotaxi programs become more common in other major U.S. cities. Waymo is one of the few companies offering full driverless rides to the public, even though surveys show people remain uneasy. The American Automobile Association said earlier this year that two-thirds of U.S. drivers reported fear of autonomous cars.

Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT and co-author of “How to Make AI Useful,” said the pause in San Francisco showed the limits of these vehicles. He said something was missed in the design or development of the systems, and he argued that power failures are expected events. “Not for eternity, but in the foreseeable future, we will need to mix human and machine intelligence, and have human backup systems in place around highly automated systems, including robotaxis,” he said.

Reimer also said regulators must decide how many highly automated cars should be allowed on streets and should hold AV companies responsible for any “chaos gridlock” the cars cause during major outages. Waymo did not say when service will return or whether any collisions happened during the blackout.

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