Comment by andsoitis
3 days ago
Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen.
Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.
3 days ago
Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen.
Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.
> Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen
We have zero evidence a power outage wasn't foreseen. This looks like a more complex multi-system failure.
Does it matter?
Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe. And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens.
If you can physically get out of the way, you need to. Period.
> Does it matter
Yes. OP is inferring Waymo's internal processes from this meltdown. ("Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.")
If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a systemic problem. If, on the other hand, there was some weird power and cellular meltdown that coïncided with something else, that's a fixable edge case.
11 replies →
A fail-safe is EXACTLY blocking roads at intersections without power, not proceeding through intersections without power. It's much safer to be stopped than to keep going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood last night actually understood this.
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> Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe.
Yes.
> And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens.
No. Fail-operational is not the only allowable fail-safe condition for automobiles. For example, it is acceptable for loss of propulsion to cause stop-in-lane — the alternative would be to require high-availability propulsion systems, or to require drivers to always have enough kinetic energy to coast to side. This just isn’t the case.
One can argue that when operating a fleet with correlated failure modes the rules should change a bit, but that’s a separate topic.
Yeah, I was shocked by this. Blackouts in California aren’t some sort of rare event. I’m primed to expect rolling brownouts/blackouts yearly in the summer.
There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
There were significant power shutdowns in California in 2019 (affecting millions of customers in aggregate); the reason for the shutdowns was different from 2001 (preemptive shutdowns when the risk of downed power lines starting wildfires was thought to be high) but the impact on customers is the same: no power for an extended period.
> There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
Waymo operates in more places than the Bay Area. Phoenix, AZ, for example, had widespread power outages in Aug 2025 due to Haboob and Monsoon.
It also means that their claims of "autonomy" are fraudulent, like most "self driving" cars. A car which depends on powered infrastructure outside the car to drive is not autonomous.
Nearly all humans depend on powered infrastructure outside their car to drive it. You're describing a shortcoming of all 21st century navigation.
I think the 100 or so miles I can generally drive in my car while it still has gas is different from my car just stopping suddenly because of a power outage.
Tell that to all of the humans who were capable of driving, but blocked by a fake autonomous car that froze in the middle of the road.
Horse manure. If the power goes out, I can still drive. Including navigating intersections. Same for my cell phone.
One usage case that I saw myself is when a vehicle is parked such that it will require the other vehicle to go slighty over the curb, in this case the curb is flat so I assuming the parked driver thought it was okay. Every other human driver did okay, but Waymo just refused to put its wheel on the curb and just got stuck. Video here: https://x.com/aaditya_prakash/status/1989444130238259575?s=2...