Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly.

And if you’re Waymo, it’s a short-term reputation hit but great experience to learn from and improve.

I’m curious what’s the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that, or at least most of everyone. What’s the situation in SF?

I got stuck behind a Zoox in SF trying to cross the street from an alley. There was an endless stream of stop & go traffic and the Zoox refused to push itself into traffic, despite other cars deliberately giving it space. I wasn't sure if honking at it would help or hurt the situation.

> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.

There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy.

There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from.

It's a genuine frustration here.

Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them.

Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.

In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.

I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time, right?

Surely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.

During Japan's 2011 earthquake, many roads were gridlocked by human drivers.

> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos

Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked?

We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.

What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.

Perhaps this is by design. Cruise had a failsafe system that detected a collision and decided to pull over but by pulling over it dragged a person underneath the car (or something close to this scenario). Maybe this dumb failsafe was designed not to repeat Cruise's mistakes?

Certainly a better way to handle this would have been to pull over. I think stopping where ever it happened to be is only acceptable if the majority of sensors fail for some reason

What makes you think it was either?

AIUI, it was the irregularity of the uncontrolled intersections combining with the “novel” (from the POV of the software) driving style of the humans. In dense areas during outages signaled intersections don’t actually degrade to 4 way stops, drivers act pretty poorly.

The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted.

Certainly not ideal, and the should be a very strong regulatory response (the gov should have shut them down), and meaningful financial penalties (at least for repeat incidents).

Waymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection is gone then this is no longer available, and one might speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if they are in a situation where remote help is called for and inaccessible.

Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to stop operating autonomously and try to phone home for help, or perhaps losing the connection home is itself enough to trigger a fail safe shutdown mode ?

It reminds a bit of the recent TeslaBot video, another of their teleoperated stunts, where we see the bot appearing to remove a headset with both hands that it wasn't wearing (but that it's remote operator was), then fall over backwards "dead" as the remote operator evidentially clocked off his shift or went for a bathroom break.

> 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.

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...

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.

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.

That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.

There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.

The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.

I've been through long blackouts.

My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.

At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves.

But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both appropriate and safe.

After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).

By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.

By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with. People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've seen it.

But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious route.

(but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the middle of the road. That's NFG.)

I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.

Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.

In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.

In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.

> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.

My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)

It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

I thought the traffic went pretty well tonight in San Francisco considering we had this major issue.

I've seen 4-way 1-lane intersections behave well.

But those complex multiple lanes in all directions + turn lanes...

They do break down. I think they are a breeding ground for confusion and frustration.

Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were ruled by stop signs. It’s not always easy to keep track of who goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well in those cases.

You can further optimize the setup by not installing engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and designed for carrying.

Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed power to these cars using overhead cables.

In the original Sim City, having your city entirely use tracks instead of roads was superior because there was no traffic congestion from tracks

If you're happy to put those tracks on every road, sure. I wonder why no-one's bothered with that before.

Fast forward to blackjack and hookers.

It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist.

When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared with unstable and violent people, which while possibly "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real differentiating advantage.

Slot cars at the grown-up level.

Maybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make them more efficient.

Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.

I wonder how Waymos know that the traffic lights are out.

A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently, a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one by one, as if they think the light is not working."

It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific angles.

Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are working.

That's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the middle of the block with nobody in front of them.

I miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way.

Would have hoped they trained for this but at least now they likely will be.

That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.

Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.

Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote ops that halted everything

I think it’s clear that both use cases are a must have during an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos shouldn’t be online during such times at all.

I didn’t notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.

Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.

That's a really good question.

No, but they ran through stations that lacked power, so in the sense of being dumped out far from your actual destination, yes.

Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out (didn’t know about it, we were going to Japan town from the Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One advantage of building unsupervised system from public version that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.

Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency vehicles pass safely.

Treats it as a four way stop.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-A701F7D...

https://x.com/edgecase411/status/2002630953844552094

Looks like it treats it as a 4-way stop. Is this because Tesla has more training data?

50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a stop.

Don’t think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.

I think Tesla doesn’t care a out their reputation like Waymo does.

> Is this because Tesla has more training data?

Its human takes over. FSD is still Level 3.

(Robotaxi, Tesla's Level 4 product, is still in beta. Based on reports, its humans had to intervene.)

SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or exit there.

Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing for them, but it can be solved with software improvements. Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs, so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.

But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.

I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?

Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on the road.

The "boast about numbers" wasn't from Waymo, it was from their investors, and it was earlier this month and not during the service suspension.

What do you mean no answer? They are suspending their operations. That is their answer.

Read more carefully, Waymo didn’t boast about their numbers and that part of the story was unrelated to the issue except as a measure of impact their shutdown could have.

Because they are currently trying to raise money at 100bn valuation

The word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an errand in the blackout, we didn't need to do it, but we wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including multiple disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it over, I would have stayed home.

I did when I was younger (18-25). Exploring the world outside of my hometown often put me at ease when I was feeling destabilized.

I used to go out in the snow on purpose (DC metro). Mostly have them to myself, it was always fun.

Unsure if sarcasm, but lots of people do that. I do it every day.

Some folks enjoy driving.