Waymo autonomous vehicles (AVs) stopped and blocked traffic in San Francisco on Dec. 20 after traffic lights stopped working due to an electrical power outage caused by a substation fire, forcing the company to temporarily suspend services.
The robotaxi company said its vehicles are designed to treat nonfunctioning traffic lights as four-way stops, but that the scale of Saturday’s outage had created unusual conditions. Therefore, the company paused services, resuming on the afternoon of Dec. 21.
“While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events,” a spokesperson for Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, said….