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A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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This is really bad. You need to have emergency service vehicles able to move around the city. Blocking road like that could mean life or death for some. Public road isn't some playground for doing beta testing. Waymo needs to be heavily fined for putting public at risk.
Honestly, I'm happy they picked this as a default "car doesn't know what to do" scenario. From what I've seen Tesla's default is to just ignore the unknown thing, I wouldn't be surprised if Robotaxis would have just treated all the blank lights as green.
It can be tough not to. Earlier this fall I was out of town and drover through an intersection before realizing no there was a traffic light there. Since it was night and the light was out, I had no reason to expect one so I effectively treated it like a green light.
I’m probably not the only one: next time I went past that intersection the city had placed cones and temporary stop signs
What's the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?
An intersection with the lights no longer working is treated as a stop sign.
I admit I scratch my head at 4 way intersections with blinking yellows on all 4 though. Usually the bigger road gets the yellows for caution, the adjacent lanes have to yield.
I've not seen an intersection with four blinking yellow lights in California; typically two ways are blinking yellow (caution) and the other two are blinking red (stop).
Yeah the few times I've seen them set like that everyone is stopped, and just kinda waving people to go. I think it's to do with power outage, and tye place I've seen it twice is a 4x3 lane intersection.
I’ve seen both. Places where the lights are only intended to work at busy hours default to flashing red and flashing yellow. Lights with a power outage can be random but I’ve also seen flashing yellow in all directions. I don’t know why that’s even an allowed configuration though
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't drive.
A LOT of drivers actually don't know the answer to this one!
My first assumption giving them the benefit of the doubt would be that it's a rhetorical question to point out that there is a proper response and the car should have been taught to do that instead. Even if a lot of actual drivers don't know the answer.
Most humans can learn on the fly though. If they see people taking turns at a broken stoplight they're likely to follow that example.
Another option is, there are more than one country on earth.
I'm not American
The default (at least in most of the US) is to treat a malfunctioning light as an all-way stop sign, with traffic alternating in each direction. The waymos instead stopped and blocked intersections, failing to reach the basic expectation for human drivers. Should we not hold these machines to a higher standard, if not at least the same standard as human drivers? Self-driving vehicles are supposed to be safer and 'better' than human drivers.
Police and firefighters would love to have an excuse to go demolition derby on these things I bet.
They'd probably love to, but wouldn't. Lithium fires could make a bigger problem than slowly going around them.
Waymo didn't switch to Sodium? I would have thought they'd use the newer batteries to save money.
Afaik, no they haven't. Everything I've seen said they're on lithium.
police literally have a pusher on the front of their cars for shit like this
Yeah, "push" rather than ram. Lithium fires take 10-30x more water than a conventional fire, something that firefighters are wary of containing.
It's literally called a ram
Lol this is a "can/should" argument here. Just because they CAN ram the car doesn't mean they should. Crushing damage to batteries in EVs can be insanely costly. I wasn't exaggerating by the 10x-30x needed water for extinguishing an EV vs ICE.
so, what do you think bumpers are for? like, those push cars without leaving a dent.
I'm not saying they're unable to. Are you purposely trying to miss the point? Crushing a lithium battery is a bad fucking idea. Explosively bad fucking idea. What I'm trying to tell you is that yes they can push them out of the way, but literally ramming them should not be done. Which is what I've been saying the entire time. A fire engine has the ability to push these cars from idle with zero effort and would be less likely to damage the batteries. But that's not what the OP of this thread was saying, they said they'd like to go demolition derby, which would be to hit these things at speed.
As long as the car isn’t moving, this is the best thing they could do. Emergency vehicles can drive around cars that aren’t moving. There should be plenty of room in any intersection for multiple vehicles.
It seems like one of the first things you’d want a self driving car to do is to pull over
Until it's multiple self driving cars getting stuck in that intersection