San Francisco Blackout Cripples Waymo Robotaxis, Forcing Service Shutdown
San Francisco's power grid flickered—and Waymo's autonomous future stalled. A city-wide blackout didn't just plunge homes into darkness; it stranded a fleet of driverless taxis, forcing an immediate and complete service pause. The incident exposes a critical vulnerability in the infrastructure-dependent vision of autonomous mobility.
The Single Point of Failure
When the lights went out, so did Waymo's cars. The blackout cut connectivity, crippled sensor arrays, and left vehicles frozen in place—unable to navigate, communicate, or safely conclude rides. The system, designed for a perfectly connected world, had no robust offline protocol. It was a stark reminder that artificial intelligence is helpless without electricity.
Infrastructure's Ironic Revenge
The very urban landscape these vehicles are meant to transform became their trap. Malfunctioning traffic signals, inoperable charging stations, and lost GPS signals created an environment too chaotic for pre-programmed algorithms. The backup systems? Inadequate. The result was a fleet of very expensive, immobile hardware.
A Costly Pause for Investors
Every minute of downtime isn't just a service interruption—it's a burn rate spectacle. While the power company deals with the outage, Waymo's balance sheet quietly bleeds. It's the kind of real-world stress test that vaporizes quarterly projections and gives venture capitalists a new gray hair. A cynical finance jab? Perhaps the most reliable AI in this story was the one automatically calculating the losses per idle vehicle.
The autonomy narrative hit a hard, unplanned stop. The industry sells a future of seamless efficiency, but today's reality remains chained to the grid. Until robots can fix power lines, their road to dominance has a very human-sized pothole.
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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