this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections (www.engadget.com)
submitted 3 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
68 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Several of Waymo's autonomous vehicles were seen stuck in the middle of San Francisco streets following a significant power outage that took out the city's traffic lights. Waymo responded to the power outage by suspending its ride-hailing services in the city, but images and videos on social media showed the self-driving taxis stopped at intersections with hazard lights on.

"We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread power outage," Suzanne Philion, a spokesperson for Waymo, told Engadget in an email. "Our teams are working diligently and in close coordination with city officials, and we are hopeful to bring our services back online soon."

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[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Exactly. Any such remote control would have to be trivial for a cop to use, and also need to directly control only the car(s) the cop is currently interacting with. Think of a situation like this where a traffic light is disabled and a cop is there directing traffic. If driverless cars are approaching from multiple directions then how does the cop direct his commands to only the one he’s focusing on at the given moment? Not all that easy when you think about it…

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Like a flashlight, or laser pointer ….. or gun. “Just point this gun-like object at the car you want to stop…”. What could go wrong?