Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

Posted by rwoll 12/21/2025

Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams(missionlocal.org)

319 points | 456 commentspage 3

schlauerfox 12/22/2025|

I was in hollywood, california last night and saw a waymo come to a weird 5 way intersection, stop past the limit line on a red light in or past the crosswalk at the right turn lane and go into it's sign active attract mode. I think they have some more development to do, and don't recommend using such poorly performing software.

throw7 12/22/2025||

This is how "science" works in the postmodern world. It's not about predicting, it's about implement, problem, solve.

HardwareLust 12/21/2025||

"the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company’s control"

Well there's your problem.

rvz 12/21/2025||

The proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all along.

TZubiri 12/22/2025|

I thought this was trivially verifiable due to regulation and latency analysis.

If they truly rely on teleoperation, that's at least 20ms in the best case, and can grow a lot with interference.

I always assumed these things have some autonomy.

Tempest1981 12/21/2025||

How did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?

delichon 12/22/2025||

Here's an example of it doing well:

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2002699317409186219

cjsplat 12/22/2025||

The Tesla example is a single oncoming car, clear right of way, and ample time in a simple 4-way intersection.

The Waymo video has over a dozen cars, at least 6 pedestrians crossing streets (many more on the sidewalks), and is a 5-way intersection.

These are cherry picked examples. Either advertising or propaganda.

HardwareLust 12/21/2025||

That's a really good question.

alistairSH 12/21/2025||

Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?

cjsplat 12/22/2025||

I saw plenty of Waymos managing to make it through intersections. They were slow and tentative, but definitely made forward progress.

I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone, presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos were lacking connectivity.

There is of course also a possibility that the total demand exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human intervention.

isodev 12/21/2025|||

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.

jerlam 12/21/2025||

First responders get the highest priority of cellular networks even in non-emergency situations (FirstNet).

AlotOfReading 12/21/2025||

FirstNet is AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile have their own alternatives (FrontLine and T-Priority, respectively). QCI is a fun rabbit hole, because some of these networks share the first responder QCIs with certain business use cases.

nerdsniper 12/21/2025||

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

scoofy 12/22/2025|||

I was in the affected area and we effectively lost all but messaging. Not the whole time, but definitely while I was ordering takeout at a place with power. I couldn't get an image to send to a friend.

torham 12/21/2025|||

I lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but plenty were down.

tiahura 12/21/2025||

How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?

tanvach 12/21/2025||

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.

andsoitis 12/21/2025|||

Treats it as a four way stop.

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

jerlam 12/21/2025||

[flagged]

GMoromisato 12/21/2025|||

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

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

gertlex 12/21/2025||

I'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when, not training data, that results in the two behaving different.

brianwawok 12/21/2025|||

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.

JumpCrisscross 12/21/2025|||

> 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.)

AlotOfReading 12/21/2025||

FSD is level 2. Level 3 doesn't require the human driver to monitor the outside environment, only take over when requested. Tesla also doesn't report data from FSD under L3 reporting requirements anywhere in the US.

EA-3167 12/21/2025||

[flagged]

bni 12/21/2025||

Not looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.

1970-01-01 12/21/2025||

Obvious failure should be obvious. Get out of the streets. What happens when one gets a flat tire? Surely it doesn't just stop in the middle of the street, right??

kylehotchkiss 12/21/2025|

Did anybody get stranded on the bart?

jeffbee 12/21/2025|

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

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