Waymo's San Francisco Blackout Postmortem: Autonomy in the Dark
Waymo's San Francisco Blackout Postmortem
Waymo published a detailed postmortem after a San Francisco power outage revealed weaknesses in its urban operations, showing how vehicles responded when traffic signals and infrastructure went dark. The report highlights vehicle behaviors, sensor limitations in nonstandard lighting, and decisions made to prioritize passenger safety while avoiding human remote driving as a fallback.
Technical Findings and Operational Choices
The analysis explains how degraded external signals and unexpected intersection states confused perception models and increased stop-and-wait scenarios, requiring conservative motion planning and remote monitoring support rather than direct teleoperation. Waymo describes software patches, updated intersection handling, and smarter fallback maneuvers to reduce gridlock while maintaining a policy against human drivers controlling vehicles in live service.
Implications for Autonomy
The incident underscores that fully autonomous fleets must handle infrastructure failures robustly, prompting investment in redundancy, simulation of dark-traffic scenarios, and clearer public communication about limits and improvements.
About the Organizations Mentioned
Waymo
Waymo is a leading autonomous vehicle technology company that evolved from Google’s self-driving car project launched in 2009 and became an independent subsidiary under Alphabet in 2016. Its mission is to make transportation safer and more accessible by developing fully self-driving technology that eliminates human error, which currently causes millions of traffic fatalities worldwide. Waymo aims to offer freedom of movement, sustainability, and efficiency through its advanced autonomous driving systems[5]. Waymo’s key milestones include the first fully autonomous ride on public roads in 2015 and launching the first driverless taxi service to the public in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2020. Since then, it has expanded commercial autonomous ride-hailing to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta, handling over 250,000 trips per week with a fleet of more than 1,500 self-driving vehicles, mainly Jaguar I-PACEs[1][3][4]. The company has completed over 100 million autonomous miles on public roads and provided over 10 million paid rides, reflecting its leadership in the robotaxi market[1][6]. Waymo is notable for its deep expertise in both hardware and software, including sensor suites and motion control systems developed at its technology and assembly centers in Michigan and Arizona. It also partners with major automotive manufacturers like Toyota and Jaguar Land Rover to build and scale its vehicles[2][6]. In October 2024, Waymo raised $5.6 billion at a $45 billion valuation, supported by investments from Alphabet, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and others, marking it as a high-value autonomous mobility platform with significant growth potential[1][2]. Looking forward, Waymo is preparing to expand internationally with plans to launch fully autonomous ride services in London in 2026, leveraging its UK engineering hubs and local partnerships. It is also growing its corporate travel business and integrating with airports and public transit systems to compete with traditional ride-hailing companies[3][6]. Unde
