Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0

Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area

Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week.

The robotaxi biz was a focal point of the power outages at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), with videos circulating online of its self-driving cars plonked in the middle of the city's busy roads, unresponsive due to traffic signal failures.

The company responded by saying its fleet is programmed to treat disabled signals as four-way stops, but "the scale of the outage and the sheer number of disabled traffic lights" led to cases where its cars remained stationary for longer than usual.

Videos showed Waymo cabs lined up in streets with their hazard lights blaring, as human-controlled cars carefully navigated around the congestion.

In announcing the fleet tweaks, the Alphabet-owned company said its cars successfully navigated more than 7,000 dark traffic signals on Saturday, December 20. 

It said that, in cases where its cars have to decide how to proceed through a dark intersection, it may send an additional request back to Waymo HQ for confirmation that its decision is the correct one. The scale of the outage prompted a spike in these requests, which created a backlog that, in turn, led to delays.

The updates being rolled out now include those that Waymo said would improve its cars' decisiveness when navigating dark intersections by sending additional context around regional outages.

"We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale," it stated. 

"While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively."

Waymo also said it would be improving its incident preparedness and response capabilities following the PG&E outage, working with San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie's office in doing so, and promised to expand its first-responder training program.

"We live and work in San Francisco, and we are grateful to the city's first responders for their tireless work, and to mayor Lurie for his leadership," it said.

The outage at PG&E, caused by a fire at a substation, affected well over 100,000 customers, according to its own updates, and its services were only restored fully on Tuesday.

Outages persist across the city at the time of writing, according to the G&E outage center, but these are being attributed to heavy storms hitting northern and central California and the damage they are causing, not the substation issues that led to traffic chaos over the weekend.

Global internet service provider Hurricane Electric confirmed a power issue at its Fremont facility last night, although it noted that its network remained "mostly functioning without issue." In its latest update at 2043 UTC last night, it said power had been "restored, and we are working to restore affected systems. Our email and phones now are back working."

The power company has warned customers never to touch or try to move downed wires, and to assume any downed power line is energized and extremely dangerous. Locals should keep kids and animals clear and report downed power lines immediately by calling 9-1-1 and then PG&E at 1-800-743-5002, it added. ®