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A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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This is really bad. You need to have emergency service vehicles able to move around the city. Blocking road like that could mean life or death for some. Public road isn't some playground for doing beta testing. Waymo needs to be heavily fined for putting public at risk.
Honestly, I'm happy they picked this as a default "car doesn't know what to do" scenario. From what I've seen Tesla's default is to just ignore the unknown thing, I wouldn't be surprised if Robotaxis would have just treated all the blank lights as green.
What's the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't drive.
A LOT of drivers actually don't know the answer to this one!
Most humans can learn on the fly though. If they see people taking turns at a broken stoplight they're likely to follow that example.
My first assumption giving them the benefit of the doubt would be that it's a rhetorical question to point out that there is a proper response and the car should have been taught to do that instead. Even if a lot of actual drivers don't know the answer.
Another option is, there are more than one country on earth.
I'm not American