405
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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Technology
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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.
Police and firefighters would love to have an excuse to go demolition derby on these things I bet.
They'd probably love to, but wouldn't. Lithium fires could make a bigger problem than slowly going around them.
Waymo didn't switch to Sodium? I would have thought they'd use the newer batteries to save money.
Afaik, no they haven't. Everything I've seen said they're on lithium.
police literally have a pusher on the front of their cars for shit like this
Yeah, "push" rather than ram. Lithium fires take 10-30x more water than a conventional fire, something that firefighters are wary of containing.
It's literally called a ram
Lol this is a "can/should" argument here. Just because they CAN ram the car doesn't mean they should. Crushing damage to batteries in EVs can be insanely costly. I wasn't exaggerating by the 10x-30x needed water for extinguishing an EV vs ICE.
so, what do you think bumpers are for? like, those push cars without leaving a dent.
I'm not saying they're unable to. Are you purposely trying to miss the point? Crushing a lithium battery is a bad fucking idea. Explosively bad fucking idea. What I'm trying to tell you is that yes they can push them out of the way, but literally ramming them should not be done. Which is what I've been saying the entire time. A fire engine has the ability to push these cars from idle with zero effort and would be less likely to damage the batteries. But that's not what the OP of this thread was saying, they said they'd like to go demolition derby, which would be to hit these things at speed.