Waymo suspends service after power outage hit San Francisco
Waymo temporarily halted its San Francisco robotaxi service after a major blackout left multiple autonomous vehicles stranded on city streets.
securityaffairs.com
1) How does Waymo prevent this same situation from happening again?
Waymo can prevent a repeat by reducing reliance on city infrastructure and improving fail-soft behavior.
2) Why did Elon mention that Tesla doesn’t have that concern?
It’s because of the difference between the two autonomous-driving models.
Waymo uses an infrastructure-assisted autonomy model, which cooperates with a city’s infrastructure and external resources such as HD maps, traffic-signal data, and other predefined environmental inputs.
On the other hand, Tesla’s robotaxi is based on a self-contained (vision-only) autonomy model, which relies solely on onboard sensors and neural-network reasoning, without depending on city infrastructure or external systems.
- HD maps = “The car knows the city in advance.”
- FSD = “The car learns to drive by seeing.”
3) What are the main concerns if a citywide power outage affects a Waymo-like model?
Reduced availability causing business impacts(losing customers and trust), increased safety risks, and the potential for power outages to be exploited as a city-disruption attack vector.