Overview
- Waymo temporarily paused Bay Area service again on Thursday because of a National Weather Service flash flood warning, according to notifications sent to riders.
- During the December 20 PG&E substation fire that cut power to roughly a third of San Francisco, videos showed Waymo cars stopped at dark intersections before the company halted service and resumed the next day.
- Waymo said its vehicles treat dark signals as four-way stops but a concentrated spike in human confirmation requests during the blackout delayed responses and contributed to traffic backups.
- The company is deploying fleet-wide software updates to give vehicles specific power-outage context and is refining confirmation protocols developed during earlier, smaller deployments.
- California’s DMV and CPUC are reviewing the incident and discussing emergency-response and remote-operations standards with operators, while researchers argue for stricter rules and backup teleoperation as fleets scale.