TO Waymo autopsy on Tuesday offers at least some clarity about what the hell happened to their poor, ignorant San Francisco operation after much of the citywide power went out on Saturday.
Waymo’s behavior at dark traffic lights forced the Alphabet-owned company to return all of its San Francisco robotaxis home, a logistical catastrophe. But, to be fair, the social media posts probably made Waymo’s ad hoc solution look even messier than it actually was, giving the impression that all the Waymos in San Francisco had been destroyed at the same time which caused the outage, causing them to stop in place, even at busy intersections, as if their robotic drivers had been snatched into the robotic sky.
The power outage killed the RIP waymos pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku
—Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025
There were certainly congested streets and blocked intersections, but below is how Waymo prefers to frame how the problem arose. Please note that in its communications, Waymo refers to its cars’ self-driving software as “the Waymo Controller.”
“While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals such as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest decision. While we successfully navigated more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated increase in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, caused response delays, contributing to congestion on already overwhelmed streets.”
The Waymo brand finds it very important to never give the impression that Waymos are driven remotely. What Waymo has instead of “remote drivers” or “teleoperators” is called “fleet response,” says a Waymo blog post. When the Waymo Driver encounters a truly heterogeneous driving situation, it sends a human alert message. comment, which we are not supposed to consider as a ransom. You might want confirmation about, for example, what you suspect is a completely impassable intersection, and a human operator sends you signals directing you where you might want to go.
“Fleet Response can influence the Waymo driver’s path, either indirectly by signaling lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV to use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider,” Waymo’s blog post on Fleet Response says. You may or may not consider this the input of a “remote driver” or “teleoperator.” Waymo clearly doesn’t.
In any case, all these sneaky Waymos at the dead traffic lights in San Francisco on Saturday created a logjam of these human feedback requests, and Waymo’s autopsy acknowledges that the logjam caused even worse traffic.
So what Waymo says happened next seems like a reasonable course of action in response to traffic caused during an outage: “We directed our fleet to stop and park appropriately so we could return vehicles to our depots in waves. This ensured we didn’t add to congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles during the peak of the recovery effort.”
From the outside, and especially on social media, this is the part that seemed worse than it really was. Posts showing Waymos could be seen at intersections next to posts showing Waymos stopped on the side of the road. This made it seem like San Francisco was a post-apocalyptic wasteland littered with dead robotaxis. It is reasonable to ask: If they weren’t dead, why didn’t the company send them home? But it’s also reasonable that Waymo would want to prevent a critical mass of Waymos from disrupting San Francisco like a stampeding herd of wildebeest, and therefore have vehicles simply wait on the side of the road until they call their group.
This created an additional bad look for Waymo: next to the Waymos that became obstructions, there were at least a few crowds of safely parked We walked, without fail, simply waiting for the signal to return to their depots in an orderly manner.
6 Waymo is parked at a broken traffic light blocking the roads. It seems they were not trained for a power outage. pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe
– Walden (@walden_yan) December 21, 2025
There are no future plans mentioned in the post-mortem regarding the introduction of remote controllers. The future plans included, rather disconcertingly, don’t include anything, at least so far, about changing the Waymo Driver’s fundamental driving software. The three points on Waymo’s “path forward” focus on emergencies: “Integrate more information about outages,” “Update our emergency preparedness and response,” and “Expand our involvement in first aid.”
Robotaxis are programmed to drive conservatively and therefore have behavioral records similar to those of boy scouts put together, but this autopsy doesn’t show Waymo reflecting at all on the fact that these are aliens on our roads who will misbehave and fail in entirely novel ways that cannot be predicted. In fact, it ends on a note of defiance, saying “we are undaunted by the opportunity to challenge the status quo of our roads, and we are proud to continue serving the residents and visitors of San Francisco.”
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