Waymo execs testify at San Francisco City Hall about their vehicles’ actions during power outage

By John Ramos

Inside San Francisco City Hall, Waymo was being questioned by supervisors over the way its cars just stopped during the Dec. 20 city-wide power outage.  But before that meeting even began, a large group of angry union members were protesting outside.

“We’re out here today to demand that our city and our state start putting people above robots,” said Teamster Peter Finn.

The assembled group represented Uber and Lyft drivers, demanding that the autonomous vehicles be taken off the streets until more controls can be put on them. Much of their concern centers on the threat that driverless cars pose to their jobs, but Monday’s arguments focused on the blackout meltdown.

“Autonomous vehicles, as with AI, as with all of these non-human tools, we do know that there has to be control,” said SEIU 1021 President Theresa Rutherford. “There has to be proper oversight. There has to be proper checks and balances.”

When the power went out and 5G cellular died, the Waymo cars lost communication with their home base.  Most pulled over and parked, but there were 63 reported cases of cars stopped in intersections, awaiting human commands, some allegedly blocking access for emergency vehicles.  At the meeting, supervisors wanted to know what’s going on.

“Out on the streets right now are hundreds of vehicles moving about the city like Cinderella’s magical carriages,” said Supervisor Bilal Mahmood.  “But just like in the fairy tale, we can now see that those carriages can turn into pumpkins at the drop of a hat.”

City officials said they had a hard time getting through to Waymo that night, finally making contact after Mayor Lurie called personally.  For that, Waymo was apologetic.

“I want to be very clear that Waymo takes full responsibility for the communication gaps that occurred that evening,” said project manager Sam Cooper.  “Specifically, we acknowledge the difficulty the Department of Emergency Management, and other agencies experienced in reaching us.” 

At the meeting, Waymo revealed that, at any given time, there are about 70 dispatchers at a call center in the Philippines to assist cars in the company’s global fleet that require human intervention.  

On the night of Dec 20, they said the system was simply overwhelmed. But while the city searches for ways to increase regulations, USF Engineering Professor Billy Riggs, said the problem isn’t the robots, it’s the people.

“The Waymo robots could have pulled over without cellular service,” he said. “But we, from a regulatory standpoint, we required there to be a 5G connection. So, the elephant in the room here is, we set ourselves up for failure.”

Riggs said even though we are at the center of the tech universe, people are still skeptical about the idea of a machine being a better driver than we are.

“Here in the Bay Area, we don’t have faith in robots to hand the controls over in an emergency event. And that is actually what we’re bumping up against now. Robots are now exceeding human driving, but in the real world, we don’t have faith in robots.”

Riggs said less human interference would actually make things safer, but what happened on Dec. 20 didn’t help that case.