STOPPED TRAINS, a stuck ambulance, stranded riders, and some priceless lessons learned: There’s no way to quantify the value of the research and development that San Francisco residents and those visiting the city provided Waymo with on Dec. 20, when a massive blackout caused over 1,500 of the autonomous vehicles to become inoperable on city streets.
Nor is there an easy way to capture the cost of the roadside assistance first responders like police officers and firefighters have provided to the multibillion-dollar company behind Waymo, Alphabet Inc., since the (mostly) autonomous vehicles hit San Francisco streets in July 2024.
In an appearance before the county Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation Committee on Monday, Waymo executives had a hard time quantifying much at all, except for the fact that the company has just 75 employees that can intervene when the cars stop working autonomously, and that they were overwhelmed by the volume of disabled vehicles that day.
The hearing was attended by Supervisors Bilal Mahmood, Alan Wong, Myrna Melgar and Chyanne Chen.
Mary Ellen Carroll, head of the city’s Department of Emergency Management, and Pat Rabbitt, deputy chief of operations for the fire department, also provided accounts of that day from their agencies’ perspective.
Unionized rideshare drivers rallied outside City Hall before the meeting, joined by Supervisor Jackie Fielder, Teamsters and Service Employees International Union 1021 representatives, and the head of the city’s firefighters’ union, Sam Gebler.
All lambasted the company for what they said were unsafe conditions that made their jobs harder the day of the blackout. Uber and Lyft drivers who were also caught in the blackout said the difference in performance between autonomous vehicles and those driven by a human emphasized the safety and care they can provide as real people, and they lamented the lack of Waymo oversight from the city.
Mahmood agreed, saying in his opening remarks to start the hearing that the time to examine these problems was now, before more companies start testing their autonomous vehicles, or AVs, in the city.
“We need to be more clear on what we expect from AVs,” Mahmood said.
Waymo executives said in the committee hearing that the company’s vehicles were involved in over 90% fewer collisions and injury collisions than those caused by human drivers.
In a statement following the outage in December, the company blamed heavy traffic backups in the city for confusing the cars and causing some of them to need manual intervention, which requires a remote employee to take command of the vehicle. But the traffic jams meant some sat idle at intersections or in roadways for hours. Some Waymo vehicles needed first responders to move them out of the roadway.
According to Waymo, when the cars get confused, they start a “conversation” with a worker who can manually intervene to guide the car via prompts. The company said remote employees who work in the Philippines, Arizona and Michigan, do not drive the cars, but only guide them.
Eventually the entire fleet was pulled over remotely and taken out of service, before returning to service the next day.
“Our first responders should not be Triple A roadside assistance,” Wong told company representatives during the hearing.
The company pledged to hire more staff to handle calls during an emergency but couldn’t say how many or when. Representatives also could not say how often those employees receive training.
Even the number of stalled vehicles was called into question by the company’s representatives, which Mahmood said was determined to be 1,593, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. Waymo said the company had not verified the “new data point.”
The company’s representatives also asserted that the vehicles worked as designed by at first approaching inoperable traffic signals as if they were a four-way stop sign. But they couldn’t handle the prolonged blackout, which caused them to employ safety features that made them refuse to go through the darkened intersections, Waymo said.
“This was not a technical limitation of the system,” said Chinmay Jain, Waymo’s director of product and driving behavior.
But that didn’t explain why the problem left about 64 cars on the road that had to be manually moved, either by a remote operator or by a San Francisco first responder.
Company representatives said a system update has since been installed that should let the cars recognize when there is a prolonged blackout.
It was also revealed at the hearing that a 911 operator spent nearly an hour on hold trying to reach the company about an unresponsive vehicle, and a firefighter had to leave his company to manually move a stalled car that had stopped inside a restricted area.
Calls made directly from Mayor Daniel Lurie to a company executive got a faster response than any of the city’s attempts to reach the company during the crisis, according to Mahmood.
AB 1777 compliance in doubt
Waymo’s performance on Dec. 20 raised serious doubts from Mahmood that it would be ready to comply by July with a new law that requires the company to answer calls from 911 operators within 30 seconds.
The law, Assembly Bill 1777, also requires autonomous vehicles to recognize restricted “avoid the area” zones established by first responders within 2 minutes and stop entering them.
One of the company’s representatives, Sam Cooper, a program manager with Waymo, said repeatedly that the day’s failures were “unacceptable,” as was the fact that the company had not more proactively communicated with city officials about such issues.
The company’s solutions centered around training first responders to move the cars themselves and to “train more folks to answer phones,” Cooper said.
Some solutions put forth by Waymo to prevent similar incidents included creating a triage-type system for categorizing issues as high or low priority, creating a dedicated team to handle spikes in calls during emergencies, and to rely less on information from PG&E, which the company said misrepresented restoration times for power.