While driverless tech may be safer on average than human drivers, this incident showed it could “still go wrong in completely new ways,” said Jack Stilgoe, professor of science and technology policy at University College London.
“If we’re going to make good choices about this technology, we need to understand entirely new types of risk,” he told BBC News.
The outage is not the first time self-driving cars have faced technical difficulties.
In December 2025, a large power outage in San Francisco led Waymo taxis to stop working around the city, causing huge traffic jams.
Meanwhile in August 2025, an Apollo Go robotaxi carrying a passenger in Chongqing fell into ​a construction pit.