{"id":129316,"date":"2026-01-11T17:05:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T17:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/129316\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T17:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T17:05:11","slug":"waymo-refuses-to-discuss-details-from-december-blackout-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/129316\/","title":{"rendered":"Waymo refuses to discuss details from December blackout problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

A Waymo vehicle travels on Drumm Street during a break between rainstorms in downtown San Francisco on Dec. 23. Waymo has been under public scrutiny since several cars in the company\u2019s San Francisco fleet were stalled amid a blackout that affected over 100,000 people.<\/p>\n

Dan Hernandez\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n

A judge scolded\u00a0Waymo<\/a> during an administrative rules proceeding Friday, after the company refused to disclose how many of its robotaxis had stalled during a December power outage<\/a> in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

That information is a trade secret, Waymo\u2019s attorney Jack Stoddard told Senior Administrative Law Judge Robert Mason, drawing snickers from a crowd. Although the company has shared preliminary numbers with regulators, including the Department of Motor Vehicles, Stoddard said that Waymo would risk too much by airing them in a public forum.<\/p>\n

Ride-hail drivers, Teamsters, transportation policy wonks and gadflies had gathered in a ground-floor hearing room of the California Public Utilities Commission building on Van Ness Avenue, eager to hear the autonomous vehicle companies get grilled. A sign on a telephone pole outside gave voice to the critics: \u201cWaymo stalls, safety fails. Our streets are not their testing ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Stoddard had to strike a delicate balance, showing that Waymo could engender trust<\/a> while also protecting the Google-backed autonomous vehicle titan from a growing army of competitors. Lawyers for some of those ventures\u00a0\u2014 Zoox<\/a>, Tesla, Uber and Lyft\u00a0\u2014 were sitting right beside him, waiting for their turn to address the judge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mason\u2019s jaw appeared to tighten, and he trained his eyes on Stoddard, as though to express disbelief.<\/p>\n

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\u201cCounsel, is it your position that the number of vehicles that stopped as a result of the Dec. 2025 power failure is confidential?\u201d he asked. When the attorney stood his ground, saying his client couldn\u2019t risk exposing too much detail about its fleet deployment, the judge did not appear satisfied.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, you may have claimed a trade secret, but the commission has not ruled on that yet,\u201d Mason said.<\/p>\n

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Their tense exchange marked the latest fallout of a Dec. 20 blackout that has already led Waymo down a path of technological change, though it\u2019s also raised skepticism from San Francisco residents and political leaders\u00a0\u2014 the Board of Supervisors will hold its own hearing on robotaxi gridlock amid the outage. Mason and\u00a0PUC Commissioner Matthew Baker had asked Waymo and other autonomous vehicle companies to answer a list of questions about topics ranging from whether they know if their vehicles are used by unaccompanied children, to how they will handle pick-up and drop-off at airports.<\/p>\n

Forefront on the list was a series of concerns, apparently added this week, about the performance of robotaxis during the Dec. 20 power failure caused by a fire at a Pacific Gas & Electric Co.\u00a0substation. For hours, Waymos had become paralyzed in intersections as the vehicles asked for confirmation from human supervisors to treat the outed traffic lights as four-way stops. That spike in confirmation requests overwhelmed the technology company, ultimately forcing it to suspend service.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a result, Waymo will refine its approach to darkened traffic lights, making its self-driving cars more decisive and \u201cless reliant on feedback from remote assistants,\u201d Stoddard said Friday. Such changes would build on the evolutionary trajectory that Waymos followed throughout last year, as engineers tweaked them to be\u00a0more intuitive and human-like<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the outage might also trigger more rules from the\u00a0PUC, which continues to establish new policies and address issues that arise, with so many AV companies now using California streets as a laboratory. Zoox and Tesla also declined to provide data on vehicles stopped during the outage. Although Waymo\u2019s staff has repeatedly underscored that the company successfully navigated 7,000 traffic signals that day, it has remained silent on the number of roads or intersections where its cars stumbled.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does unfortunately suggest there\u2019s something that they are not keen to talk about,\u201d said Brad Templeton, an autonomous vehicles expert based in Sunnyvale. He has overall defended the company\u2019s handling of the outage, saying the engineers managed to absorb lessons at little cost, since no one was hurt. The viral videos that showed lines of immobilized cars, or intersections that became clogged omnidirectional horror shows, were still relatively innocuous.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe are continuing to review this event and gathering more complete information,\u201d a Waymo spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Chronicle. (Staff at the company are reviewing logs and have become aware of a few instances in which their AVs temporarily blocked emergency vehicles while Waymo\u2019s event response team worked with first responders to disengage them).<\/p>\n

Representatives of the Service Employees International Union challenged Stoddard\u2019s claim that stop data is proprietary information, saying it amounted to a lack of accountability. At Friday\u2019s hearing SEIU asked for an \u201cexpedited investigation\u201d into the blunders of autonomous vehicles during the blackouts, and suggested the\u00a0PUC might consider a range of penalties for AV companies that committee road violations. The commission could, for example, bar self-driving cars from school zones or limit the hours and weather conditions under which they operate.<\/p>\n

Such regulations would constitute a serious blow to an AV market in a period of rapid expansion, with Waymo now running service on Peninsula freeways and eyeing opportunities in Wine Country and suburban Los Angeles. Yet, if the back-and-forth over trade secrets revealed anything about Waymo, it\u2019s that the company is ready to push back against regulators; the bigger threat, it seemed, is Zoox and Tesla.<\/p>\n

Mason gave each of the companies until Jan. 30 to address the\u00a0PUC\u2019s questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Waymo vehicle travels on Drumm Street during a break between rainstorms in downtown San Francisco on Dec.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[23183,101,103,102,104,106,105,995,5987],"class_list":{"0":"post-129316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-driverless-cars","9":"tag-san-francisco","10":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","11":"tag-san-francisco-news","12":"tag-sf","13":"tag-sf-headlines","14":"tag-sf-news","15":"tag-tech","16":"tag-waymo"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}