"The stalled Waymos were actually disrupting emergency vehicles from accessing the PG&E substation that caused the fire in the first place. The purpose of Monday's hearing is to get answers from Waymo about what were the causes of the technical failure for some of their vehicles that day, and simultaneously, what are they doing to prevent this from happening again."
"While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets. These human confirmation prompts were part of the cars' early deployment."
During a December 20 blackout affecting one-third of San Francisco, Waymo's autonomous vehicles became confused at intersections without traffic signals. The vehicles' software prompted them to seek human confirmation from a control team for each signal-less intersection, creating a concentrated spike in requests that overwhelmed the system. This backlog caused response delays and congestion on already-strained streets. The stalled vehicles blocked emergency access to the PG&E substation that caused the fire triggering the outage. Waymo executives faced questioning at a SF Board of Supervisors hearing about the technical failure and preventive measures being implemented.
Read at sfist.com
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