A vehicle may occasionally “request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice,” the company stated on Tuesday. The Waymo Driver system is intended to deal with non-functional traffic lights similarly to four-way stops.
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The incident “resulted in a significant surge in these requests,” the company reported, although the vehicles “successfully” navigated 7,000 malfunctioning traffic signals due to the power outage in San Francisco on December 20.
The increase in requests delayed Waymo’s response time to its immobilized vehicles. Waymo mentioned that it halted operations after local officials advised drivers to stay off the roads.
During the weekend, a fire at a PG&E Corp. substation led to outages impacting over 130,000 customers in San Francisco. Social media footage showed several Waymo cars halted in the roadway, activating their hazard lights and contributing to significant traffic jams.
The company indicated it is implementing additional contextual information in its software about regional power outages, enabling vehicles to “navigate these intersections more decisively.”
(Edited by : Juviraj Anchil)
