The San Francisco power outage caused Alphabet (GOOGL.US)'s Waymo autonomous vehicle to be paralyzed and forced to upgrade emergency systems across the line

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Waymo, an autonomous driving company under Alphabet (GOOGL.US), said on Tuesday that it will update the software used to operate its autonomous vehicles and improve its emergency response protocol. On Saturday, its driverless taxis stopped in parts of San Francisco due to a large-scale power outage, causing traffic chaos and congestion in parts of the city.

On the evening of December 20, local time, a fire broke out at a Pacific Gas & Power Company substation, causing power outages in about one-third of San Francisco, affecting about 130,000 residents and forcing some businesses to temporarily shut down. Waymo then suspended the service.

Multiple videos posted on social media showed that traffic lights stopped working due to a power outage, Waymo's driverless taxi was stranded at an intersection, and hazard warning lights flashed.

Waymo said its autonomous vehicle is designed to handle conditions at intersections where traffic lights go out, but the vehicle may occasionally request confirmation checks.

The company said, “Although we successfully passed over 7,000 intersections where traffic lights went out on Saturday, the power outage led to a surge in the concentration of such confirmation requests.” “This has caused a backlog, and in some cases, delayed response, and exacerbated already overburdened road congestion.”

Waymo said these confirmation agreements were reasonable in the early deployment phase, but the company is currently refining them to suit the current scale of its operations. Waymo is implementing a fleet-wide software update to provide vehicles with “specific outage scenario information so they can navigate more decisively”.

Waymo also said it will improve its emergency response protocol based on lessons learned from this incident.

Waymo operates more than 2,500 vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area; Los Angeles; the Phoenix Metropolitan Area, Arizona; Austin, Texas; and Atlanta, Georgia. The company said it resumed ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area on Sunday.

On Monday, the California Public Utilities Commission said it was reviewing the Waymo vehicle stalled issue. The Commission is responsible for overseeing the testing and commercial deployment of driverless taxis and issuing relevant permits with the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

Earlier this month, Waymo issued a recall to update the software for its autonomous vehicles. Earlier, Texas officials said that since the beginning of school, these vehicles have illegally overtaken school buses at least 19 times. This prompted the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to launch an investigation into this issue in October.