How do you stop an entire fleet of self-driving cars and put a major city into gridlock? It turns out that you don't have to do much. All you need to do is turn out the lights.
It wasn't some Italian Job-style plot to swap out the tapes for the traffic control computers. Instead, it was something that happens all of the time. The power went out. A fire at a San Francisco-area power substation on Saturday afternoon left more than 100,000 customers without power. That put traffic lights out across San Francisco, and it put Waymo's self-driving taxis into panic mode.
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