🔥🎯 A power outage forced Waymo's "autonomous driving limits" to be exposed

A regional power outage in San Francisco directly caused a large number of Waymo vehicles to stop collectively.

This is not an occasional failure, but a structural stress test.

The first layer of the problem actually occurs at the "rule boundary."

When traffic signals fail and road conditions deviate from preset rules, Waymo vehicles choose not to "understand the scenario" but to "stop the system."

This is a typical rule-driven and modular decision-making logic: as long as the environment exceeds the whitelist, the system enters a conservative shutdown.

Human driving, on the other hand, relies on common sense, game theory, and on-the-spot judgment to continue moving forward when signals are chaotic and rules are missing.

The second layer of the problem is even more critical: the remote takeover system was simultaneously paralyzed.

Waymo has always emphasized "remote support as a backup," but this power outage also cut off communication and control links.

The result is clear—

Once the cloud and control center are unavailable, the vehicle itself does not have the ability to independently make decisions in complex scenarios.

What this incident truly reveals is not a technical bug but a clear dividing line:

Waymo's system is still highly dependent on external infrastructure and rule stability.

In contrast, Tesla is taking a completely different path.

End-to-end neural networks do not rely on "rule completeness" but attempt to learn "how humans cope in chaos."

This path is harder and slower, but the goal is clear:

Even if signals fail, the network is interrupted, or rules are missing, the vehicle can still judge "how to drive now" like a human.

The San Francisco power outage is not an accidental incident but a real-world test that arrived early.

It exposes a core question:

When cities no longer operate perfectly, can autonomous driving systems continue to work?

Do you think this incident is just a phase problem for Waymo,

or is it the natural ceiling of rule-driven autonomous driving in the real world?

📣 I will continue to analyze the key failure scenarios of autonomous driving in the real world, divergences in technical routes, and which capabilities determine the final winner.

If you are also following the real turning point of #AutonomousDriving, stay tuned for further analysis.

#Waymo #Tesla #FSD #AutonomousDriving #SelfDrivingCars #AI