Waymo resumes robotaxi service in San Francisco after weekend chaos

? (Anchor) 00:01.460

waymo service is back up in san francisco after a weekend blackout exposed what might be a blind spot for the rapidly expanding robo taxi company arder debosa tells us why in today's tech check yikes how was it D it was

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 00:15.260

interesting let me just show you some of the scenes from saturday night here in san francisco you had waymo stopped in the middle of intersections causing gridlock across parts of the city now the vehicles are designed to handle dead traffic lights and keep driving even if they

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 00:28.780

lose wireless connectivity but what seeing here is a system that defaulted to extreme caution when too many variables broke at once now this raises a bigger question for the alphabet subsidiary can they generalize because the ability to adapt in real time that's what ultimately

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 00:44.030

unlocks scale and it may be the key divide between the waymo and tesla approaches now elon musk posted over the weekend that tesla robotaxis were unaffected by the power outage now that is not a fair comparison because tesla does not run a driverless service here in san

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 00:58.990

francisco but it does reveal a different underlying philosophy tesla is trying to build autonomy that behaves more like a human so one that can improvise which can infer a mid ambiguity like in a blackout now here's a simple way to think about it a waymo robotaxi approaching a

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 01:15.510

dead traffic light treats it as a four way stop then proceeds very cautiously until it can confirm what every other actor is doing so during a citywide blackout that quickly turns into gridlock a more humans like system which musk says tesla is building would do what drivers

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 01:31.190

actually did that night and that is read eye contact edge forward make judgment calls without having perfect signals now the latter may come with safety tradeoffs because it is asking the system to make judgment calls with less certainty so learn in the wild if that works it

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 01:47.270

could scale faster because it doesn't require perfect mapping before every deployment now waymo has the momentum right now it is raising new capital at a hundred billion dollar plus valuation is expanding to new cities now the company says that it focused on rapidly integrating

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 02:04.350

the lessons learned that's what it's doing going forward but this incident guys it really puts a spotlight on whether scaling which is what this race is all about means careful city by city expansion or systems that can adapt in real time

? (Anchor) 02:16.340

i guess the one question would be you know maybe the more adaptable system the improvisational approach that tesla is talking about would allow it to scale better if those cities permitted it right i mean if if is that going to be a barrier to how the the authorities decide

? (Anchor) 02:33.380

whether they want those robo taxis on the road

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 02:36.310

right and that is sort of the trade off that tesla is making right it's more of an improvisational situation or strategy so cities are perhaps a little more reluctant to say OK go learn in the wild use our city as a test case whereas waymo has done this very methodically

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 02:52.230

impeccable almost impeccable safety record and so there's trade offs it's going city by city it's getting more of those regulations but now it may not matter right because other cities that are looking at what happened here in san francisco over the weekend say may say we don't

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 03:05.990

want any of that i mean we've known historically to any little thing happens in san francisco big or small and that has the ability to you know shut down robo taxi ambitions right in their tracks i mean nobody was hurt there were no accidents this past weekend but you look at a

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 03:22.710

case like cruz right which happened it was a few years ago now actually struck a pedestrian and that was the end of cruises ambitions so that hasn't happened to wayne out developing in a very different way but regulators are already sort of on the on the watch for anything that

Deirdre Bosa (TechCheck Anchor) 03:40.310

goes awry and they're held to a much higher standard

? (Anchor) 03:43.150

yeah definitely incremental incremental ammunition for those skeptics at the local level who might not want to experiment pretty fascinating dee and i'm sure we're not done talking about it deirdre bosa