TechCheck Waymo’s San Francisco blackout pause 12/22/25
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Dec 22, 2025 
Deirdre Bosa, a technology and business reporter, provides insights into the recent Waymo robotaxi shutdown during a San Francisco blackout. She explains how multiple failures caused the vehicles to halt, highlighting the differences between Waymo's cautious approach and Tesla's improvisational strategy. Deirdre discusses safety trade-offs, regulatory challenges, and the limits of generalization in autonomous driving. She also contrasts Waymo's driverless fleet with Tesla's, emphasizing the role of human safety drivers in the latter.
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Caution-First Design Creates Gridlock
- Waymo's vehicles defaulted to extreme caution during a multi-system failure, causing gridlock across San Francisco.
- This highlights a core scaling tension between careful, mapped deployment and real-time adaptability.
Human-Like Autonomy Scales Faster But Riskier
- Tesla's approach aims to imitate human improvisation, enabling judgments without perfect signals during ambiguity like blackouts.
- That could scale faster but carries safety trade-offs from acting with less certainty.
Methodical Expansion Trades Speed For Trust
- Waymo is expanding methodically and raising capital at a $100B+ valuation while integrating lessons from incidents rapidly.
- The company's cautious city-by-city strategy trades speed for regulatory trust and perceived safety.