Believe it or not, hosting a weekend talk show and writing 3-5 articles a week for Hot Air doesn't pay a "Living Wage".
I have a day job in the tech industry; I've worked on software for a dizzying variety of industries, from e-commerce to health insurance to cybersecurity.
And if I've learned one thing in all those years, it's "never buy version 1.0 of anything". Indeed, wait until you get past the bugfixes and into 2.0 if you can possibly bring yourself to wait a little bit. Market pressure inevitably pushes technology, especially software, to market before it's ready for prime time.
As San Francisco and its fleet of self-driving taxis found out last weekend:
Power out in SF and the @Waymo’s are causing a MASSIVE jam in North Beach 🤣 pic.twitter.com/fuvhprlyma
— Iago Maciel (@_iagomaciel) December 21, 2025
Waymo announced Saturday night that the Google-owned robotaxi company would suspend rides in San Francisco after riders reported vehicles causing traffic jams and … well, kinda just throwing their hands (wheels?) in the air.
“We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services given the broad power outage in San Francisco,” wrote Suzanne Philion, a company spokesperson, a little after 7 p.m., reports Mission Local. “We are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work.”
A power outage left the city without stoplights. Waymos read stoplights; without stoplights, they (sensibly, under the circumstances) shut down.
A power outage in a major city is going to be a problem - but humans have been dealing with those sorts of things for a while...:
Mayor Daniel Lurie addressed residents in a video posted to social media, urging them to “please stay off the roads and stay inside” because traffic lights were not functioning. He said police officers were being dispatched to major intersections and high-traffic corridors.
With signals dark across the city, Waymo vehicles appeared confused and came to a standstill. Social media posts showed robotaxis stopped at intersections while lines of human-driven cars piled up behind them.
Many of the circulating videos and photos showed multiple Waymos immobilized in clusters. In several locations, two, three and sometimes as many as six vehicles sat motionless – rain falling while other drivers maneuvered around them.
...in a way machines have not.
pic.twitter.com/9506nRdzSm
— BlueCollarMillionaire (@TheReal_BCM) December 21, 2025
Makes you wonder why this issue was never raised before?$TSLA over $500—this will boost the bull case scenario!
Video shows Waymo vehicles confused during a power outage in SF. 😢😂
This follows a year during which Waymos have been spoofed by fireworks and maliciously but effectively pranked:
Videos and images posted on X on October 12th show dozens of the Waymo-owned vehicles efficiently listless, confused about how to act next. Per X user Riley Wataz, it all began with a single vehicle called well before sunrise … and then another … and then another, each summoned by someone. It was a real-life, group-effort DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, a tactic commonly seen in cyberattacks; because of Waymo’s no-show policies, each ping resulted in a $5 no-show, but the cars still stuck around for at least 10 minutes before driving away.
In the world of tech, especially technology that interacts with amazingly complex human systems, there's always a test case the testers forgot, or never could have envisioned.
Elon Musk is taking a victory lap on this one - Tesla's cabbie-free cabs apparently were resilient enough to keep going during the outage:
Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage https://t.co/uaYlhcSx25
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2025
And in this case at least, he deserves the "W".
But there'll be another problem someday soon.
And I''ll be driving my own cars, thanks.
