How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?
Sounds like their disaster recovery plan was insufficient, intensified traffic jams in already congested areas because of "backlog", and is now being fixed to support the current scale.
The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.
If the onboard software has detected an unusual situation it doesn't understand, moving may be a bad idea. Possible problems requiring a management decision include flooding, fires, earthquakes, riots, street parties, power outages, building collapses... Handling all that onboard is tough. For different situations, a nearby "safe place" to stop varies. The control center doesn't do remote driving, says Waymo. They provide hints, probably along the lines of "back out, turn around, and get out of this area", or "clear the intersection, then stop and unload your passenger".
Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition? After some number of seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop condition. Apparently here they overloaded the control center. That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that. That's good for scaling.
> While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets. We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.
Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.