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On the Fourth of July, more than 100,000 people packed San Francisco’s waterfront for a fireworks show. When the crowd tried to head home, Waymo’s robotaxis blocked intersections, choked traffic and left some stuck behind them for over three hours. At least two drove over exploding fireworks, one of them catching fire, according to the New York Times.
“We were just in absolute shock,” said Rose Peterson, who was inside one of them. The car smelled like it was on fire, she told the Times, before it stalled out at the next intersection.
The autonomous vehicle industry has a term for moments like this: an “edge case,” basically a situation so unusual that nobody thought to program the car to handle it. They’re becoming more common as Waymo’s fleet has quintupled to nearly 4,000 cars across 15 metro areas.
Waymo says its cars still cause 94% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers. But federal regulators aren’t fully convinced the “edge case” explanation holds up. “Emergency scenes are not rare or extreme ‘edge cases,'” one wrote in a July letter.