Waymo scolded by judge after robotaxi company refuses to discuss details from power outage
A judge scolded Waymo during an administrative rules proceeding Friday, after the company refused to disclose how many of its robotaxis had stalled during a December power outage in San Francisco.
That information is a trade secret, Waymo’s attorney Jack Stoddard told Senior Administrative Law Judge Robert Mason, drawing snickers from a crowd. Although the company has shared preliminary numbers with regulators, including the Department of Motor Vehicles, Stoddard said that Waymo would risk too much by airing them in a public forum.
Ride-hail drivers, Teamsters, transportation policy wonks and gadflies had gathered in a ground-floor hearing room of the California Public Utilities Commission building on Van Ness Avenue, eager to hear the autonomous vehicle companies get grilled. A sign on a telephone pole outside gave voice to the critics: “Waymo stalls, safety fails. Our streets are not their testing ground.”
Stoddard had to strike a delicate balance, showing that Waymo could engender trust while also protecting the Google-backed autonomous vehicle titan from a growing army of competitors. Lawyers for some of those ventures — Zoox, Tesla, Uber and Lyft – were sitting right beside him, waiting for their turn to address the judge.
Mason’s jaw appeared to tighten, and he trained his eyes on Stoddard, as though to express disbelief.
“Counsel, is it your position that the number of vehicles that stopped as a result of the Dec. 2025 power failure is confidential?” he asked. When the attorney stood his ground, saying his client couldn’t risk exposing too much detail about its fleet deployment, the judge did not appear satisfied.
“Well, you may have claimed a trade secret, but the commission has not ruled on that yet,” Mason said.
Their tense exchange marked the latest fallout of a Dec. 20 blackout that has already led Waymo down a path of technological change, though it’s also raised skepticism from San Francisco residents and political leaders — the Board of Supervisors will hold its own hearing on robotaxi gridlock amid the outage. Mason and CPUC Commissioner Matthew Baker had asked Waymo and other autonomous vehicle companies to answer a list of questions about topics ranging from whether they know if their vehicles are used by unaccompanied children, to how they will handle pick-up and drop-off at airports.
Forefront on the list was a series of concerns, apparently added this week, about the performance of robotaxis during the Dec. 20 power failure caused by a fire at a Pacific Gas & Electric Company substation. For hours, Waymos had become paralyzed in intersections as the vehicles asked for confirmation from human supervisors to treat the outed traffic lights as four-way stops. That spike in confirmation requests overwhelmed the technology company, ultimately forcing it to suspend service.
As a result, Waymo will refine its approach to darkened traffic lights, making its self-driving cars more decisive and “less reliant on feedback from remote assistants,” Stoddard said Friday. Such changes would build on the evolutionary trajectory that Waymos followed throughout last year, as engineers tweaked to be more intuitive and human-like.
But the outage might also trigger more rules from the CPUC, which continues to establish new policies and address issues that arise, with so many AV companies now using California streets as a laboratory. Zoox and Tesla also declined to provide data on vehicles stopped during the outage. Although Waymo’s staff has repeatedly underscored that the company successfully navigated 7,000 traffic signals that day, it has remained silent on the number of roads or intersections where its cars stumbled.
“It does unfortunately suggest there’s something that they are not keen to talk about,” said Brad Templeton, an autonomous vehicles expert based in Sunnyvale. He has overall defended the company’s handling of the outage, saying the engineers managed to absorb lessons at little cost, since no one was hurt. The viral videos that showed lines of immobilized cars, or intersections that became clogged omnidirectional horror shows, were still relatively innocuous.
“We are continuing to review this event and gathering more complete information,” a Waymo spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Chronicle. (Staff at the company are reviewing logs and have become aware of a few instances in which their AVs temporarily blocked emergency vehicles while Waymo’s event response team worked with first responders to disengage them).
Representatives of the Service Employees International Union challenged Stoddard’s claim that stop data is proprietary information, saying it amounted to a lack of accountability. At Friday’s hearing SEIU asked for an “expedited investigation” into the blunders of autonomous vehicles during the blackouts, and suggested the CPUC might consider a range of penalties for AV companies that committee road violations. The commission could, for example, bar self-driving cars from school zones or limit the hours and weather conditions under which they operate.
Such regulations would constitute a serious blow to an AV market in a period of rapid expansion, with Waymo now running service on Peninsula freeways and eyeing opportunities in Wine Country and suburban Los Angeles. Yet, if the back-and-forth over trade secrets revealed anything about Waymo, it’s that the company is ready to push back against regulators; the bigger threat, it seemed, is Zoox and Tesla.
Mason gave each of the companies until Jan. 30 to address the CPUC’s questions.