December 22, 2025 - Waymo Loses Out To Mother Nature

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for  December 22, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

Automated vehicles have a lot of theoretical advantages over human drivers. They don't get drunk or drowsy or distracted. They can, in theory, see obstacles sooner than humans and in conditions where humans might not be able to see. They should be able to drive closer together without colliding. All of these factors should eventually lead to safer roads and more efficient and affordable travel. But that day isn't here yet for Waymo or any other company developing automated driving systems. 

We've already known for many years that AVs struggle with driving in poor weather conditions and for those that are exclusively reliant on cameras in sub-optimal lighting. The software used to try to interpret what sensors are detecting and make driving decisions is also extremely complex, and sometimes the most advanced AI just isn't sufficient to avoid problems. Waymo is easily the leading company in the AV space in terms of commercial deployment of robotaxis. But as they have tried to scale those operations, issues that seem like they should be straightforward to resolve keep cropping up. In recent weeks, there have been multiple reports of Waymo vehicles not recognizing school buses and driving through sites with emergency vehicles. 

This past weekend, severe weather, including high winds in San Francisco, led to widespread power outages that disrupted traffic signals and wireless communications. While human drivers aren't perfect, they are very adaptable. In the absence of functioning traffic lights, they will generally treat it as a four-way stop and proceed with caution. If cellular networks go down, they can keep driving. The same was not true with the Waymo fleet, which ground to a halt when it lost communications back to base and couldn't figure out what to do with non-functional signals. The result was hundreds of robotaxis that simply stopped in place, causing traffic jams.  While Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the San Francisco power outage, those vehicles are manually driven by humans and not allowed to operate autonomously in California. 

It's likely that as companies like Waymo and others continue to try to scale AVs, many more such issues will crop up and will need to be addressed before the human driver can be replaced widely. 

Thanks for listening.