In the wake of what was surely Waymo’s greatest SF screw-up yet, SF Supervisor Bilal Mahmood (of all people!) is the first local elected official calling for a probe into how Waymos stalled out all over town Saturday.

As of 3:30 pm Monday afternoon, the fallout from Saturday's massive SF PG&E outage still continues, as thousands in SF still don’t have their power back on. So PG&E will surely deal with some nasty blowback over this incident where more than 130,000 SF customers lost power on Saturday.

But the self-driving car company Waymo is probably also going to spend some time in the corporate-scandal doghouse, considering that their cars froze in place at intersections all over town, adding to a myriad of traffic jams and blockages for first-responder vehicles.  

So Waymo and San Francisco learned the hard way that these cars just don’t work in an electrical power outage! Much like the fact that the cars can be stalled with an orange cone, this seems like a stunning oversight that makes it way too easy to disable a fleet of Waymos. And while the Waymo vehicles were up and running again by 4 pm Sunday, we still have not gotten any answers about why this took more than 24 hours (there has to be more to that story), and what Waymo plans to do so their cars don’t all just stall in place wherever the stop lights go out in the future.  

Waymo, for their part, have said that the only problem was that their cars, which can even operate without wi-fi signal (allegedly), became too cautious at intersections without traffic signals, and amid the chaos of other drivers at those intersections, creating further backups.

It is no surprise that SF’s famously left-leaning Board of Supervisors is planning a hearing and probe into what happened with Waymo on Saturday during the power outage. What is a surprise is how these hearings are being called by District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, the tech industry’s main cheerleader in the board, himself a startup founder funded by Y Combinator, a tech entity that’s very much in the tank for Waymo.  

“San Franciscans deserve answers into why Waymo was unable to handle such a large-scale infrastructure failure, and what they plan to do about it in the future to mitigate these types of impacts,” Mahmood said in a Monday morning press release. “Given my background in the artificial intelligence industry, I plan to ask the hard technical questions our residents want answers to so we ensure safety in our streets no matter the conditions.”

Needless to say, Mahmood is already getting some blowback from the tech set for daring to challenge the sacred cow of VC-backed tech ventures (above we’ve got Google Glass shower guy Robert Scoble doing the honors). And we’ll see if Mahmood actually holds Waymo’s feet to the fire on this one, or whether Waymo just opts out of the hearings, as Mahmood might not even be able to compel them to appear or testify at City Hall hearings.  

Mahmood’s hearings into Waymo, and whatever hearings new Supervisor Alan Wong is threatening against PG&E, could not begin until the SF Board of Supervisors returns from their holiday recess, which will be on Monday, January 5, 2026.

Related: Waymos Freeze in Place, Snarl Traffic En Masse During Saturday’s Citywide Power Outage [SFist]

Image: walden_yan via Twitter