Tesla FSD works fine in San Francisco power outage while Waymo robotaxi service disrupts

Tesla owners shared footage of driving their cars on Full Self-Driving (Supervised) during today’s massive power outage in San Francisco, California.

These videos demonstrate that Tesla FSD v14 can navigate easily through power outages that result in dark streets. Tesla FSD easily handled intersections and turns when even the traffic lights were off due to the outage.

Energy company PG&E has given Monday as the deadline for fully recovering the power supply in the City of San Francisco.

During these dark hours, a couple of videos of Waymo’s Jaguar robotaxi surfaced online, showing these vehicles struggling during the dark hours of the outage. Tesla FSD (Supervised), on the other hand, navigated the city streets freely using its neural net-based AI vision system.

San Francisco, California, has one of the densest populations of Tesla cars. This translates to a ton of driving video data from the city. Tesla’s neural networks know San Francisco much better than other parts of the US or Canada.

However, it’s still impressive for a self-driving system to perform in a situation that it’s not used to, especially at night.

Waymo robotaxis, on the other hand, which, by misconception, is considered superior to Tesla FSD by some users, were stuck at an intersection. One of the three Waymos even crept ahead of the crosswalk and looked totally confused.

In an official statement to the media, Waymo confirmed that it paused all its robotaxis for safety reasons as the vehicles were puzzled because of the lack of traffic lights and signs.

Above: Tesla FSD v14 navigating dark roads without any traffic lights during a power outage in San Francisco, California.

Tesla’s official statement, “FSD is trained on billions of real-world miles, including power outages,” is very interesting. The automaker has apparently trained its vision AI even for scenarios like power outages.

Tesla Robotaxi service is active in the SF Bay Area. If a normal Tesla vehicle can drive itself in power outages, a Robotaxi should perform even better as it has a more advanced version of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) software.

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Featured image: Zack (@BLKMDL3 via X).

Note: This article was published earlier on Tesla Oracle. Author: Iqtidar Ali.