CNBC's Deirdre Bosa joins 'Money Movers' to report on the Waymo weekend blackout in San Francisco and the company's strategy versus the Tesla robotaxi.

San Francisco

Waymo has resumed its robotaxi operations in San Francisco after a citywide blackout over the weekend caused several of its vehicles to stop in intersections, leading to traffic gridlock. The vehicles, designed to proceed cautiously during traffic light failures or connectivity loss, defaulted to extreme caution when multiple system variables failed, exposing a potential challenge for the company's technology.

The incident has sparked debate over the scalability of different autonomous driving approaches, contrasting Waymo's methodical, safety-focused expansion with Tesla's more improvisational philosophy. While no injuries or accidents occurred, the event has drawn attention from regulators and may influence how cities approach the deployment of autonomous vehicles.

Waymo resumes robotaxi service in San Francisco after weekend chaos

Waymo service is back up in San Francisco after a weekend blackout exposed what might be a blind spot for the rapidly expanding robo-taxi company. Ardur Deboza tells us why in today's tech check. Yikes. How was it, Dee? It was interesting. Let me just show you some of the scenes. From Saturday night here in San Francisco, you had Waymo stopped in the middle of intersections, causing gridlock across parts of the city. Now, the vehicles are designed to handle dead traffic lights and keep driving, even if they lose wireless connectivity. But what you're seeing here is a system that defaulted to extreme caution when too many variables broke at once. Now, this raises a bigger question for the Alphabet subsidiary. Can they generalize? Because the ability to adapt in real time, that's what ultimately unlocks scale. And it may be the key divide between the Waymo and Tesla approaches. Now, Elon Musk posted over the weekend that Tesla robo-taxis were unaffected by the power outage. Now, that is not a fair comparison, because Tesla does not run a driverless service here in San Francisco. But it does reveal a different underlying philosophy. Tesla is trying to build autonomy that behaves more like a human, so one that can improvise, which can infer amid ambiguity, like in a blackout. Now, here's a simple way to think about it. A Waymo robo-taxi approaching a dead traffic light treats it as a four-way stop, then proceeds very cautiously until it can confirm what every other actor is doing. So during a citywide blackout, that quickly turns into gridlock. A more humans-like system, which Musk says Tesla is building, would do what drivers actually did that night. And that is read eye contact, edge forward, make judgment calls without having perfect signals. Now, the latter may come with safety tradeoffs, because it is asking the system to make judgment calls with less certainty, so learn in the wild. If that works, it could scale faster, because it doesn't require perfect mapping before every deployment. Now, Waymo has the momentum right now. It is raising new capital at $100 billion-plus valuation, is expanding to new cities. Now, the company says that it focused on rapidly integrating the lessons learned. That's what it's doing going forward. But this incident, guys, it really puts a spotlight on whether scaling, which is what this race is all about, means careful city-by-city expansion or systems that can adapt in real-time. I guess the one question would be, you know, maybe the more adaptable system, the improvisational approach that Tesla is talking about, would allow it to scale better if those cities permitted it, right? I mean, is that going to be a barrier to how the authorities decide whether they want those robo-taxis on the road? Right. And that is sort of the tradeoff that Tesla is making, right? It's more of an improvisational situation or strategy, so cities are perhaps a little more reluctant to say, OK, go learn in the wild, use our city as a test case, whereas Waymo has done this very methodically, impeccable, almost impeccable safety record. And so there's tradeoffs. It's going city-by-city. It's getting more of those regulations. But now it may not matter, right, because other cities that are looking at what happened here in San Francisco over the weekend may say, we don't want any of that. I mean, we've known historically, too, any little thing happens in San Francisco, big or small, and that has the ability to, you know, shut down robo-taxi ambitions right in their tracks. I mean, nobody was hurt. There were no accidents this past weekend. But you look at a case like Cruz, right, which happened, I think, it was a few years ago now, actually struck a pedestrian, and that was the end of Cruz's ambitions. So that hasn't happened to Waymo. It's developing in a very different way. But regulators are already sort of on the watch for anything that goes awry, and they're held to a much higher standard. Yeah, definitely incremental ammunition for those skeptics at the local level who might not want to experiment. Pretty fascinating, Dean. I'm sure we're not done talking about it. Deirdre Bosa.

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Breakdown