Waymo service is back up in San Francisco after a weekend blackout exposed what might be a blind spot for the rapidly expanding Robotaxi Company.

Ardur Dabosa 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 robotaxies 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 Robotaxi approaching a dead traffic light

treats it as a four-way stop,

...