Waymo robotaxis run out of battery in San Francisco traffic jam

Several Waymo robotaxis had to be towed from San Francisco streets after their batteries died in Fourth of July gridlock, leaving at least a dozen stationary vehicles lined up after fireworks over the Golden Gate Bridge. The scene unfolded as the company’s all-electric fleet, built to run without human drivers, ran into a kind of urban chaos that software alone could not quickly untangle.

Waymo said “major traffic disruptions, a high volume of travelers, and unplanned road closures” created unexpected congestion. The company said its roadside assistance team worked to clear the vehicles and that it is “evaluating ways to strengthen Waymo’s resilience in major traffic disruptions.” Video that was verified by NBC News showed many of the stalled cars were Jaguar I-PACE models, and another clip showed more vehicles at a standstill at an intersection packed with people.

A separate incident added to the spectacle when a Waymo vehicle caught fire after driving over fireworks that had been set off in the street. Waymo said no one was injured. Residents and bystanders described being stuck in traffic for hours, and one witness said people were yelling at the driverless cars because there were no drivers inside. The episode turned a holiday bottleneck into a public test of how an autonomous fleet handles a city that is not moving.

The San Francisco incident echoed a December 2025 blackout that cut power to nearly one-third of the city, darkened traffic signals and created citywide gridlock. At the peak of that outage, roughly 130,000 homes and businesses lost power, and Waymo said its vehicles successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals before the company later refined its confirmation protocols and rolled out fleet-wide updates to give the cars more context about regional outages.

For Waymo, which operates a publicly available autonomous ride-hailing service in San Francisco and other cities, the holiday jam underscored a recurring problem: the hardest failures can come not from the vehicle’s sensors or battery chemistry, but from predictable surges in demand, street closures and emergency conditions that can freeze a dense urban core.