When the Cars Don’t Listen

Most centers do not yet have a specific call type for this scenario. It likely gets logged as a traffic hazard, abandoned vehicle, or obstruction — none of which capture what it actually is. That matters because the response is different. You cannot dispatch a tow truck to an autonomous vehicle without the owner company’s involvement. You cannot tell the driver to move it. Your traffic unit cannot write a citation to the car.

San Francisco had to create a new CAD category called “Driverless Car Incidents” specifically because existing categories did not fit the problem. The question for your agency: do you have autonomous vehicles operating in your jurisdiction now? If yes, what is your call type, and does your dispatcher know what number to call? If no, when does that change, and when does your protocol get updated?

The phone number for Waymo’s first responder line, for reference: 1-877-503-0840. That is also the number that put a San Francisco dispatcher on hold for 53 minutes during a blackout.

Vendor hotlines are designed for isolated incidents. They are not scaled for simultaneous system-wide failures. The same event that requires you to call the hotline is likely the same event that is overwhelming the hotline. This is structurally true for autonomous vehicle companies, for CAD system vendors, for utility companies, and for any private system that embeds itself in public infrastructure without a public-sector redundancy.

For dispatch professionals, the lesson is: the hotline is your last resort, not your plan. The plan is what you do when nobody picks up. Does your center have a protocol for when a critical vendor is unreachable during a major incident? San Francisco’s solution was to have the mayor personally text the CEO. That is not a protocol — that is improvisation at the executive level. The gap between what the law requires (30 seconds for emergency geofencing response under a proposed California bill) and what actually happened (53 minutes on hold) is where your planning lives.

The Walz prank was a novelty. But it demonstrated a real attack surface: if 50 people with smartphones can briefly disable Waymo service in a 2-block area, a larger coordinated action with worse intentions could do significantly more. The prank was the proof of concept. The question for emergency management is whether similar manipulation of autonomous systems — ride-share, delivery, logistics — could be used deliberately during a crisis to slow emergency response or create diversionary incidents.

This is not a hypothetical that needs a policy answer today. But it is a conversation worth having with your jurisdiction’s emergency management office before autonomous vehicle density in your city makes it operationally relevant. The communication between private autonomous vehicle operators and public safety agencies is still largely informal in most cities. The DDoS prank is a useful training hook because it is nonthreatening enough to discuss openly, while pointing directly at a real vulnerability.

Supervisor Mahmood nailed it at the hearing: Waymo’s answer was essentially “we will train your first responders to do our roadside assistance better.” That is not a satisfactory answer. First responders are not Waymo employees. Every minute a firefighter spends moving a stalled robotaxi is a minute they are not available for a medical call, a fire, or an extrication.

For dispatch professionals, this is an advocacy conversation as much as an operational one. If autonomous vehicles are going to operate in your jurisdiction, the question of who bears the cost of their failures needs to be answered before the failure happens. Does your agency have a formal relationship with any autonomous vehicle operators in your jurisdiction? Is there an MOU, a direct contact above the hotline level, an agreed-upon protocol for removal during an active incident? If the answer is no, the next blackout will play out the same way.

The training point for dispatchers: if you receive a call about a stalled autonomous vehicle blocking emergency access, escalate to your supervisor immediately rather than attempting to resolve it through the standard hotline process. Time is a factor, and the standard process may not produce a result in time to matter.

The honest answer is that most centers will not prepare until after the first incident. But the San Francisco experience gives you a roadmap for what to build before you need it. At minimum: a call type or CAD code for autonomous vehicle incidents; a verified first responder contact above the public hotline level for any AV operator in your jurisdiction; a protocol for escalation when that contact is unreachable; and a conversation with your jurisdiction’s emergency management office about what geofencing or service suspension capabilities exist and how they are activated.

The harder conversation is the one about training. Waymo has trained 25,000+ first responders across the US on how to interact with its vehicles. If your jurisdiction is in an expansion market, you should be requesting that training proactively — not because it is your responsibility to learn how to manage their equipment, but because your responders will encounter these vehicles regardless of who is technically responsible.

The San Francisco model for what not to do: wait until a blackout creates 1,593 simultaneous stall events, then have the mayor text the CEO.

If AVs are already operating in your jurisdiction, this is a gap that exists now. If they are not yet operating, this is a planning item that belongs in your technology-impact section of your annual training review. The call type question is not trivial — it affects how calls are routed, how they are tracked, and whether your data ever surfaces a pattern of AV-related incidents that warrants a formal response from your jurisdiction.

Suggested owner: Operations supervisor in coordination with your CAD administrator and your jurisdiction’s emergency management office. This is not a line-level dispatcher decision.

Walk your team through this scenario without a script. If the answer involves more than one phone call and more than 60 seconds before a decision is made, you have identified a gap. The 53-minute hold is an extreme — but even a 10-minute hold during an active structure fire with a blocked access road is a critical failure.

The goal of this exercise is not to solve the problem in the room. It is to make the problem visible before an incident makes it visible for you. Have your dispatchers walk through what they would actually do, step by step. The friction points in that walkthrough are your training priorities.