I saw plenty of Waymos managing to make it through intersections. They were slow and tentative, but definitely made forward progress.

I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone, presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos were lacking connectivity.

There is of course also a possibility that the total demand exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human intervention.

I think it’s clear that both use cases are a must have during an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos shouldn’t be online during such times at all.

I didn’t notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.