Each week I bring you the top stories in the auto industry along with my commentary or sometimes amusing thoughts about the craziness that goes on in the world of cars.
Stories you’ll find today:
- Air Horns and Fire Trucks
- Denied in Illinois (with video)
- Unwanted Passenger
- Waymo, Lights Out
Air Horns and Fire Trucks — Ever wondered why a fire truck might blast its horn three times and leave you staring at the sky like you just heard something from a bad sci-fi movie? There’s no uniform “three-honk code” that every department in America follows, but in many firehouses a series of three short air-horn blasts repeated is used as an evacuation signal to get firefighters out of a burning building when the situation goes sideways — think structural collapse risk or sudden fire behavior — so everyone knows to clear out fast. That’s why in practice you might hear three honks repeated before they shift to something else or repeat the pattern. It isn’t a nationally mandated standard and some departments vary the pattern or length of blasts, but three tends to be a common cadence for that specific get out now cue. When you hear a fire truck honk in regular traffic, it usually isn’t a coded signal at all — it’s just the driver using the air horn to encourage cars to yield the right of way so the rig can sprint through congestion and get to the call. Either way, those horns are loud for a reason: they’re designed to grab attention even if you’re distracted on your phone or windows are up.
Denied in Illinois — If vanity plates are supposed to show off your personality, some Illinois drivers apparently took it too far (or maybe not far enough, depending on your sense of humor). The Illinois Secretary of State’s office got more than 55,000 personalized plate requests in 2025 but knocked back more than 550 of them for being “inflammatory, profane, offensive or too hard to read,” and this year’s rejects read like a middle-school reunion slip-up. Among the bloopers were ICUP (yes, spell it), IBPOOPN (because sometimes making people think is too much effort), PRIUSSY (some people have strong feelings about hybrids), BBL and BDASMOM (which the secretary joked about on camera). Some combos were just too ambiguous or confusing for law enforcement, and others just couldn’t clear the state’s “good taste and decency” bar, leaving would-be plate holders with nothing more than a refund and a smirk. The whole list was shared in a video that turned what could’ve been a bureaucracy memo into a bit of year-end entertainment — proof that even in the DMV world, creativity sometimes runs smack into common sense.
Unwanted Passenger — A Los Angeles mom summoned what she thought would be an empty Waymo robotaxi for her daughter and instead got a literal surprise guest tucked in the cargo area behind the back seat, sparking one of the oddest rideshare horror stories of the season. As the self-driving SUV-style Waymo pulled up near MacArthur Park, the woman and her kid opened the door only to see a man’s face and hand sticking up from the trunk-area space with him saying it “won’t let me out,” apparently having climbed back there after a previous rider left the hatch open; she started filming, Waymo’s remote rider support reached out to confirm they were safe and later credited the rider, and police ended up detaining the man on the sidewalk. Waymo called the whole thing “unacceptable” and said it’s implementing changes to prevent similar incidents, but the episode raises real questions about how autonomous fleets handle unexpected human behavior when someone manages to get where they shouldn’t be, especially given other high-profile glitches the service has had this year. Fortunately, there were no physical injuries reported, just a story that’ll sit somewhere between urban legend and safety cautionary tale as autonomous mobility rolls deeper into everyday life.
Waymo, Lights Out — A major San Francisco power outage earlier this month left roughly a third of the city in the dark and turned what was supposed to be a smooth robotaxi rollout into an impromptu traffic jam puzzle courtesy of Waymo’s autonomous fleet. As traffic signals blinked off across wide swaths of the city after a PG&E substation fire knocked out power for more than 130,000 homes and businesses, multiple Waymo vehicles simply stopped in the middle of intersections with their hazard lights on, unable to navigate the darkened grid like a human would by treating it as a four-way stop. Videos circulating on social media captured clusters of the driverless cars frozen in place and snarling traffic while human drivers wove around them and city officials eventually had to suspend Waymo’s service entirely until the outage eased. Waymo explained that its software is designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops but, faced with the scale of dead lights and a surge in “confirmation checks” with its fleet, some cars defaulted to stopping rather than improvising — and its remote support team couldn’t unjam the backlog quickly enough, which compounded the problem. Riders reportedly had trouble reaching support while stuck, and the incident has reignited questions about whether current autonomous systems are ready to handle real-world infrastructure failures. The blackout highlights the fragility of robotaxis when civic infrastructure goes AWOL and serves as a reminder that edge-case resilience still matters in autonomy.
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