The strange hum outside Jennifer King’s quiet Richmond District home in San Francisco started at night. At first, she thought there was a spacecraft outside her bedroom window. It wasn’t.
It turns out it was just a long line of Jaguar SUVs, each decked out with elaborate rooftop sensors waiting to drive to the end of her dead-end street, make a U-turn, and then drive off into the foggy San Francisco night.
The cars all belong to Waymo, the Google subsidiary dedicated to inventing self-driving cars. Waymo is trying to start a robotaxi service in San Francisco, but obviously, they haven’t worked all the kinks out yet. None of the cars have any passengers.
“There are some days it can be up to 50,” King told a local television station. “It’s literally every five minutes. And we’re all working from home, so this is what we hear.”
The Waymo Jaguar SUVs invading the Richmond District aren’t really even self-driving cars … yet. They each have a driver inside them, and these drivers can be seen actually performing the three-point turns before the robots take over and drive the car away.
“There are fleets of them driving through the neighborhood regularly,” resident Andrea Lewin told the same television station. “And it’s been going on for six, eight weeks, maybe more.”
Reached for comment, a Waymo spokesman blamed San Francisco’s “Slow Street” program, which forbids cars from making through-traffic trips across select “Slow Streets.” The placement of the Slow Street right after King’s street is just too much for the Waymo robot brains to handle. There are at least 27 Slow Streets throughout the city, but only this one seems to have caused a robot traffic jam.
We’re all for innovation, but we do hope the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at least holds our new robot overlords to the same standards they do for every 16-year-old and forces them to make a flawless three-point turn before they give them a license.
