Waymo’s self-driving robot taxis are causing a nightmare for San Francisco residents, who are kept awake for an hour before dawn by the vehicles’ blaring horns.
Sophia Tang, a software engineer who lives above a driverless taxi parking lot, denounced the unwanted wake-up calls from the Alphabet subsidiary.
“All night long I could hear the buzzing noise of a Waymo backing up and going in and out,” she wrote in the thread.
“I barely got any sleep. I literally heard it in my dreams. I still haven’t slept this morning.”
In a subsequent post on the thread, Tan wrote: “There’s a traffic jam right now. Cars are all honking at each other and being a bit aggressive. The attendants have no idea what to do.”
On Thursday, Tan posted a livestream of a drone taxi entitled “Waymo getting aggressive in parking lot even though it’s 4am.”
The video showed a car honking its horn while waiting to park behind another car that was backing up.
Paulownia He told technology news site The Verge When Waymo vehicles finish their work for the day, they “start returning” to their parking lots between 7pm and 9pm local time Sunday through Thursday, or between 11pm and midnight on Friday and Saturday.
According to Tan, the car park usually starts filling up “from around 4am”.
“We recognize that in certain circumstances, our vehicles may honk their horn briefly while driving through parking lots,” a Waymo spokesperson told The Verge.
A representative told the news site that the company has identified the cause of the horn and is working on a solution.
The Post has reached out to Waymo for comment.
Waymo was officially launched in 2009 as Google’s self-driving car project and renamed to its current name in 2016. In August 2019, it introduced robot taxis to the streets of San Francisco and began testing self-driving cars with safety drivers on board.
In 2021, California regulators gave Waymo the go-ahead to test its cars without a human safety driver.
But San Francisco residents have complained that vehicles that stop suddenly or drive slowly are worsening congestion on the city’s roads.
Other residents pointed out that Waymo and its competitor, Cruise, owned by General Motors Co, have been involved in numerous crashes and near-crashes, including one that killed a small dog.
Last October, the California Department of Transportation indefinitely suspended Cruise Robotaxis from operating on San Francisco streets after receiving multiple complaints that the vehicles were interfering with police and fire departments during emergencies.
The move comes just weeks after a Cruise Robotaxi, nicknamed “Panini,” collided with a pedestrian, leaving the pedestrian severely injured. The victim was extricated from underneath the robotaxi with the help of a “lifeguard” and taken to a local hospital.
The federal government announced in May that it was opening a preliminary investigation after Waymo’s robotaxis were linked to nearly two dozen traffic accidents.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also announced an investigation into Amazon-owned Zoox earlier this year after two Toyota Highlanders equipped with the company’s self-driving technology crashed.
Waymo’s service is operational in metro Phoenix and several surrounding towns, with testing and limited service ongoing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin and Detroit.
Cruise Robotaxi is testing or offering limited service in Phoenix, as well as Seattle and Washington, DC.
With post wire
