Waymo’s autonomous robotaxis have become a nightmare for San Francisco residents — with their sleep being disrupted by the vehicles’ blaring horns for as much as an hour before the crack of dawn.
Sophia Tung, a software engineer who lives above a parking lot for the driverless cabs, slammed the Alphabet-owned subsidiary for the unwanted wake-up calls.
“The entire night I was hearing the boop boop boop of waymos backing up and pulling in/out,” she wrote on Threads.
“Could barely sleep, literally heard it in my dreams. Still at it this morning.”
In a subsequent post on Threads, Tung wrote: “Now there is a traffic jam. They’re all honking at each other and getting a bit aggressive. Attendant has no idea what to do.”
On Thursday, Tung posted a livestream of the droning cabs, titled “When it’s 4am but the waymos are getting aggressive in the parking lot.”
The video captured one of the cars honking its horn while waiting to park behind another vehicle that was driving in reverse.
Tung told tech news site The Verge that Waymo vehicles that are finished for the day “start migrating back” to the parking lot between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. local time Sunday through Thursday or 11 p.m. through midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.
The lot starts to fill up “usually…at 4 a.m. or so,” according to Tung.
A Waymo spokesperson told The Verge that the company is “aware that in some scenarios our vehicles may briefly honk while navigating our parking lots.”
The rep told the news site that the company has figured out what’s causing the honking and is now working to fix it.
The Post has sought comment from Waymo.
Waymo, which was officially conceived as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009 before it was later rebranded to its current name in 2016, began testing its autonomous vehicles with a safety driver present while the robotaxis were rolled out onto the streets of San Francisco in August 2019.
In 2021, California regulators allowed Waymo to test the cars without a human safety driver.
But San Francisco residents have complained about the vehicles stopping abruptly and driving slowly, which they say exacerbates congestion on the city’s streets.
Other residents noted that Waymo and its competitor, the General Motors-owned Cruise, have been involved in scores of crashes and near-collisions, including one that killed a small dog.
Last October, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles indefinitely suspended Cruise robotaxis from San Francisco’s streets after several complaints that the vehicles were impeding police and fire officials during emergencies.
The move came just weeks after a Cruise robotaxi nicknamed “Panini” collided with a pedestrian, critically injuring them. The victim had to be extracted from under the robotaxi with the help of the “jaws of life” before being taken to a local hospital.
In May, the federal government announced it was launching a preliminary probe after Waymo robotaxis were linked to nearly two dozen traffic incidents.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also announced a probe into Amazon-owned Zoox earlier this year after two Toyota Highlanders that were equipped with its self-driving technology were involved in accidents.
Waymo service is active in several towns in and around the Phoenix metropolitan area while tests and limited service are ongoing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin and Detroit.
Cruise robotaxis are either being tested or are offering limited service in Phoenix as well as in Seattle and Washington, DC.
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