When driverless cars are attacked, who’s the target?
When driverless cars are attacked, who’s the target?
It is tough to drive in San Francisco — a place with winding, narrow streets, brutal traffic and constant streams of pedestrians. For self-driving cars, there’s apparently another obstacle: people trying to set you on fire.
On Saturday night, an unoccupied Waymo robotaxi was set ablaze in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood. Waymo is owned by Google.
This isn’t the first time Waymos and other self-driving vehicles have been vandalized, which tells us something about what these cars have come to symbolize.
In 25 years of working on autonomous vehicle safety, Phil Koopman has never had the urge to smash a windshield or puncture a tire.
“There’s no call for beating up on a poor robotaxi. No matter how frustrated you might be. And I know people are frustrated,” he said.
Koopman is an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He said a lot of that frustration comes from robotaxis blocking emergency responders or clogging traffic, not to mention some high-profile accidents.
Situations that might have been prevented if these cars still had human backup drivers.
“The companies could have handled that a lot better, but they didn’t. They could have put people back in the cars till they got it together and stop making those kinds of messes. They chose not to,” he said.
Waymo declined an interview request, and there aren’t many details yet on what exactly provoked last weekend’s vandalism.
But these robotaxi attacks have been happening for a while now, and not just in San Francisco.
Douglas Rushkoff at Queens College said the autonomous vehicle is becoming a symbol of Big Tech.
“These cute, little autonomous vehicles, they’re the vulnerable extension of the tech bro billionaires,” he said.
According to a J.D. Power study, consumer confidence in self-driving cars has actually slipped since 2021.
While hopping in a robotaxi may come with some stigma now, Boston College management professor Sam Ransbotham doesn’t expect that stigma to last very long.
“I think you will get in whatever car is cheaper for you. And that’s the way this is going to play out,” he said.
Because, he said, that’s how economic history almost always has played out.
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