A throng in San Francisco’s Chinatown area damaged and burned a Waymo robotaxi Saturday night. This is the latest incident involving driverless cars in San Francisco, where businesses have spent years testing the technology on public streets.
Video and social media posts from Saturday night showed no coordination. The footage shows a crowd becoming angrier and more aggressive as the autonomous car is approached.
A Waymo spokeswoman said the autonomous car was empty. Company statement:
A completely autonomous Waymo car was driving through San Francisco around 9 p.m. on Saturday, February 10th, when a mob broke the window and threw a firework inside, setting it on fire. The car was empty, and no injuries were recorded. We are consulting with local safety authorities to address the issue.
San Francisco residents have experimented with autonomous cars before. Probably not the last.
Last summer, a decentralized group of San Francisco Safe Streets activists placed a traffic cone on a vehicle’s hood to deactivate the robotaxis.
The gang named the popular hoax on Twitter and TikTok the “Week of Cone” to protest local robotaxi services. The protest occurred before Cruise and Waymo acquired final approval to commercially operate robotaxi services in San Francisco from the California Public Utilities Commission.
Videos show humans assaulting the Cruise robotaxis. Since Cruise is barred from operating in the city, Waymo is the sole driverless robotaxi service and the city’s most conspicuous autonomous tech emblem.
A San Francisco Waymo robotaxi was vandalized and burnt.
