Cars can drive themselves! The future is here! And it’s noisy as hell!
In Santa Monica, California, residents living near Waymo’s taxi depot are being serenaded nightly by the grating, high-pitched BEEP BEEP BEEP of self-driving cars. Waymo are Google-funded self-driving cars ferrying people around select cities across the United States.
Even though it is disconcerting and quite eerie to see a car with a passenger in the back but no one behind the wheel, they have a reputation for being safer than you’d think, as they tend to follow the rules of the road a lot more closely than humans do.
One of the many reasons they’re safer than the average human-driven car on the road is that these robotic Ubers have to emit a backup warning tone whenever they reverse. Since they’re electric and constantly returning to recharge, they back up often. This results in an unholy chorus of reverse alarms driving nearby residents insane, and sometimes out of their homes entirely.
“I thought it was cool, and then those freaking noises started. And then I thought, ‘Oh no, this can’t be happening,” neighborhood resident Darius Boorn told the Los Angeles Times.
Sleep is quickly becoming a thing of the past, with some locals claiming they’ve been woken up in the dead of night by backup beeps and Waymo horns. The latter became infamous nine months earlier in San Francisco when the AI cars started honking in harmony during rush-hour madness.
Inspired by a Bay Area activist group called Safe Street Rebel that pioneered a protest tactic known as “coning,” Santa Monica residents have begun jamming traffic cones onto the hoods of Waymo vehicles, parking their own cars to block the bots, and sometimes even standing in the road like human roadblocks. It’s petty as hell, and the kind of low-tech tactics you wouldn’t expect innovative humans to pull out in a war against machines, but it works.
In 2023, Safe Street Rebel launched “The Week of the Cone” after California regulators greenlit Cruise and Waymo to operate robotaxis 24/7. The protests helped get Cruise’s license pulled by the DMV.
Waymo filed lawsuits against nonviolent protestors and even tried to slap restraining orders on locals. One of them was denied, which might say more about public sentiment than any press release ever could.
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