San Diego resident José Manjarrés has a robot problem in his neighborhood.
When he goes to charge his Ford Mustang Mach-E, he increasingly finds the charging stations are already occupied by robotaxis. Last month, he had to wait an hour for his turn as driverless Waymos filled up.
“It becomes really annoying when you see three Waymos in a charging station with four spots,” said Manjarrés. “It creates some kind of antagonistic posture against the product.”
Other San Diego residents have complained about sharing the city’s limited charging infrastructure with a new Waymo fleet that just launched in the region. Local politicians are calling for more regulation of the automated vehicles.
Welcome to the quiet beginning of the robot wars.
As AI-enabled bots enter everyday life, they are creating a brand new set of etiquette and legal conundrums. Do you need to be polite to chatbots? Do we have to make way on the sidewalk for food delivery bots? If a driverless car breaks the law, who is responsible?
California — home of many of the companies behind the bots as well as the locations where they are being tested — is where these new rules are being worked out.
Waymo officially launched in San Diego in September, but its vehicles started showing up months earlier as they were testing, locals say.
San Diego resident Finn Sadler, 24, said long lines formed in some places as Waymos took up limited charging stations.
“They come in droves,” he said.
He sometimes waits more than half an hour in line for his turn to plug in his Audi E-tron. It is so bad that he says if fuel prices were lower, he’d consider switching back to a gas-powered car.
The San Diego stations drivers are complaining about are privately owned. Electrify America, the Virginia-based charging company founded by Volkswagen Group of America, has 13 stations in San Diego and more than 300 charging stations in California.
The company said it has no official partnership with Waymo.
Waymos have also been spotted at an EVgo charging station in the city. The company has worked with autonomous vehicle partners since 2020 and also operates charging stations for them in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Earlier this year, EVgo had 120 stalls dedicated to AV companies.
An EVgo spokesperson said its San Diego stations are public sites available to all drivers, including robotaxis.
Waymo says it posts people at some public charging stations to help its robotaxis plug in and it tries to keep its vehicles from bunching up. That, however, can be difficult, particularly in areas where public and private fast-charging infrastructure is still being built out.
“As our operations in a city mature, we establish our own charging infrastructure and prioritize using dedicated charging,” said a Waymo spokesperson. “If a vehicle is being driven or supervised by a human specialist, they might also choose to charge on the road while taking their break.”
The frustration at the chargers has unraveled in a city where officials were skeptical of Waymo before its launch.
In January, after Waymo announced its San Diego expansion plans, a Metropolitan Transit System advisory committee chaired by Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera voted to oppose the expansion of driverless vehicles and urged state leaders to let communities decide whether they can operate.
On Sept. 14, the City Council voted unanimously for a resolution urging Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state lawmakers to give cities more control over autonomous vehicle operations. The resolution asks to give cities a say in how driverless cars are deployed and monitored. It also urges the airport authority to keep autonomous vehicles out of San Diego International Airport, and asks that charging hubs be kept away from homes, schools and public safety facilities.
Elo-Rivera said the charging issue is part of his opposition to Waymo’s rollout.
“Waymo or autonomous vehicles generally should not be displacing people,” he said.
His concern is for drivers who have built a routine around their job and family and can’t charge at home, either for logistical reasons or because they can’t yet afford to. Those drivers, he said, are now “competing with robots that can hover.”
A city spokesperson said San Diego is working to expand its public charging network. More than 50 sites will get chargers over the next 18 months, the spokesperson said, and the city has been retrofitting existing public stations and adding chargers at libraries and recreation centers.
“The current effort to expand our public EV charging stations focuses on providing additional resources for San Diego residents and visitors and is independent of any plans by private companies, such as Waymo,” the spokesperson said.
Waymos and other autonomous vehicles would not be barred from using public stations, the spokesperson said, and any that do would pay the same fees as everyone else.
San Diego is not the first place to struggle with sharing space with autonomous machines. In Santa Monica, neighbors complained about noise from Waymo’s own charging lots. Last year, its City Council ordered the company’s charging provider to stop overnight operations.
On social media, people have posted photos and videos of Waymo vehicles utilizing chargers at public stations across the country. One Reddit user posted a photo of three Waymos occupying spots at a charging station in Nashville. Another Facebook user posted an image of Waymos utilizing chargers at an Electrify America Station in St. Louis.
“There are precious few public fast chargers in St. Louis,” the user said.
In L.A. County, Commerce is also dealing with Waymo, which is currently mapping and training its vehicles in the city.
Following resident concern about the increased presence of Waymo self-driving vehicles, the City of Commerce announced in a social media post this week it would conduct additional overnight patrols and monitor and document vehicles parked in residential areas.
“While the State of California regulates Waymo and the City cannot prohibit these vehicles from operating on public streets, we are taking steps to address your concerns,” the Instagram post read.
People are still figuring out how to behave around other types of robots.
Shoppers in L.A. have worried they were being followed by grocery-store bots used to scan shelves. Delivery bots have been tagged with graffiti in Los Angeles, and there was even one botched botnappingattempt.
In Philadelphia this month, police arrested Carolyn Marvin, a 78-year-old former University of Pennsylvania professor, on a disorderly conduct charge after she refused to move out of an Uber Eats delivery robot’s path. She had spent months blocking the robots.
LAX, one of the most important destinations for taxis, isn’t sure it wants to open up to Waymo.
In a February report from Los Angeles World Airports, the governing body’s chief executive said that while they were “engaged in discussions with Waymo,” there “is currently no timeline for permitting” its cars to conduct pickups, drop-offs or any operations on LAX property.
Times staff writer Caroline Petrow-Cohen contributed to this report.
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