San Francisco neighbors who live in a building next to a Waymo parking lot are still experiencing a problem with their cars honking at night. That’s despite a fix from the transportation company that appears to have solved the original problem — cars honking in the parking lot — but also revealed that the problem is more complicated than it might initially seem.
Waymo said last week that the horns were the result of a safety feature that was triggered when a Waymo car detected another vehicle backing up toward it. Sophia Tong, who runs a livestream on YouTube, said: The Edge In an email, he said that on the first night after Waymo’s update, several cars inexplicably missed the parking spot and went into a dead end next to the building. In a video we saw, the vehicles stopped in the dead end and started honking their horns.
The company quickly “canceled the whole impasse and threw us a social ice cream party to calm things down,” Tong said, adding that things calmed down for a few days after that.
But early this morning, the robo-taxis demonstrated another extreme case when enough people backed up at once that a queue formed to enter the parking lot. After one of them backed up to others waiting in the street (seemingly free from the tyranny of the parking lot’s restrictions), it set off a chain reaction in which each Waymo car backed up, prompting the next car in line to honk and drive off, and so on.
Tong said she has already reached out to Waymo about the new round of evaporation. She also plans to speak with Waymo’s director of product management and operations, Vichai Nihalani, on a livestream tomorrow, starting at 5:30 p.m. ET.
Waymo did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
“Infuriatingly humble alcohol fanatic. Unapologetic beer practitioner. Analyst.”