State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.” And they tend to be confined to a handful of places in the Sun Belt, because they still can’t handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy. Which is rare: Six years after companies started offering rides in what they’ve called autonomous cars and almost 20 years after the first self-driving demos, there are vanishingly few such vehicles on the road. It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi in the wild. The companies have suggested they’re on the verge of eliminating road fatalities, rush-hour traffic, and parking lots, and of upending the $2 trillion global automotive industry. Over the course of more than a decade, flashy demos from companies including Google, GM, Ford, Tesla, and Zoox have promised cars capable of piloting themselves through chaotic urban landscapes, on highways, and in extreme weather without any human input or oversight. Waymo disputes that its tech failed and said in a statement that its vehicles had been “obeying the same road rules that any car is required to follow.” The company, like its peers in Silicon Valley and Detroit, has characterized incidents like this as isolated, potholes on the road to a steering-wheel-free future. “And the neighbors are certainly noticing.” Soon after, King’s driveway was hers again. “It is kind of funny when you watch it,” the report began.
The whole thing went on for weeks until last October, when King called the local CBS affiliate and a news crew broadcast the scene. Sometimes a few of the SUVs would show up at the same time and form a little line, like an army of zombie driver’s-ed students. King complained to Google that the cars were driving her nuts, but the K-turns kept coming. But dozens of Google cars began doing the exact thing, many times, every single day.
This would’ve been no biggie, she says, if it had happened once. She was observing what looked like a glitch in the self-driving software: The car seemed to be using her property to execute a three-point turn. It had what looked like a giant fan on its roof - a laser sensor - and bore the logo of Google’s driverless car division, Waymo. Outside she saw a white Jaguar SUV backing out of her driveway. King lives on a dead-end street at the edge of the Presidio, a 1,500-acre park in San Francisco where through traffic isn’t a thing. “It sounded like a hovercraft,” she says, and that wasn’t the weird part. The first car woke Jennifer King at 2 a.m.
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