Residents are enjoying peace and quiet again after being kept awake by robotaxis honking their horns.
The nightmare began for neighbours of Waymo’s depot in San Francisco Bay when the vehicles would honk their horns at each other as they manoeuvred into the parking and charging area for the night.
Waymos honking at Waymos
When the depot first opened, there were no problems with noise and neighbours welcomed the added security the depot brought. But an update which enabled Waymo’s taxis to beep at other vehicles if they came too close caused chaos when the robotaxis parked next to each other at the depot.
Sky News reports that neighbours had had enough when they were woken up at 4am several days running as the vehicles set off from the depot for the day – honking at each other as they manoeuvred through the car park.
Exhausted and frustrated, residents of neighbouring condos complained to Waymo, which was quick to act. It sent updates to the vehicles which disabled the use of horns at the depot. While neighbours enjoyed brief respite, they soon discovered that it had shifted the problem on the main road leading to the depot, and the robotaxis were once again honking at each other as they queued for the depot.
Live-stream nightmare
At its peak, the situation was so bad that resident Sophia Tung set up YouTube livestreams to show others what they were living with – and the videos have been viewed be tens of thousands of people.
In one clip revealing their nightmare, Sophia recorded the cars reversing out of parking bays with hazard lights flashing and being beeped by other vehicles as they manoeuvre out.
The livestream continues today and has gained Sophia more than 3,000 subscribers.
In one video, she is joined by Waymo director of product management and ops Vishay Nihalani, who again apologised for the disruption, and explained the solution.
He said: “We have every intent of being a good member of the community and want to apologise for the honking. We are aware of the disturbance it has caused.”
He explained that the feature was introduced following several collisions involving drivers of other vehicles crashing into the automated taxis.
Safety feature
He said: “We are seeing that a non-trivial amount of collisions are due to other road users’ inattentiveness – that could be someone backing into us or rear-ending us. We came up with this feature to honk and get the attention of other road users. You can see how that makes sense on public roads.
“Where it had an unintended effect was in the parking lots. We didn’t anticipate what would happen when we have a bunch of Waymos in a Waymo-only parking lot. Clearly it’s not that useful to have one Waymo honking at another Waymo! We were able to disable that feature in our parking lots.
“But that fix was not appliable to public roads nearby so as we see more cars route to that area, we saw a little bit more congestion and, again, Waymos honking at Waymos.”
Another update solved that problem and Vishay says he hopes they can develop technology so that Waymos can identify Waymos and even behave differently than they would to other vehicles on the roads, improving efficiency and the experience for passengers.
Whatever your views on robotaxis, the important thing is how quickly the company responded to complaints and took action. Despite the disruption, Waymo has enhanced its reputation with the way it dealt with the problem and has won back customers it risked driving away – including Sophia and many of her neighbours.
