Author: G.Li, Megaphone Editor-in-chief

📍San Francisco, CA

In a San Francisco parking lot, Waymo cars were getting loud. 

Waymo is an American company providing autonomous driving technology, meaning that they give driverless rides to passengers. These rides have recently gone from a limited waitlist to opening up to rides for everyone, and Waymo has expanded beyond its origins in San Francisco to reach Daly City, Colma, and Broadmoor. (We covered more about Waymo’s new services in one of our previous articles, read about it here!)

Photo of a Waymo car cruising down San Francisco streets, taken from Waymo’s website

However, despite the expansion of Waymo to different areas, trouble soon arose with Waymo cars honking for no apparent reason in their hometown, San Francisco. 

Near an apartment building in San Francisco was a parking lot full of driverless Waymo cars, which Waymo had rented to house their vehicles. Though many were initially excited by the appearance of Waymo’s cars in their neighborhood, believing that these cars would make their area safer, repeated, unwarranted honking from the cars soon turned them into a major disturbance to the residents. To make matters worse, a majority of the honking occurred during 4:00 a.m., waking up residents near the Waymo parking lot in the middle of the night.

Photo of the parking lot holding numerous Waymo cars honking at each other

This display was showcased in a video posted to Youtube by one of the residents of the apartment building, Sophia Tung, titled “Waymo Unlimited Honk Works at 4 A.M.”. The video shows the Waymo parking lot, and lots of beeping coming from the cars. Videos similar to this quickly gained attention on social media, prompting a response from Waymo. 

In their response, they stated that they are aware of the honk-related issues their cars have, and are in the process of implementing a new fix by updating their software. According to Waymo, they had been honking due to a new program training Waymo cars to honk when other cars get close to them on the road, in hopes of reducing accident-causing collisions. Since their response, residents have already noticed a change in the noise-level produced by Waymo. 

Although this problem has been semi-resolved by Waymo, this situation does represent how Waymo still has some areas to improve in before they are completely able to replace human-driven taxis. There have been some reports of Waymo cars getting involved in crashes or fires, and additional reports of Waymo cars bumping into stationary objects such as parked vehicles. 

On the other hand, it does appear that Waymo cars are, in general, quite well-functioning, with data coming out in December 2023 by Waymo citing that Waymo vehicles get into fewer injury-causing collisions than human drivers. 

In the future, I believe it can be expected for Waymo cars to become a lot more efficient and fine-tuned with their environments, and they will only improve; the mistakes, such as the issue with the honking, are an opportunity for the cars to get better in terms of quality.