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In what weirdly feels like a hostile gesture from the tech industry itself, a Waymo robotaxi stalled out in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ motorcade in San Francisco on Friday night.
Harris has already suffered significant hostility from Silicon Valley, where a large aggregate of crypto bros and a number of influential tech tycoons (including, most prominently, Elon Musk) have decided to endorse Donald Trump over the Democratic candidate. As if to demonstrate the strained relations between the tech industry and the candidate, one of Waymo’s autonomous cars decided, of its own accord, to lay down in front of her motorcade and transform itself into a vehicular traffic cone.
The vehicle was in the process of making a U-Turn on California Street in the city’s Nob Hill neighborhood when it malfunctioned and stopped moving, the San Francisco Standard reports. Harris’s motorcade—which was en route to her hotel—was behind the car when it abruptly halted. It’s unclear how long the motorcade was stalled, or if the AV was really a problem for the vice president at all. Eventually, a local police officer was forced to jump inside the driverless car and manually steer it out of traffic.
HAPPENING NOW: A driverless @Waymo gets stuck making a u-turn as @VP’s motorcade arrived at the Fairmont S.F.
An SFPD officer had to manually drive the vehicle out. We’re hearing this wasn’t the only one… @abc7newsbayarea pic.twitter.com/uCdiTf9lbB
— LaurenABC7 (@LaurenABC7) September 28, 2024
Gizmodo reached out to Waymo for comment.
Much of the Harris-related consternation from tech elites seems to stem from the fact that, unlike Republicans, the Democratic Party has attempted to regulate the tech industry to some degree. Under Joe Biden, the federal government has cracked down on the crypto industry’s most notorious actors and has passed rather tame AI regulations.
This isn’t the first time a robotaxi has randomly died in the middle of a San Francisco intersection. The driverless vehicles, which have become a prominent fixture of the city since California approved broader use of the vehicles last year, have been causing traffic problems for many months now.
It’s probably a good thing, then, that California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill into law that will create new regulations for the robotaxi industry. AB1777 will require self-driving car manufacturers to comply with a number of new stipulations. Most notably, the law will allow police to cite self-driving car companies for traffic violations connected to their vehicles. (Currently, robotaxis are free to obstruct traffic with no legal consequence.) The law will go into effect in 2026. The Verge reports that Newsom recently vetoed two other autonomous vehicle-related bills—one that would have banned autonomous trucks from operating on public roads, and another that would have created data reporting requirements for autonomous vehicle companies.
