Anika Begay
San Francisco neighbors who live in a building next to a Waymo parking lot are still plagued by horns blaring at night. That’s despite a solution from the ride-hailing company that appears to have solved the original problem (cars honking in the parking lot), but it also revealed that the problem is a little more thorny than it first seemed.
Waymo said last week that the honking was the result of a safety feature that activates when a Waymo car detects another one backing up toward it. Sophia Tung, who hosts a YouTube livestream of the parking lot, said The limit in an email that the first night after Waymo’s patch, several cars missed parking and inexplicably pulled into a dead end next to his building. In a video we saw, the vehicles stalled in the dead end and started honking.
Tung said the company quickly “completely shut down the cul de sac and threw us an ice cream social to smooth things over.” After that, he added, things were quiet for a couple of days.
But early this morning, the robotaxis revealed another extreme case, when they returned enough at once to form a line to enter the parking lot. After one of them backed up toward the others waiting in the lane (where they are supposedly free from the tyranny of parking restrictions), it set off a chain reaction of Waymo vehicles backing up, triggering the next one in line to honk and drive backward, and so on.
Tung said he has already reached out to Waymo about the new honk. He also plans to speak with Waymo’s director of product management and operations, Vishay Nihalani, on a livestream tomorrow, starting at 5:30 p.m. ET.
Waymo did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
