Waymos are bad drivers too
There appears to be this myth that Waymos drive far better than Cruise vehicles. Turns out they screw up all the time! Now they get their own page to keep track of their foibles.
It would take two strategically placed Waymos to block the entire Embarcadero
Waymo crashes into a large and stationary pole
While driving down a little alley in Phoenix a Waymo crashed into a large pole fast enough to crumple the front end of the vehicle. Waymo of course has not explained what went wrong here.
Here is the rather small alley that the Waymo crunched itself:
Get the Fuck Out of the Bike Lane
There is absolutely no excuse for this one, Waymo.
“Chaos ensues” is not a good customer review
Turns out those Waymos catch on fire pretty easily
Not the first time Waymo drives in the wrong place
Back in July ’22 an errant Waymo drove into the Dolores Hill Bomb event. That was ill advised. Spray paint was of course also involved.
As with the recent incident in Chinatown, Waymo was happy to work closely with the SFPD on the investigation to identify the dastardly perpetrators. But, due to past history of the local police, a local publication ridiculed the notion of the police actually doing anything.
“The autonomous specialist was eventually able to direct the car safely out of the crowd and remove themselves from the situation. We are in close communication with the San Francisco Police Department as they actively investigate this incident.”
Haha, good luck with that SFPD “active investigation,” Waymo spokesperson!
SFist
Another example of Waymos now being a target
Though no one has tried to make Waymo robotaxis a target, they certainly have achieved that status on their own. It is hard to figure out what might solve their problem. Only thing certain is that additional “safety studies” conducted by Waymo will not convince people otherwise.
Another example of Waymo driving poorly
It doesn’t take sportsball fans or a “partying mob” to cause Waymo difficulties. Remember that they can get into big trouble all on their own since Autonomous Vehicle tech is still not quite there.
Waymos just can’t get enough of construction zones
How could their amazing AI miss that this was a construction zone?? And it tries to keep going!?!?
They don’t even know which side of the road to be on
This driving into oncoming traffic for two blocks is rather egregious.
And some really dangerous driving around a transit bus
On February 13, 2024, a Waymo did an incredibly dangerous maneuver in front of a city bus in Phoenix. It was purely by chance that the car driver in the next lane over didn’t run right into the robotaxi. This dangerous behavior was not reported by Waymo to regulators. Instead, we only know about it because the passengers, who was laughing quite nervously, posted this video on YouTube.
Blocking public transit, just like Cruise
And how did two Waymos hit a vehicle being towed?
It took a while for the news to get out but it turns out that on December 11th, 2023, two separate Waymo robotaxis hit a pickup truck being towed. Waymo of course tried to blame it all on the tow truck driver. But they ended up doing a software recall because it was clear that the Waymo vehicles were not predicting what a backwards facing vehicle was going to do next. And of course, neither of the Waymos had passengers at the time, meaning once again, they were not replacing potentially bad human drivers. Instead, they were only adding miles driven via their very expensive zero-occupancy vehicles, and causing two collisions doing so.
This Waymo customer just wants to get the hell out of the car
This person was clearly not happy with Waymo’s “Full Self Driving”. Sounds more like a kidnapping than a nice ride in Google’s finest.
Waymo, the convenient target
Not having a driver definitely did not help here.
More pranks
Coning certainly got a lot of attention, but now people have found out they can befuddle a Waymo just with a Stop sign t-shirt. Glad to see the pranksters got a whole article about their shenanigans in TheStreet.
Are they really self driving?
Turns out that the Waymo tech is no way ready for real autonomous driving. There is apparently a human monitor for every single vehicle. Their technology appears to have a long way to go, but at least Waymo deals with it, unlike Cruise. But this means that their service is very expensive to operate and is not likely to ever be a viable business.
