On Waymos

An infiltration of driverless cars.

By Isabelle Oh

Illustration by Isabelle Oh

My first Waymo encounter was somewhere in my neighborhood in San Francisco, around my junior or senior year of high school. At the time, they were a novelty even to those of us in the Bay Area.

I wasn’t tuned into the tech industry in a way that would have notified me of the appearance of autonomous vehicles. Similar to most San Franciscans, I assume, the appearance of Waymos and similar vehicles was random, unexpected, and unprompted. 

It was a slow trickle, starting in residential neighborhoods with monitors sitting behind the wheel. At that point, multiple companies had prototypes roaming the streets. Some had bike-rack-like rigs with spinning sensors, while others had tall, camera-encrusted apparatuses on their roofs with more spinning sensors mounted above each headlight. I watched as prototypes were replaced with slightly altered versions, as monitors became obsolete and the driver seats emptied, as cars with certain brand names disappeared while others multiplied. I drove around them when they pulled over for no reason, cast a glare at the empty driver’s seat while speeding past. But they weren’t just annoying. I’d watch as the steering wheel moved of its own accord. I imagined the acceleration and brake pedals moving like those self-playing pianos in old Westerns. It was eerie and unnatural.

I remember driving by an intersection and looking over at the cross street. A truck was trying to pull out of a grocery store loading dock and two Waymos were approaching in opposite directions on either side of the truck that now blocked half the street’s width. Both attempted to circumvent the truck, but neither could continue as they would otherwise collide with the other. It was a stand-off; neither could make the first move. One vehicle couldn’t wave the other on to pass. Cars with drivers behind their wheels had begun to clog the street, with the truck and the two Waymos at an impasse. I passed the odd situation before I could witness its resolution. Slowly, I realized, these robots had begun to blend in. 

Even before the more recent acts of Waymo-trashing related to the anti-ICE protests taking place throughout California, people were frustrated by these robots infiltrating the streets. Over winter break I saw a parked Waymo with blue tape wrapped around each sensor and camera. Two summers ago, a Waymo was stopped on a busy street. Someone had put a traffic cone on its hood, hazard lights flashing in the dark, confused.  With no driver to flip off, the whole car became the victim of road rage. Rumbling beneath these small acts was a feeling that the cars were at best tolerated, and at worst completely unwelcome.

As protests in Los Angeles and around the country have ballooned in reaction to law enforcement kidnapping people off the streets, many have noted that Waymos and other driverless cars have been overwhelmingly vandalized, burned, and otherwise destroyed. Destruction of property has long been a part of civil unrest, but burning autonomous vehicles felt targeted, purposeful in the spray painted words “Fuck ICE” emblazoned on every melting car door. Burning Waymos, their signature bright white paint with bulbous, beetle-like sensors and cameras protruding out of the bumpers and roofs engulfed in bright orange flames and billowing black smoke, have become symbols of a deep-seated frustration and anger toward those whose intentions are at best unknown and at worst malicious and hateful, against law enforcement and Silicon Valley tech bros, and an incursion of a technology thrust upon a city struggling for basic human rights at a pace far faster than what anyone was and is capable of keeping up with.

I’ve talked to many friends who have come to appreciate Waymos. They’re helpful when getting home late at night, sometimes a bit cheaper too (a whole other conversation about putting many rideshare drivers out of work). They make up for some of the lackluster reach and reliability of Bay Area public transportation. They offer a form of independent mobility around the city, especially for those with disabilities. Autonomous vehicles are not an inherent evil; they’re useful, even. 

But despite the value autonomous cars might bring, images of burning and graffitied cars still plastered headlines. Setting fire to what is essentially a giant battery is dangerous and toxic, but the act is symbolic, even if violent. Cars are a regular sight in San Francisco, and most certainly in Los Angeles, yet the inclusion of cameras and sensors pointed outward at pedestrians, homes, other cars, watching and tracking the surroundings of these driverless vehicles evokes that of beetle-black eyes. Though perhaps not built for surveillance, it certainly felt as if the city were being watched in yet another covert way, and people started reacting to that discomfort. 

As protests continued throughout the first full weekend of June, Waymo began instructing, or programming, its vehicles to avoid certain parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities. Expressions and acts of frustration had escalated from traffic cones on hoods or tape over sensors to fires and smoke. For those past few weeks, people had been viscerally reminded of their lack of control in the city they called home. But for the past few years, the trickling in of autonomous vehicles was a subtle but incessant poking that the places we called home can be trashed, manipulated; that shared spaces are no longer truly safe, but crawling with far away entities with no real interests in making it a better place to live. 

Many elected officials and some protest organizers have called for the protests to remain peaceful. Yet every popular movement opposing discriminatory and malicious treatment of individuals, though all with some element of violence, has eventually been regarded by history as a net good. I don’t yet know if I still possess the same faith in the course of history, that we can pull ourselves out of this spiral toward an irreversible reliance on artificial intelligence, out of this nation’s inability to truly treasure humanity and human life.