Revolt against the ROBOCARS

People keep telling us driverless cars are the future. But they’ve brought such chaos to San Francisco that vigilantes are now hunting them down, torching them – and disabling them simply by putting a traffic cone on the bonnet

SAN Franciscans know better than to drive into Chinatown during the Lunar New Year celebrations. The narrow streets are guaranteed to be heaving with revellers, and fireworks explode wildly in all directions. The Year of the Dragon, which was welcomed in last month, is considered particularly lucky – but it certainly wasn’t for the driverless ‘robotaxi’ that inadvertently gatecrashed the party.

After dropping off a passenger nearby on the first day of the Chinese new year, the Jaguar I-PACE – owned by Waymo, an offshoot of Google and one of the world’s first fully self-driving cars – headed towards a busy intersection, its supposedly omniscient artificial intelligence computer system apparently oblivious to the party-goers surrounding it. Some time later, it finally did register that something was up and stopped in its tracks.

It never moved again. Minutes later, the crowd had used some of those New Year fireworks to set it ablaze, sending up a huge plume of black smoke.

It was clearly no accident. Video footage shot by bystanders shows people scribbling graffiti on the car and breaking the windows before jumping on the bonnet and smashing the windscreen as the watching crowd applauded.

‘That was when it went WILD,’ wrote Michael Vandi, a witness who said nobody tried to stop the violence. ‘There wasn’t anything you could do to stand up to dozens of people.’

The fire department later released photos of the charred wreck – all that was left of a car estimated to have cost as much as £130,000 (€153,000).

Waymo brushed off the incident as a ‘one-off event’ and made no attempt to explain what lay behind the destruction.

But San Franciscans could easily have explained it – and they also know the attack was not an isolated incident.

While it appeared to be the first time one of the estimated 600 robotaxis cruising the city had been actually set on fire, the vehicles have been repeatedly attacked, vandalised and immobilised in a sustained display of civic outrage.

Once considered a deeply cool way of getting around one of America’s most happening cities, the cars are now widely shunned as a total menace on wheels.

This week, critics expressed dismay after a California regulator allowed Waymo to extend services to the fast-moving freeways around San Francisco and a large swathe of Los Angeles – where robotaxis could legally travel at up to 65mph (105kph).

‘We are seeing people reaching a boiling point over tech that they do not want and that does not make their lives better,’ says Missy Cummings, a robotics professor at George Mason University in Washington DC, about the taxi burning.

A former senior adviser on traffic safety to the US government, she told the Mail: ‘People are tired of having artificial intelligence jammed down their throats and being told implicitly that they’re about to be replaced – whether it’s a taxicab driver or a white-collar worker.’

It’s not hard to see why that anger is being taken out on selfdriving cars. Some of their mistakes have been terrifying.

Only this week, social media was ablaze with pictures of another rogue electric Jaguar I-PACE tearing down a British motorway after it suffered an ‘electrical fault’.

Although fully self-driving cars are not allowed for now on UK (and Irish) roads, the terrified driver of the vehicle – whose manufacturer promises ‘unyielding acceleration’ – was helpless, saying: ‘The car was in its own world.’

The brakes failed — and Nathan Owen’s £80,000 (€94,000) car reached up to 100mph (160kph) as it hurtled down the M62.

Mr Owen, 31, managed to avoid a catastrophic crash by calling the police, who intervened to bring the Jaguar to a halt by trapping it between their patrol cars, but he revealed that his car had gone rogue in December, too.

In San Francisco – the chief testing ground for the technology since they were introduced in 2022 – self-driving cars have been seen blundering into police, fire and ambulance emergencies and blocking their vehicles (more than 75 separate incidents have been

‘The taxis are reportedly a popular place to have sex’

recorded, including one in which police were trying to reach an active shooting), knocking over cyclists, rear-ending buses, stopping suddenly for no reason in fast-moving traffic and even running over a pedestrian and dragging her 20 feet before stopping with her body underneath.

It was all supposed to be so different. The cars were meant to be a radical and boldly futuristic solution to the hazards and drudgery of driving.

They were trumpeted by their advocates in the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) industry as safer and slower. And San Francisco, a short (but inadvisable) robotaxi drive from Silicon Valley, waved them through with few objections, keen for the city to become the unofficial birthplace of a tech revolution.

Unveiled with the kind of hype and promises to be expected from Silicon Valley, self-driving cars are now having a very bumpy ride.

Their potential advantages were never difficult to identify: making cars accessible to everyone and saying farewell to fallible humans at the wheel with all their weaknesses, like driving under the influence, being distracted by their mobile phones or passengers or tiredness.

The European Commission is now developing regulations to support the future use of selfdriving cars, which will influence any legislation introduced by member states, including Ireland.

In the UK, the government – which says it wants to be a world leader in technology – is enthusiastic about self-driving cars, hoping that Britain can profit from an international AV market estimated to be worth up to £42 billion (€50billion within 10 years. British transport secretary Mark Harper breathlessly announced last December that autonomous vehicles could be on Britain’s roads as soon as 2026.

‘This technology exists, it works, and what we’re doing is putting in place the proper legislation so that people can have full confidence in the safety of this technology,’ he told the BBC’s Today programme.

But if he thinks the technology ‘works’ – and, oddly, he said his verdict was based on what he’s seen in California – he is letting his excitement run away with him.

Positive stories about robotaxis – reportedly a popular place to have sex – have long since been outnumbered by negative ones.

Videos of Waymo and General Motors-owned Cruise robotaxis going badly wrong have gone viral.

The cars have done everything from rolling into wet cement to crashing into a fire engine, injuring a passenger.

Anti-robotaxi activists in a secretive group called Safe Street Rebel have taken to hunting down the vehicles in San Francisco and immobilising them: a simple

‘‘It is not as sophisticated as they would have us believe’

procedure that involves placing a traffic cone on their bonnet, interfering with the sensors. The

companies then have to send out someone to recover the vehicle.

Experts say the main problem is that the technology behind selfdriving cars simply isn’t ready – and won’t be, some academics estimate, for at least 30 years.

Prof Cummings says: ‘What everybody wants to know is: “When am I going to be able to call one of these things on my cell phone and it can take me anywhere, at any time?” And my answer to that question is: “Not in my lifetime”.’

Experts identify myriad problems. Top of the list is so-called ‘phantom braking’ in which the car’s AI ‘hallucinates’, seeing something in the road that simply isn’t there, and slams on the brakes.

Nobody knows quite why it happens but it is believed to be related to shadows, possibly caused by clouds overhead.

‘It’s one thing for a slow cargo vehicle carrying groceries at 25mph to slam on its brakes in an urban setting, where nobody else is going very fast,’ says Prof Cummings.

‘It’s a completely different animal when you’ve got a semi-trailer truck [articulated lorry] going 65 miles an hour down the interstate and then it slams on its brakes.’

That distinction explains why robotaxis have been introduced in another US city, Phoenix, Arizona, with far less trouble.

Unlike congested San Francisco, suburban Phoenix is full of wide roads, slow traffic and few pedestrians other than slowmoving retirees – the sort of untaxing conditions, she believes, where autonomous vehicles can thrive.

Another serious problem with driverless cars, say academics, is their capacity for error when faced with situations for which they haven’t been trained.

This was illustrated last October when a Cruise robotaxi ran over a San Francisco pedestrian – after a human-driven car in front had delivered her a glancing blow – and dragged her 20 feet.

Nine Cruise officials were sacked and the company suspended all operations in the US after admitting it had misled regulators about the seriousness of the incident.

The woman survived but is reportedly still in hospital.

US politicians and safety experts are starting to see beyond the hype, demanding greater transparency and tighter rules of the secretive AV industry.

California state senator Dave Cortese, who is proposing legislation to give local governments more power to regulate these cars, warns: ‘What is becoming abundantly clear is that AV technology is not as sophisticated as the industry would like us to believe.’

Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a road safety pressure group in Washington, calls the situation in San Francisco a ‘fiasco’.

She told the Mail that governments are failing to see what is actually happening on the roads

Target: The blazing robotaxi in San Francisco and, below, cars disabled by cones

and falling for AV companies ‘that are being very persuasive about what they think they can deliver’.

One of the main objections to the vehicles is their unpredictability, she says, citing a report of a robotaxi suddenly speeding up and almost hitting a child.

‘We’re actually quite lucky that more – and more serious – injuries haven’t happened yet,’ she says.

Tech experts say the AV companies could have prevented most of the accidents had they kept human back-up drivers in the robotaxis, as used to be the case, but they insisted on pushing ahead without them.

Facing competition from China and backed by billions of dollars from venture capitalists who are now clamouring for a return on their investment, the driverlesscar companies are said by critics to be cutting corners in their rush to deliver.

And nobody’s in more of a rush than Elon Musk who, for about a decade, has assured investors that his Tesla electric cars are only a year or so away from becoming fully autonomous.

His frequent tendency to overegg the self-driving capabilities of Teslas – whose ‘Autopilot’ function is essentially enhanced ‘cruise control’ rather than full autonomy – has landed the company in a lot of trouble.

An investigation by the Washington Post revealed how federal data shows that, since it was introduced in 2014, Autopilot

‘You’re not ready, we’re not ready, the cars are not ready’

has been involved in 736 crashes, at least 19 of them fatal.

The company now faces at least 10 lawsuits over Autopilot. The cases allege Tesla exaggerated the self-driving capability. In some, drivers died after assuming the car could drive itself and taking their eyes off the road.

Last week, Texas police announced they were treating the drowning of the billionaire sister-in-law of Republican senator Mitch McConnell as a criminal matter after her Tesla reversed into a pond and firemen spent an hour trying to get her out.

Tesla counters that in such cases the driver is still in control of the vehicle and must pay attention.

Needless to say, none of this has done any favours for the reputation of real self-driving cars.

Prof Cummings admits she is bemused that some countries are so enthusiastic about autonomous cars. She says the British government ignored her advice when, as a senior safety adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, she essentially told them: ‘You’re not ready, we’re not ready, the cars are not ready.’

She says ‘people are desperate for the magic’ of self-driving cars, but an articulated lorry suddenly stopping on a motorway is the sort of magic we can all live without.