Rides with ghostly vehicles: What kind of driver does it take to violate the law? A case study of a robot axi driver in San Francisco
You can take a stroll around San Francisco in the summer and you will see Jaguar SUVs and Chevrolet vehicles driving with no one inside. The ghostly vehicles are owned and operated by Google spinoff Waymo and General Motors subsidiary Cruise. Last week, the companies received permission to operate paidrobotaxi services everywhere in the city around the clock, and there will likely be a lot more of them in the years to come.
Munderloh estimates that less than half of his rides require level of customer service beyond ferrying passengers. It might be directing tourists, assisting someone with mobility issues, or negotiating a tricky pickup spot. Munderloh recently found himself near the University of San Francisco, where a passenger was trying to explain to a robotaxi that her phone had died. The cab partially blocked the road and a human support agent responded over its loudspeaker to everyone within earshot. The car has to deal with other things as well. It’s a business proposition of giving someone a ride, too,” Munderloh says. There are dedicated, human customer support teams available via in- vehicle links, and accessibility features, that might help riders navigate robot rides.
Sometimes breaking the law is the only option. Ride-hail driver Glauco Marinho recalls picking up passengers on New Year’s Eve near San Francisco’s City Hall. A street was closed for a party, requiring drivers to make a technically forbidden U-turn. Marinha had to make his way around the robotaxi idling in the road with hazard lights flashing and he was paralyzed by its own lawfulness. There wasn’t a lot of space to maneuver around the stopped car because there were a lot of drunk people walking.
Ilina acknowledged that being a good driver often leads to being a criminal. She said the company’s robotaxis might sometimes cross a double yellow line in order to maintain a safe distance from other road users.
Being a good ride-hail driver requires being an expert at reading not just roads, but people. After Popovics spent four hours trying to scrub projectile vomit off the ceiling of his car, he hired a cleaning service and started paying closer attention to passengers’ intoxication levels. He wants to know how the passengers are doing after greeting them. “Not because I want to know about them,” he says. “I want to hear them speak to see if they’re slurring.” He has plastic bags in case someone becomes sick.
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Cruise has a cleaning fee policy and charges up to $150 for “extensive liquid and smelly messes,” including vomit. Waymo spokesperson Ilina says (human) workers use cameras inside the company’s vehicles to determine if a cleaning is needed before or after rides, and that robotaxis are always cleaned when they return to home base for charging or maintenance.
Opponents are not likely to take these major changes lying down. In the weeks leading up to the CPUC vote, several videos went viral of people placing orange cones on the hoods of the vehicles, effectively disabling them. They called it the “Week of Cone,” and it was meant to demonstrate how easy it was to confuse these supposedly high-tech vehicles.
Cruise and Waymo say they are in constant contact with police, fire, and emergency services, and have created training programs for first responders to safely interact with their vehicles. They also say that every incident is used as training data to be uploaded to the rest of the fleet to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Other drivers doubt most passengers will even notice the difference between the old and new cars. “Most people want to come in and stare at their phones,” says Gabe Ets-Hokin. “They treat me like I’m a robot anyway.”
Some who know this is coming simply shrug—several ride-hail drivers told WIRED that they think the jobs have become too crappy to fight for, because earnings have declined over the years and there’s no reward for sticking around. “It’s just a gig job,” says Sam Gormus, who doesn’t lose sleep over being replaced by a machine. I could just quit and look for something else.
A group of robotaxis broke down in the middle of a busy street to celebrate, after California regulators gave the green light to expand their services without restriction.
Several local news reports say that 10 Cruise vehicles sat paralyzed in a busy intersection near a music festival causing a traffic jam and drawing outrage from witnesses. The company said that the music festival caused wireless issues with its vehicles. The overload of the cellular networks made it difficult for Cruise’s vehicles to send and receive information.
Those cities will face similar issues as San Francisco: blocked roads, embarrassing media coverage, and populations split over the utility of robot cars versus the need to reduce car use overall.
According to Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a researcher of self- driving vehicles, every traffic incident will affect public opinion and enthusiasm for the technology. “When a large adverse event eventually happens, all that pent up public opinion is going to make it much more difficult for companies to deal with the situation.”
There are other cities that will follow. The two companies have their sights set on New York City and Los Angeles. The companies are under enormous pressure to turn on the money spigots after their parent companies have invested tens of billions of dollars for more than a decade with very little money flowing back into their coffers.
The problem with the way we regulate cars in the US is highlighted by the robotaxi dilemma. The federal government gives the states authority to license and register vehicles, but they don’t have to enforce the road rules. All that’s left for cities to do is make minor infrastructure decisions, help direct traffic — and not much else.
More outreach by the companies could be in their own best interests. The residents you are hoping will be new customers are not likely to accept rude emergency vehicles as a form of customer service. Driverless car companies are required to report crashes and vehicle miles traveled to the state and federal government, but San Francisco officials say they want more data, including incidents in which robotaxis shut down in the middle of the street or block bike lanes. The companies are silent on the matter.
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More transparency and improvement to the issues that the public cares about is essential. It is much easier to lose trust with a single bad event than it is to regain it after the fact.
The next phase is likely to be highly litigious. Peskin wants the city to “slow down or walk back” the expanded rollout of robot cars. If that’s what it means, then it could be requesting another hearing or a vote from the CPUC. The commission has authority over the city and could be sued.
The cities are always at a disadvantage in these types of fights. In California, there is a willingness to set aside local concerns about traffic, labor and safety in order for the unimpeded growth of Big Tech companies. In 2020 voters approved a ballot proposal to allow companies to continue treating their workers like independent contractors rather than employees.
It was easy to support people who were disabled or distrustful of human drivers, for example, when new technology became available. After all, disruption and inconvenience tend to go hand in hand, said Raj Rajkumar, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Think of the advent of plumbing in the home or the installation of natural gas lines.
He said that all were major societal changes and that we cannot live without them. Strong passions get the most attention and negative things get the news headlines. Assuming that this comes to pass, day-to-day convenience and ergonomics for many customers will begin to triumph.
