San Francisco Waymo arson sparks fresh debate on self-driving cars
By Hyunjoo Jin and Abhirup Roy
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — A seasoned San Francisco cab driver might have avoided the intersection of Jackson Street and Grant Avenue, in the heart of the city's Chinatown on the first day of Chinese New Year.
An autonomous Waymo robotaxi, by contrast, drove toward the cross streets on Saturday evening, when crowds were blocking all sides and revelers were lighting fireworks, according to two witnesses. Minutes later, some in the crowd attacked the car and set it on fire.
«Most normal car drivers know that they have to avoid Chinatown during the Lunar New Year holidays. The computer doesn't understand that,» said Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who has called for more regulation of self-driving cars.
The incident highlighted both the limited ability of robotic cars to make judgment calls and hostility to them for a host of reasons, such as concerns about safety, the jobs they might take from human drivers, and a more generalized fear of artificial-intelligence, according to officials and academics.
Others in San Francisco, where such vehicles have become commonplace, voice support for the cars as safer than human drivers.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed called the Chinatown Waymo incident a «dangerous and destructive act of vandalism» and praised the city's role as a testing ground for the development of self-driving cars.
«We are a city that is home to exciting, emerging technologies, like autonomous vehicles, that are changing the world,» Breed said.
Saturday's destruction of the vehicle from Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), followed an incident last week in which another Waymo car struck a bicyclist. In October, a
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