Burning of Autonomous Waymo Taxi sparks debate on self-driving vehicles

On a busy intersection at the height of the Chinese New Year festivities, an angry mob set upon a poor defenceless Autonomous Waymo Taxi and burnt it down.  Authorities are now trying to determine if this was the latest in a series of protests that target autonomous taxis by groups like the Safe Street Rebels, a group that has been protesting them for a while.

A report circulated by the San Francisco fire department detailed pictures of the incident as a crowd jumped the electric vehicle, spray painting slogans on it, smashing the windows and then setting it on fire. 

No arrests have been made at the time of writing despite the incident occurring on a very busy intersection in the heart of the City’s China Town during the Lunar New Year Festivities.

The car was a Jaguar I-Pace operated by Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxi project, as a driverless taxi which at the time of the attack was unoccupied. According to Waymo no one was hurt in the incident either. 

Waymo and other wannabe providers of driverless taxis are battling what seems to be a concerted effort to thwart them. There have been a number of attacks on their vehicles including those by the Safe Street Rebels who have been conducting a campaign using simple traffic cones to stop the relentless march of technology.

The protestors question the safety of the vehicles particularly in California which is a leading US State for driverless technology. Thus far, more than nine million miles have been driven on public roads by autonomous vehicle test permit holders without major incident. 

They seem to be forgetting the traffic chaos caused a few weeks back by a stalled vehicle though which some headlines called “a warning to the World!”.

It may be slightly more fundamental than that though. A seasoned taxi driver would have known to avoid the busiest intersection in a major China Town in the middle of Chinese New Year Festivities. 

By contrast, the dumb Waymo tried to drive straight across the intersection while party-goers were choking the streets and pavements. 

So maybe it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time, and all of the talk about this being evidence of yet another protest against the rise of the machines is but a storm in a tea-cup, full of quality Chinese tea of course.