A Waymo #robotaxi has been destroyed by an angry mob in San Francisco. When a core of your target customers is so anti your product that they actually set one on fire, there is something wrong either with your product or strategy. We don't see reports of the public torching buses, trolleybuses, Ubers or Lyfts, nor of angry mobs roaming neighborhoods burning privately-owned vehicles. So this is something to do with strategy.
It isn't hard to guess what. If your pockets are deep enough, you can use every lawyer and lobbyist trick in the book to get your own way. So Cruise and Waymo played the system to get their vehicles on the road to "save lives." But the outcome was to force every other road user into becoming non-consenting, unpaid, lab rats to test experimental robotaxi tech on behalf of trillion dollar tech companies.
In San Francisco, they watch their city leaders plead for the tech bros to slow down, and they see their fire chief being ignored. They know when they are being manipulated and lied to. But nothing changes and the robotaxi developers keep plowing on. The outcome is coning and a burnt out Waymo - and this won't be the last such incident.
What we are watching is the inevitable outcome of a breakdown in the democratic process. This isn't about the rights and wrongs of robotaxis, comparisons with human drivers, or even about making public roads safer. It is that the people of San Francisco were never asked if they wanted to be part of the robotaxi experiment, and that the concerns of their city leaders about safety are being dismissed.
When you force change on the masses nolens volens, expect a reaction, and that reaction may be violent. This is what we are now witnessing.
This isn't a tech problem needing ever more tech, but a socio-political problem based on a lack of democratic consent. It is the most commercially aware companies that are understanding the nature of the problem first. Ford was way ahead of everyone else in seeing the challenges, and Aptiv just got there second.
In comparison, Cruise's former-CEO Kyle Vogt was a technologist and Cruise was eventually forced to stop by regulators, but it is Waymo that looks most out of touch on this issue.
If a mob reacts to a Waymo robotaxi like this now, consider the reaction when one inevitably harms or kills someone. Waymo's smartest move from here is to read the runes and get out of San Francisco. But it won't. Waymo doesn't want to make roads safer, it wants to save the world its way, with its tech, irrespective of whether a community consents or not.
When a company has enough lawyers and lobbyists, it can fool itself into thinking it doesn't need democratic consent. But public roads are shared spaces and it is from within the blind spot of a messiah complex that Waymo has ultimately planted the seeds of its own destruction.
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