AsianFin -- Some Waymo self-driving cars were caught in the crossfire of the National Guard and protestors in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement actions over the weekend, with several even burned or damaged.
“We are in touch with law enforcement,” said Waymo in a statement. Five of Waymo’s vehicles were vandalized, but the company doesn’t believe protestors deliberately targeted them.
Waymo has stopped service to downtown L.A. Other areas in the region can still call for a Waymo self-driving taxi.
The vandalization of the autonomous vehicles over the weekend is sparking discussions reminiscent of the past, when 19th-century textile workers, known as Luddites, resisted automation that threatened their livelihoods.
As self-driving technology advances, similar concerns are emerging regarding job displacement. With millions of ride-hailing and 3 million truck drivers in the U.S., the transition to autonomous cars and trucks presents both challenges and opportunities. While innovation drives efficiency and cost savings, it also raises important questions about the future of employment in transportation.
But job losses appear not to be the issue in Los Angeles. The driverless vehicles were targeted mainly because the cars’ cameras are constantly recording, becoming a major source of information police can use.
Burning a Waymo is much more costly than destroying the smartphone of a bystander videoing a scene a protestor wishes to go unrecorded.
Whether that is the entire story of the damage done in this series of riots is hard to say, but it is likely a large part of what is going on.
Waymo has a fleet of more than 1,500 autonomous vehicles in a handful of U.S. cities, delivering over 250,000 paid self-driving cab rides per week. Meanwhile, Uber completes hundreds of times that number per week.
Tesla plans to launch its self-driving taxi service in June in Austin, Texas. The company intends to scale up its robo-taxi business by using vehicles owned by regular Americans in an Airbnb-type network.
Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney projects that the North American self-driving ride-hailing market will grow from annual revenue of less than $500 million in 2025 to about $7 billion by the end of the decade. Self-driving cars will still only represent about 7% of the ride-hailing market by then, Delaney wrote in a recent research report. It will take time for fleets to build, the technology to scale up, and regulations to catch up.
Shares of Alphabet, Waymo’s parent company, appeared unaffected by the weekend’s vandalization. The share price rose 1.7% to close at $177.63 on Monday, while the S&P 500 gained 0.1% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished flat.
