Waymo Faces Growing Opposition from Left-Wing Luddite Activists – MishTalk

Waymo hasn’t announced any specific plans to launch a driverless taxi service in Boston. But the Google self-driving company did some preliminary testing and mapping there this summer (with safety drivers behind the wheel) and the Boston City Council wasn’t happy about it. The council grilled Waymo about its plans at a four-hour hearing on July 24.

“My main concern with this technology in Boston and honestly across the country is the loss of jobs and livelihoods of so many people,” said City Councilor Enrique Pepén.

City Councilor Julia Mejia declared her “strong opposition” to driverless vehicles operating in Boston.

“What we are doing is creating an opportunity for people to choose to not support humans,” Mejia said. “If we’re competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers.”

When a Waymo representative mentioned the Waymo Driver—the company’s name for its self-driving software, Mejia objected. “Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot,” she said. Mejia considered it “very triggering” for Waymo to use the term “driver” to describe a technology rather than a person.

Across the country, states and cities have been grappling with how—and whether—to allow autonomous vehicles on their roads. Red states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Florida have rolled out the red carpet for Waymo. But the technology has gotten a frosty reception in blue jurisdictions like Boston.

And this means that the leaders of blue states stand at a crossroads.

City Councilor Benjamin Weber found it “concerning to hear that the company was making a detailed map of our city streets without having a community process beforehand.” He added that “it’s important that we listen when we hear from the Teamsters and others who feel as though they’re blindsided by this.”

“I think it’s important that we pause—sometimes we rush—and make sure everyone’s voice is heard before anything happens that we can’t turn back from and that protections are in place for our workers,” said City Councilor Erin Murphy.

The next day, Murphy announced legislation requiring that a “human safety operator is physically present” in all autonomous vehicles—effectively a ban on driverless vehicles. Given the near-unanimous hostility Waymo faced at the hearing, I wouldn’t be surprised if Murphy’s proposal became law in Boston.

And while Boston seems likely to be the first Democratic-leaning jurisdiction to pass legislation like this, it may not be the last. A number of other Democratic-leaning states are considering proposals to restrict or ban the deployment of driverless vehicles.

If these ideas become law, we could wind up in a future where driverless cars are widely deployed in red states and illegal or heavily restricted in many blue states. Not only would this be inconvenient for blue state passengers and bad for blue state economies, it would be a powerful symbol of how dysfunctional—even reactionary—blue state governance has become.

If this isn’t the future Democrats want, they’re going to have to say no to the Teamsters.

The stakes are high

This debate really matters because Waymo is now approaching the steepest part of its growth curve. The company has commercial operations in five cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta—and it is preparing to expand its service to at least a dozen others. So the decisions policymakers make over the next two years will have a big impact on how—and where—self-driving technology develops.

The most obvious reason this debate matters is safety. Waymo estimates that over the first 70 million miles, Waymo’s vehicles got into major crashes—those serious enough to cause an injury or trigger an airbag—about 80 percent less often than comparable human-driven vehicles.

It’s always worth taking a company’s own statistics with a grain of salt. But I’ve consulted multiple traffic safety experts over the last two years and they’ve consistently told me Waymo’s research is credible. A large majority of crashes involving Waymo vehicles have been clearly the result of a human driver in another vehicle. For example, one of the most common crash types involves a human driver rear-ending a Waymo.

So while opponents of autonomous vehicles sometimes claim that banning robotaxis is a pro-safety move, it’s more likely to cost lives than to save them.

In this hypothetical world, there’s a growing safety gap between red and blue states. Red states are enjoying steadily declining crash rates as more vehicles become driverless. But crash rates in blue cities are as high as they’ve ever been.

This would be a bad outcome for left-leaning communities for all kinds of practical reasons. And it would also carry a symbolic punch. After all, progressives like to imagine themselves to be champions of progress—it’s right there in the name. Yet it’s hard to think of a more anti-progress stance than banning a technology with the potential to save thousands of lives, reclaim billions of hours of commuting time, and make every purchase a little cheaper and a lot more convenient.

Hello Elon Musk, you are now 10 million rides behind Waymo.

Tesla’s FSD is not ready for prime time and won’t be without LIDAR.