As Waymo's driverless cars spread, the reactions are piling up from every direction. In San Francisco, Amazon's Zoox is angling to challenge Waymo for market share; Lyft is musing about a future where its human drivers service Waymo's fleet instead of competing with it; and in Minneapolis, city officials are weighing a rule that would force Waymo to keep a human behind the wheel, citing fears for rideshare jobs.
As Waymo scales its driverless fleet, the friction is showing: the Transport Workers Union blasted the company in a newsletter titled 'Coast-to-Coast Waymo Woes,' while TechCrunch reported that Waymo and Zoox test drivers are suffering whiplash and sprains on the job. Meanwhile, actual robotaxis keep finding trouble on the road — one was struck in a Denver collision, and another collided with a minivan outside a California Costco (though that one, at least, wasn't a hit-and-run).
As Waymo and its robotaxi rivals race to add cities and rides, the messier side of that expansion is surfacing. In Dallas, a pedestrian was struck by two vehicles, one a Waymo car; nationally, reporting shows robotaxi operators are hitting unexpected snags — construction zones, emergency scenes — faster than they can patch them. A comparison of two major U.S. operators found stark safety gaps, with one logging 14 crashes in 800,000 miles despite a human safety driver up front. Meanwhile, a federal judge in San Francisco refused to let Waymo keep running its cars overnight while it appeals a regulatory ban, underscoring how far ahead of oversight the technology is moving.