If you've ever wondered what happens to all those self-driving taxis when the world is asleep, a YouTube channel has the scoop. Since the beginning of the month, software engineer Sophia Tung has been working on the new technology. has been broadcasting live a San Francisco parking lot that Waymo is renting to give its robotaxis a place to go during their downtime.
Tung said The edge In an email, Waymo said the company apparently took over “partially” the lot on July 28 and then took over the entire lot. Waymo recently opened its robotaxi service to anyone in San Francisco.
Days later, she Setting up live streamingwith LoFi studio beats. Tung told us he’s running it from a mini PC he had lying around, with a webcam surrounded by a cereal box to cut down on glare. Now, at any time of day, you can pop in to see what the Waymo cars are up to. If there’s no Waymo in the parking lot, “the flock will begin migrating back” between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. PST Sunday through Thursday or between 11:00 p.m. and midnight Friday and Saturday, the text overlay on the video says.
As I write this, the parking lot is quiet, with just three cars parked. But when the lot starts to fill up (which “usually happens around 4 a.m.,” according to Tung), what sounds like a maddening ballet of autonomous parking and honking begins. The noise lasts for up to an hour before quieting down, he said.
Waymo is “aware that in some scenarios our vehicles may briefly honk their horns while navigating our parking lots,” said company spokesman Chris Bonelli. The edge in an email, adding that Waymo has figured out what's causing the behavior and is working to fix it.
Tung, who describes himself as a micromobility advocate, said: The edge “People are generally baffled,” he says, and he likes the cars there. “It’s actually fun to watch the cars come and go,” he says, adding that “the only thing that needs to be sorted out is the honking.”
