Self-Driving Waymo in London Fails To Recognize Walls, Active Crime Scene

Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

A self-driving Waymo Jaguar woke a Shoreditch street at 4:15 a.m. on Wednesday, blaring a reversing alarm as it backed out of a narrow cobbled cul-de-sac. It was the third time this week. The car had taken the same wrong turn each time, into the same dead-end.

Chris Lloyd, who has lived on the street for twenty years and is on speaking terms with both ends of it, filmed the white SUV as it picked its way backward down the lane in small, careful movements. He has filmed the previous visits, too. The car has now arrived in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the predawn, which is more times of day than Lloyd hears from most of his actual friends. Assuming he has any friends, given his hobby of “filming driverless vehicles backing up in cul-de-sacs.”

The vehicle is part of Waymo’s London pilot, which began in April. The cars currently drive with safety operators behind the wheel while the software maps the city, a process that involves human safety drivers in the seat, full LIDAR coverage, fleet-wide neural net updates, and, at present, three documented failures to recognize a wall that has been in place since at least the Victorian era.

Asked about the incidents, a Waymo spokesperson said the company was “validating its technology on roads across the city” and had “limited the vehicle’s ability to drive on this street.” Neither of those sentences contained an apology, a refund, or an explanation. They contained the word “limited,” which is notably not the same as the word “prevented.”

A second incident this month involved a Waymo vehicle in Harlesden driving directly through a police cordon at the scene of a double stabbing while officers were still on the ground. Local councillors have since called for the trial to be suspended. Waymo, asked to respond, repeated that it was “validating its technology on roads across the city.” Validation, in this case, was apparently performed against an active murder investigation.

Waymo says it intends to begin fully autonomous robotaxi service in London as early as September. The British government has not yet finalized the regulations under which that would happen. Lloyd asked what he expected next, gestured down the cobbled lane, and said the car would probably be back tomorrow.