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Stopped Waymo blocked Kamala Harris’ cavalry in San Francisco

Posted on by darion

In what feels oddly like a hostile gesture from the tech industry itself, a Waymo robotaxi got stuck in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ motorcade on Friday evening in San Francisco.

Harris has already experienced significant hostility from Silicon Valley, where a large group of crypto bros and many influential tech moguls (most notably Elon Musk) have chosen to support Donald Trump over the Democratic candidate. As if to demonstrate the tense relationship between the tech industry and the candidate, one of Waymo’s autonomous cars voluntarily decided to lie down in front of her convoy and transform itself into a traffic cone.

According to the San Francisco Standard, the vehicle was making a U-turn on California Street in the Nob Hill neighborhood when it malfunctioned and stopped moving. Harris’s studio apartment, headed to her hotel, was behind the car when it suddenly stopped. It is unclear how long the motorcade was disabled or whether the AV was even a problem for the vice president. Eventually, a local police officer was forced to jump into the driverless car and manually move it out of traffic.

Gizmodo has reached out to Waymo for comment.

Much of the tech elite’s consternation with Harris appears to stem from the fact that, unlike the Republicans, the Democratic Party has attempted to regulate the tech industry to some extent. Under Joe Biden, the federal government has cracked down on the crypto industry’s most high-profile actors and passed rather lenient regulations on artificial intelligence.

This isn’t the first time a robotaxi has died in the middle of a San Francisco intersection. Autonomous vehicles, which have become a feature of the city since California approved their wider use last year, have been causing traffic problems for months.

It’s probably good that California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill that will create new regulations for the robotxi industry. AB1777 will require autonomous car manufacturers to comply with a number of new regulations. Crucially, the law will allow police to cite autonomous car companies for traffic offenses related to their vehicles. (Currently, robots are free to obstruct traffic without legal consequences.) The law will go into effect in 2026. The Verge reports that Newsom recently vetoed two other bills related to autonomous vehicles – one that would have banned autonomous trucks from operating on public roads and another that would have created data reporting requirements for companies that autonomous vehicles.