Taxi drivers are the most aggressive, entitled and dangerous road users where I'm from. I'd gladly see driverless cars instead as I have no doubt that even in this early stage they would be better and safer than the cunts that drive taxis around here.
Yeah there certainly wasn't any loss leading or intentional undercutting being done to get below profitable prices to drive current players out of those markets /s
This happened during street festivities for lunar new year, so a lot of people are connecting the dots. They don't mention that the car was aggressively trying to drive through a crowd, but it seems like it was trying to make its way through a crowd.
Multiple witnesses said Waymo’s navigation technology became confused by festivities and fireworks that were lit to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Witness Anirudh Koul said the driverless car “got stuck immediately in front.”
Another witness said the car’s presence in the middle of Chinatown’s celebrations triggered frustrations in the crowd. “You could feel the frustration when people were just trying to celebrate,” she told KRON4.
"They were putting out some rage for really no reason at all. They just wanted to vandalize something, and they did," witness Edwin Carungay told KGO-TV.
The witness told the outlet the Waymo was vandalized and set on fire by a big group of people.
"One young man jumped on the hood, and on the windshield.," Carungay told KGO. "That kind of started the whole melee."
Ask yourself, this is a Chinese new year celebration, a street party. Why is there a driverless car in the middle of a street party?
All the media reports start with a driverless car in the middle of a street party, surrounded by really angry people. Why was the car there? Why are they angry at it?
Some people are so obsessed with their vehicles that seeing one destroyed feels like a personal attack on their rights. Acting like a bunch of cars don't kill a bunch of human beings every day regardless of who's driving them, professing blame belongs solely to the victims for being in the wrong place and time. Then you can see how they act when roles are reversed and the idea pops into their minds that people might destroy their precious cars, instead of the norm where cars destroy human bodies. Americans particularly seem to be completely brainwashed since the reeducation campaigns of the likes of AAA a hundred years ago.
Driverless cars are cool as fuck but still need their kinks worked out. Driving sucks and so does doing it for a living, I don't see a real negative especially once the tech cements them as safer than human driven cars, or at least no real negative which doesn't have it's root in our broken economic system.
An other article explain it got stuck in the crowd and then stopped moving as it should. Embarrassing to see people cheering on mindless vandalism and sharing false info.
Edit: it doesn't seem to be very clear what happened and there's conflicting information so my last paragraph might be completely wrong and even worse, hypocritical.
I disagree about being no negatives. Cars with or without drivers are ruining both our cities and our planet and San Francisco already has multiple excellent public transportation options. All driverless cars do is discourage people from taking public transit.
To be fair, calling San Francisco's public transportation 'excellent' isn't something I can agree with after living there for over a decade haha. But it is better than nothing 🤷
I see them as a stepping stone towards a mostly carless society personally.
I also think anyone being discouraged from taking public transit would likewise buy a car before taking public transit. I can even see the opposite, where it lets people who still need a car 5% of the time sell their ride in exchange for mostly public transit and a bit of taxi.
Individually owned cars are the devil and true public transport is definitely king, but I think driverless taxi services can serve an important niche.