Waymo’s autonomous vehicles keep getting stuck in a dead-end street in San Francisco

Traffic is hell, but what if the cars clogging up the roadways are all robots? That’s what some residents on one quiet street in San Francisco have discovered, with a seemingly endless parade of autonomous vehicles from Waymo driving down a dead-end street in the city’s residential Richmond district, turning around, and driving away.

“There are some days where it can be up to 50,” resident Jennifer King told KPIX 5 in this hilarious scene report. “It’s literally every five minutes. And we’re all working from home, so this is what we hear.”

Residents are confused as to why the Waymo vehicles — Jaguar I-Pace SUVs with rooftop sensors and high-tech compute systems inside — keep coming, one after the other, sometimes two or three at a time. They aren’t picking up or dropping off customers, despite Waymo recently announcing that it was going to start shuttling passengers around San Francisco.

They don’t have any explanation for the odd behavior. (Waymo didn’t respond to KPIX 5 or The Verge’s requests for an explanation.) As someone who covers the AV industry, I could speculate about the need for companies to train their vehicle’s artificial intelligence software in all the elements of human driving, including messy maneuvers like the dreaded three-point turn. But I’m really just having too much fun watching these confused robot cars pile into this dead-end street over and over again.

It called to mind a recent event in Phoenix, in which a fully driverless Waymo vehicle got stuck at an intersection and then, when an extraction crew showed up, tried to run away before completely blocking a three-lane highway.

The obvious difference is that Waymo is still using safety drivers for its tests in San Francisco. In the video, you can see Waymo’s safety drivers turning the steering wheels, which suggests that the vehicles haven’t quite mastered the turn.

The incident is garnering some unwanted attention, including from one guy who runs a car company that’s under investigation for numerous crashes involving stopped emergency vehicles and really shouldn’t be gloating about things like this.