Police can apparently now hop into stalled, confused Waymo robotaxis and drive them away manually, and this reportedly happened twice Wednesday night at Mayor Daniel Lurie’s inauguration party.
As new San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie celebrated his inauguration in Chinatown Wednesday night, a very not-new San Francisco thing happened. Mission Local reports that stalled Waymos held up traffic on at least two separate occasions (and we’ve found a third unverified account of this), in what was obviously a very motorcaded-up and chaotic street party.
But what’s unique here is that police were able to quickly unlock and jump into the Waymos, and drive them manually out of their confused jams. This capability has apparently existed for a couple of years, though maybe first responders are just becoming more aware of it, or maybe it’s just getting more efficient…