Waymo robotaxis waking San Francisco neighbors with nightly honking

The self-driving revolution has turned out to involve more sleep deprivation than residents of one San Francisco neighborhood imagined.

People who live near a parking lot that Waymo recently began using as the home base for a fleet of robotaxis say they're being constantly woken up by the cars' incessant honking. When the cars slink back to their spots each night, they tend to get in each others' way and respond how many human drivers would.

But here, the only humans around to hear the cars' warnings are in their beds surrounding the jammed lot.

"There's no one for me to go down there and have a conversation with, because they're a robotaxi," Randol White, 57, told the Los Angeles Times. "That's the most frustrating thing, you're just yelling into the void."

White and other neighbors had thought empty cars would be more peaceful parkers than the baseball fans that used to congregate before and after San Francisco Giants games.

"At first I actually found it really funny, these cars are honking at each other," he said. "I don't find it funny anymore."

After the complaints began, Waymo gave the cars a software update that "should keep the noise down for our neighbors moving forward," a spokesperson told Automotive News on Aug. 14.

"We recently introduced a useful feature to help avoid low speed collisions by honking if other cars get too close while reversing toward us," the spokesperson said. "It has been working great in the city, but we didn't quite anticipate it would happen so often in our own parking lots."

Meanwhile, software engineer Sophia Tung, whose bedroom overlooks the lot, has set up a round-the-clock livestream with music she calls "LoFi Waymo Hip Hop Radio: Self Driving Taxi Depot Shenanigans To Relax/Study To." Her YouTube channel also has clips showing some of the driverless gridlock her camera has captured in only a few days. Tung told the Verge that she'd enjoy watching the cars maneuver themselves, if only they'd cut out the honking.

"It's (expletive) 4 a.m.," she says at the end of one video, sounding exhausted. "Help."