Waymo Recalls 80% of Robotaxis for Updates as L.A.'s Service Industry Goes Cyborg
Seventy-five years ago, a new kind of drive-in restaurant opened on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood. The Track promised to do away with carhops (and tipping) by sending food down a conveyor belt directly to waiting automobiles parked around the building. The place lasted for about five minutes until the drive-thru window was born, but employers have long dreamed of eliminating pesky humans from the workplace. Restaurants, warehouses and now taxicabs are increasingly becoming automated as robots learn our jobs. For now, robo-lattes in Glendale and bionic pizzerias in East Hollywood are a fun novelty but when the A.I. is piloting two-and-a-half tons of British luxury car down the road, things can go wrong.
Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, recently issued a recall for more than 80% of its fleet of 1,500 cars operating in Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Those Jaguar I-Pace robotaxis are under scrutiny after several high-profile incidents found the high-tech vehicles on the wrong side of the road, slowly crashing into telephone poles or trapping customers inside while doing donuts. This is at least the third recall and software update since last year when the company reported nine collisions, according to TechCrunch. 'Driverless cars,' Waymo said in a statement. 'Reduced injury causing collisions by 81% compared to expected human performance.' A Waymo in West Hollywood recently gave a little love tap to an Uber Eats Serve bot attempting to cross La Cienega Boulevard with someone's dinner. Next year, Volkswagen plans to roll out it's retro van ID Buzz AD on L.A. streets in partnership with Uber, right as Zoox, Amazon's capsule-shaped pushmi-pullyu hits the road.
The concerns are not stopping the mechanical men from their goal of eliminating the puny mortal workforce. 'The robots don't take time off,' Shahan Ohanessian, CEO of cyborg-run convenience store VenHub told NBC. 'They're working seven days a week and they don't really celebrate holidays.' He also noted that the machines recently installed in Glendale and North Hollywood are bulletproof should anyone choose to go to war with our new robot overlords.
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