In one of the more bizarre technology tales so far this year, Waymo has apparently finally gotten its honking robocars to be quiet.
The story began last week when it emerged that driverless cars owned by Waymo were keeping residents of a San Francisco neighborhood awake at night by incessantly honking their horns after they arrived in a local parking lot.
It seemed that whenever a Waymo car reversed into a parking space, any already parked robocars that were close by would start honking.
“We started out with a couple of honks here and there, and then as more and more cars started to arrive, the situation got worse, ” local resident Christopher Cherry told NBC Bay Area News last week.
Waymo responded by saying that it had rolled out a software fix to stop the unwanted noise. But the autonomous cars kept on honking.
Disgruntled and presumably sleep-deprived local resident Sophia Tung decided to set up a live stream to show the Waymo cars continuing to merrily honk away.
Tung even managed to arrange an interview to discuss the ongoing issue with Waymo director of product and operations Vishay Nihalani, which she live-streamed on Monday.
Nihalani admitted that while honking was an important ability for a car to have out on public roads to warn human drivers and pedestrians of a vehicle’s presence, there was no good reason for one autonomous car to honk at another within the confines of a parking lot. And while the first patch failed to silence the robocars as expected, a second just-released patch should have done the job, finally bringing peace to a once honk-filled neighborhood.
Waymo has been teseting its driverless cars in San Francisco for years and is now using them to trial a paid ridesharing service for city residents.
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