A self-driving Waymo car woke up residents of a quiet street in London at 4am after becoming stuck while trying to drive down a road with a dead end three times in one week.
On Sunday, a resident took to social media to complain one of the American firm’s fleet had woken him up at 4.15am, after entering a narrow city street and attempting to reverse out again.
Chris, from London, posted footage of the incident showing the white SUV-style car mounting the curb of the cobbled road as it gingerly attempted to reverse the length of the street.
But far from learning from its mistake, by Wednesday night the same thing had happened twice more.
Waymo is currently testing its fleet of distinctive white Jaguar vehicles, which are designed to offer a completely autonomous, self-driving taxi service.
The firm, which already operates a completely driverless service in American cities including San Francisco, Miami and Atlanta, announced in January that 24 vehicles would roam London for testing and street mapping purposes.
The fleet has become a familiar sight around parts of the city, although a safety driver still sits at the wheel of the cars should the need to intervene arise. The firm originally planned to test the service before wider use is rolled out as early as September, and is reportedly planning to roll out to other British cities afterwards.
But the vehicles have come under scrutiny since hitting the streets of London after one ploughed into a taped-off crime scene in Harlesden, west London, last month. Waymo later blamed driver error for the incident.
On Sunday, a resident took to social media to complain one of the American firm’s fleet had woken him up at 4.15am, after entering a narrow city street and attempting to reverse out again
A separate incident days later saw a Waymo again become stuck, before having to complete a three-point turn to exit the road
Elder Street, in Shoreditch, has a metal gate preventing through traffic, essentially making one end of the street a dead end.
Waymo’s technology, however, has not seemed to realise this and has instead sent at least three vehicles up the road in the dead of night.
Chris complained that the incidents had ‘woken up everyone in the street’ and hit out at the firm, which is owned by Alphabet – Google’s parent company – for not correcting the error.
He added that the vehicles had become stuck on approaching the barrier, where they had sat stationary for minutes, seemingly flummoxed.
Footage from the first incident on Sunday showed the vehicle, which had mounted the pavement as it approached the dead end, slumping back onto the cobbles as it reversed very slowly back along the length of the street.
The car could be heard making a loud beeping and humming noise as it reversed, that was clearly caught on video, despite Chris filming from some distance away.
The second incident, overnight on Wednesday, again appears to have taken place in the dead of night.
This time the safety driver could be seen getting out of the vehicle and walking around it to check his spacing as he navigated a three-point turn in the narrow street – made more difficult by the presence of parked cars.
A fleet of Waymo cars are currently being tested in 19 boroughs in London, ahead of a rollout by the end of 2026
It comes just two weeks after a separate incident in the capital in which a Waymo vehicle drove into a crime scene.
A road had been closed in Harlesden, north-west London, following a double stabbing.
Video footage captured the moment the vehicle sped into the road, seemingly oblivious to the police cars with flashing lights and crime scene tape.
Waymo later said the car was being manually driven at the time and that its ‘initial analysis’ suggested the vehicle would have halted if it was in its autonomous mode.
The taxis use four sensor systems to gather and use data from the world around them – vision, radar, microphone and lidar.
Lidar – Light Detection and Ranging – is a remote sensing method that uses laser pulses to measure distances and create precise 3D, high-resolution models of objects and surrounding terrain.
A powerful computer in the boot of the vehicle processes all of the data and decides the car’s actions in real time.
But even though the service is now well-established in parts of the US, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.
Earlier this year, some of its vehicles were spotted illegally passing American school buses as they stopped to allow children on and off.
And in October, a Waymo was responsible for killing a local cat in San Francisco.
The vehicle had stopped to pick up passengers when, according to the firm, tabby KitKat darted underneath it as it pulled away.
A spokesman for the firm said: ‘We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and to the community who loved him, and we have made a donation to a local animal rights organisation.’
Some passengers in the US have also reported becoming stuck inside the vehicles, while during a power outage in San Francisco in December the cars simply grounded to a halt, as they did not know how to react at intersections when traffic lights stopped working.
The firm maintains it has a strong safety record, citing figures showing its cars are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes which result in serious injuries.
A spokesman for Waymo said: ‘As we prepare for fully autonomous operations in London, we want to validate our technology on roads across the city. However, we’ve now limited vehicles’ ability to drive on this street in response to this feedback.’
