- Waymo's robot taxis debuted to the public in San Francisco in June.
- An engineer set up a livestream of a Waymo parking lot after being woken up by the cars' honking.
On an early July morning, Sophia Tung woke up to the incessant honking of Waymos, the self-driving robot taxis built by Alphabet, outside her apartment in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco.
In a video she posted on YouTube, the Waymos can be seen slowly finding their parking space in a depot of other parked Waymos — driving in reverse, driving forward, and honking at no one.
As she watched the Waymos, Tung, an SF resident of about eight years, thought it'd be funny to livestream the self-driving cars clumsily navigating their way in the parking lot. A tech-savvy software engineer, Tung had the wherewithal to set up a stream using an old Logitech camera, a mini PC, and a cereal box to enclose the camera in darkness so it wouldn't capture the glare coming from the apartment window.
The engineer added some lo-fi hip-hop beats to the backdrop, and on August 5, "LoFi Robotaxi Hip Hop Radio Waymo Depot Shenanigans To Relax/Study To" was born.
For San Francisco residents like myself, the sight of the white self-driving Jaguar I-PACE automobiles, with clunky cameras and sensors around the body, is not new.
"It's almost sort of like — when I go somewhere else, I feel like something is missing on the street," Tung, 28, told Business Insider in an interview.
Tung's livestream cuts to the core of that disenchanting effect: Years of innovation and billions of dollars come together at an inconspicuous parking lot against the sound of calming, lo-fi beats.
Someone told Tung that her livestream has become their digital "fish tank." A German IT company sent Tung a photo of her livestream playing on a TV in its office.
Comparing the past's expectations of a utopian future against what we have today might inspire ennui. Still, if anything illustrates the unrealized promises of technology's trajectory, it's that we may have been promised jetpacks, but instead, we got a robot parking lot.
To be clear, Waymo's cars are impressive. A few of my colleagues and I have ridden in a Waymo. The autonomous driver is smooth, safe, and pretty damn smart. As Waymo gathers more data, it's likely to get better.
But as BI's Peter Kafka noted, at some point, you stop noticing.
"The very definition of it working is that it is going to feel normal," Tung said. "It's going to feel like a normal person driving."
Since it went up on YouTube, Tung's livestream has received a few upgrades. After The Verge wrote about Tung's stream, Verkada, a security camera company, reached out and upgraded Tung's DIY set-up with high-tech surveillance equipment that allows her to zoom in on license plates. The company also gave her a Mac Mini.
"It's basically the scariest camera I've ever seen," she said.
All that high-tech equipment is being put to good use. Tung can provide a better close-up of each Waymo's entrance and exit, and the clarity of the video feed allows Tung to track each Waymo.
Viewers soon got the option to name a Waymo for $10.
"People anthropomorphized them. Somebody named one 'Christine,' after the killer car," Tung said, referring to John Carpenter's 1983 Stephen King adaptation about a bloodthirsty Plymouth Fury. "When Christine doesn't show up in the lot for two or three days, people are like, 'Oh, she must be hiding.'"
Some people started to get competitive in the comment section about whose car was showing up more, Tung said, so the engineer put up a leaderboard.
Every hour, a digital goose will also pop up somewhere on the screen — an homage to the once-honking cars, the engineer said.
Tung's neighbors told NBC Bay Area that the cars would honk as early as four in the morning. Tung said Waymo has since resolved the problem.
The future is here, as Waymo advertises. It's not so remarkable, but at least it's very chill.