A self-driving Waymo car has been repeatedly getting stuck on a dead-end road in Shoreditch, east London, waking residents in the early hours. Footage shows the white Jaguar SUV attempting to reverse out of Elder Street at 4:15am, mounting the curb as it struggles to turn around.
Residents reported that a Waymo car encountered trouble on the same street three times within a week. The vehicle made loud humming and beeping noises during its attempts to perform a three-point turn. One resident, Chris, posted on social media: “That’s three times this week you’ve driven a car with a driver in it down the end of a dead end street then reversed and woken up everyone in the street.”
Another clip shows two residents shouting at the driver inside the stationary Waymo car. A Waymo spokesperson 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.”
Currently, UK law requires a driver to be present inside the vehicle during testing. Waymo, owned by Alphabet, has faced other issues in London, including a driverless taxi driving through a crime scene in west London last month, though the company said it was being manually driven at the time.
In the US, Waymo vehicles have also encountered difficulties, including a cat killed in San Francisco in October and accusations of illegally passing school buses. The cars use four sensor systems—vision, radar, microphone, and lidar—to make real-time decisions.
