My Friend Might Not Win His Robot Taxi Bet After All
Multiple Waymos were torched in downtown Los Angeles by the mostly peaceful protesters.
As I may have mentioned once or twice over the last quarter century, a friend of mine in Santa Monica, a self-driving car optimist, made a bet in 2000 with a self-driving car pessimist that on New Year’s Eve 2025, he’d be able to call a robot taxi to take them and their wives out to dinner. The odds have swung back and forth over the last 25 years, and as recently as 2023, he estimated his chances of winning as under 50%.
Over the last year, however, Google has put 300 of its $160,000 Waymo robot taxicabs in service over an 18 mile wide expanse from the Santa Monica pier to downtown Los Angeles. Last night on broad Venice Boulevard, I saw three empty Waymos drive by in a row. So, assuming Google continues to subsidize its Waymo pilot program in Los Angeles, he will win in six months.
Today, however, some mostly peaceful protesters summoned several Waymos via the app to their anti-deportation riot in DTLA and set them on fire. I’m thinking about five have been destroyed, but I don’t have confirmation of the number.
If I were Google, I might be thinking hard about moving the Los Angeles Waymos to, say, Las Vegas.
That said, I’m not sure what the terms of the bet are. Is it that they must order a robot taxi in Santa Monica? Or can it be anywhere in America? Or in the world?
The protests seem like a collection of disaffected people. From photos, I've seen Luigi hats (the guy who killed the healthcare CEO), trans people, gangbanger types. It's a loser party and everyone is invited. They don't seem to have coherent ideals besides "my life sucks and it's your fault." The LA protests are also sharing the news with the Gaza flotilla. The flotilla attracted Thunberg, with her bloodhound nose for publicity, and various other losers. I watched some videos taken by people on the boats: the boats seem to be full of the kind of people who might expound at length about crystals or why mushrooms will save the world. There's just a lot of unstable people out there these days.
Tomorrow at LA Improv, "Waymo? More like Flamo, amirite?!"