Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere

The $100 billion invested in the driverless-vehicles industry has mostly taken us in circles, according to an emerging consensus of experts-and the Trump-pardoned guy who invented it

- Max Chafkin

The first car woke Jennifer King at 2 a.m. with a loud, high-pitched hum. “It sounded like a hovercraft,” she says, and that wasn’t the weird part. King lives on a dead-end street at the edge of the Presidio, a 1,500-acre park in San Francisco where through traffic isn’t a thing. Outside she saw a white Jaguar SUV backing out of her driveway. It had what looked like a giant fan on its roof—a laser sensor—and bore the logo of Google’s driverless car division, Waymo.

She was observing what looked like a glitch in the self-driving software: The car seemed to be using her property to execute a three-point turn. This would’ve been no biggie, she says, if it had happened once. But dozens of Google cars began doing the exact thing, many times, every single day.

King complained to Google that the cars were driving her nuts, but the K-turns kept coming. Sometimes a few of the SUVs would show up at the same time and form a little line, like an army of zombie driver’s-ed students. The whole thing went on for weeks until last October, when King called the local CBS affiliate and a news crew broadcast the scene. “It is kind of funny when you watch it,” the report began. “And the neighbors are certainly noticing.” Soon after, King’s driveway was hers again.