Driverless cars keep neighbors awake in San Francisco: Why are they honking at each other all night?

Residents of San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood have been experiencing sleepless nights due to a noisy new neighbor. Waymo rented a parking lot between high-rise buildings off 2nd Street near Harrison for their driverless taxi cars to rest in while not in use.

However, one of the safety features installed in the vehicles to help avoid slow-motion crashes has resulted in the cars honking at each other for the past several weeks. While the honking at different levels occurs on a daily basis it has been reaching a fevered pitch during evening rush hours and most annoyingly around 4 am, residents told the local NBC Bay Area News.

Driverless cars keep neighbors awake in San Francisco: Why are they honking at each other all night?

“We started out with a couple of honks here and there, and then as more and more cars started to arrive, the situation got worse,” said Christopher Cherry. He lives in a building next door to the lot and said that he was “really excited” when he heard that Waymo would be a new neighbor.

However, the honking from the robotaxis is “very distracting during the work day, but most importantly it wakes you up at four in the morning,” he explained.

Residents’ videos show the Waymo cars attempting to back into parking spots as they pour into the lot causing them to honk at each other. “The cars are robotic and they’re honking at each other and there’s no one in the cars when it’s happening, and that’s absurd,” Cherry lamented.

“I think the most frustrating thing about this is that there is just nobody to talk to, and even at the corporate level, I am finding it difficult, not impossible,” Randol White told NBC Bay Area News. While he laughs at the situation, he says: “It’s not so funny when you’re not getting a good night’s rest.”

Residents reached out to Waymo to inform them of the situation to ask them to fix the issue. The Verge reports that the robotaxi company has released a software update to solve the “honkfest” and provide some relief to their SoMa neighbors.

“We recently introduced a useful feature to help avoid low speed collisions by honking if other cars get too close while reversing toward us,” said Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli. “It has been working great in the city, but we didn’t quite anticipate it would happen so often in our own parking lots.”

“We’ve updated the software, so our electric vehicles should keep the noise down for our neighbors moving forward,” he said.