Waymo Money, Waymo Problems

THE FIRST TIME I NOTICED a delivery robot in Echo Park, where I live, I decided to follow it.

It was the end of June. Immigration arrests tripled that month compared with the same period in 2024. Los Angeles was rattled from the heightened presence of federal law enforcement. A few weeks earlier, people had gathered downtown to protest the ICE raids on restaurants, car washes, and other worksites. Hundreds had taken to the streets in solidarity with communities facing detention and deportation, and some of the most widely shared images from these demonstrations showed Waymo vehicles tagged with graffiti and set aflame. It was around this same time that the autonomous ride-hail service, a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, expanded its geo-fenced area to include my neighborhood.

Los Angeles was being used as a “test case,” Mayor Karen Bass said in response to the thousands of members of the National Guard and hundreds of marines who occupied the city over the summer. You could say the same about the presence of these robots and robo-taxis popping up on the roadway by my apartment just as Echo Park was growing quiet. The historically Latino neighborhood, a dense mix of longtime residents and creative-class gentrifiers, was a target of the raids. Many people here had been afraid to leave their homes.

The delivery droid was right at my feet almost as soon as I stepped out for a walk. I’d seen ones like it before on the Westside and downtown: little boxes on wheels with blinking lights. They jerk to accelerate and make clanking sounds like a remote-controlled toy you’d find at Radio Shack circa 1985. There are a few companies that operate these robots locally, but this little guy I recognized, with its flamingo-colored outer shell, was built by Coco Robotics.

It raced up the sidewalk on Echo Park Avenue and headed straight toward a young woman dressed in shorts and tall boots who was walking with a friend in the opposite direction. She laughed until she realized the robot wouldn’t alter its course and stepped out of the way. Another standoff unfolded in short order, involving a man who held his palms out from his chest as though bracing for a collision. This time, the robot stopped, braking abruptly, which forced the man to skip to the right in order to recover his stride. As soon as the path was clear, the robot resumed its mission to dispatch the pizza or dandan noodles or whatever it was that somebody up the street had ordered.

On Reddit, people grumble about similar encounters with the Coco robots. “I’m fine with them when they gtfo of the way of an ACTUAL living resident going about their day, but when they suddenly pause in the middle of the sidewalk and your only option is to step into traffic [it] is fucking infuriating,” writes one denizen of r/AskLosAngeles. Another expressed a variation of the same complaint, writing that “I don’t feel like I should have to jump into the poop filled grass to move out of the way for a robot that only takes up less than half of the width [of the sidewalk], but wants to drive in the middle.”

I mentioned the incident I observed to Zach Rash, a cofounder of Coco Robotics, when I went to visit the company’s Venice mothership in August. Coco had just raised $80 million from angel investors, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, but it was still operating from a garage on a street off Abbot Kinney. Delivery robots filed from the building onto an outside parking lot. I steered my car into a narrow space, nervous that I might hit one of them.

Rash told me the robots always yield to pedestrians, and I said that didn’t match up with what I had observed on Echo Park Avenue. While he did not dispute my account, he countered with a more expansive definition of the word yield than I might use. “If the pedestrian moved to the side, it will go,” he insisted. “If they yield to us, we’ll go. Otherwise, we’ll sit there forever. So you do need to coexist on the sidewalks.” I thought again about the two people who moved aside for the robot. It was a narrow sidewalk and, in both cases, a crash had looked imminent. “Did it move at a slower speed?” he asked me. It did, I answered. The kerfuffle, it turns out, demonstrates what the company calls the “cone of politeness.” The objects have been programmed to slow down in the presence of humans and to stop before hitting them. I asked what would happen if someone in a wheelchair required the full width of a sidewalk. “It will clear out of the way,” he said. “And if it cannot, because there’s not enough sidewalk width, the operators are trained to take over, turn around, and find the next carve-out where it can fit.”

By operators, Rash means humans, who are threaded through what only appears to be “artificial intelligence.” Though AI companies from Waymo to OpenAI pay remote contractors to do work that otherwise appears to be executed without human assistance, very few openly acknowledge the role that these workers play in the production chain. Coco Robotics is unusual in this regard and even publicizes the fact that its delivery robots are piloted by tele-operators—the company actively hires workers with experience playing video games like Mario Kart.

Repeatedly in other interviews with the media, Rash talks about the machines as a strategy to get cars off the road. A Coco robot, he pointed out, is “lighter and slower” than an automobile; it “doesn’t require parking [and] requires a lot less energy, less noise pollution, less emissions.” Los Angeles is an ideal city in which to deploy Cocos, he told me, because of “how built everything is around cars. Like, the first step of solving that is you need to give people an alternative to a car.” It’s an argument that rings hollow and sounds reminiscent of the talking points that Travis VanderZanden, founder of Bird scooters, used to recite, before the company—once the fastest start-up to reach the “unicorn” $1 billion valuation—went bankrupt. “Cities today are built around cars, but they aren’t built to handle the volume of driving that happens,” VanderZanden said in an interview with the Sequoia Capital blog in 2019. “Our society is kind of built around cars, and cars can be dangerous,” he told The Verge the year before. Much like Coco robots today, Bird undermined its support for pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods by clogging up city sidewalks.

RASH AND COFOUNDER Brad Squicciarini picked “Coco” from a list of popular names for a dog. To some people, the down-market R2-D2s can be quite cute, even as there are no surface-level anthropomorphic qualities to cling to. But to my mind, it’s their failure-state that is endearing. Delivery robots are pitiable. The night I followed the robot around Echo Park, it stumbled into a tree pit in the sidewalk and tried over and over to return to the pavement, attracting a small crowd in the process. Whatever pity I felt for the struggling robot was abstracted empathy for the actual person somewhere—maybe Finland, maybe the Philippines—who had to have been navigating it out of distress.

Over a century of science fiction has ruminated on the boundaries of sentience. Could humanity—or something like it—emerge from actuators and plastic as it does from flesh and blood? Fewer works have contemplated what it might mean to be one of or live among the sort of human-automation centaurs colonizing LA’s streets and sidewalks.

Among the exceptions is Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008), a prescient film depicting workers in Tijuana who act as long-distance puppeteers of robots across fortressed borders. They pick oranges and drive cabs remotely; they even watch children as robot nannies. “We give the United States what they’ve always wanted,” says a character in the tele-ops factory. “All the work without the workers.” Such jobs aren’t exactly a piece of cake in person either, which the director understands. “Picking oranges in a field under the hot sun is miserable. I wouldn’t personally want to do that work nor have my child do it,” Rivera told me. When he got the idea to make a film about tele-migrants, he thought about how the technology would be deployed in a capitalist labor market. Under a political system based on justice and progressive social values, sure, maybe remote-controlled robots could spare humans from working in undesirable and unsafe conditions. But in the near-future dystopia Sleep Dealer depicts, the mirage of automation is a coercive tool to extract value from workers and cast their humanity aside.

Today the director regularly sees delivery robots and robo-taxis outside his office in downtown LA. The film, Rivera told me, has now made its way into start-up pitch decks; one tech CEO even claimed that it had been an inspiration for the remote labor force his company employs in the Global South to operate robots in the Global North. The difference in real life is that the gestures and activities of remote workers are captured as data to one day train their AI replacements. “That’s beyond Sleep Dealer,” Rivera said. He never imagined when he made the film that workers could be trapped in a “training exercise to de-employ themselves.”

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with the New York Times podcast Hard Fork, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana denied employing a Sleep Dealer–esque labor force. “We do not do tele-operations,” she said. “We do not do remote driving. It is all onboard software systems.” Mawakana’s comments contradict a filing by Waymo with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) just this year. In its request to expand its Northern California service area to include San Jose, the company even cited the remote workers in its automation chain as a critical safety feature. According to the public documents, tele-operators “are able to remotely move” Waymo vehicles in the event that automation software fails. Remote assistants also help with navigation. Workers monitor the AV and set waypoints for the car to follow whenever its sensors and software get stumped. In May, the CPUC approved Waymo’s expansion, highlighting as a factor in its decision the “aspects of its operations involving humans [that] minimize risk.” (Waymo did not respond to my request for comment.)

A Waymo AV moves through the synthesis of computation and disavowed human labor with far less grace than the inescapable advertising campaigns would have you believe. Passengers have found themselves trapped in malfunctioning cars without clear or immediate assistance. The abundance of errant Waymos—stopping where they shouldn’t, driving against traffic, instigating traffic jams—reveals both the present limits of AI and the overextension of tele-ops teams. If too few workers are monitoring too many cars at a time, there is no software solution: The company needs to hire more humans.

Waymo’s white Jaguars appear pristine on the road—another illusion that dissolves if you look down or inside. The wheels, for instance, are often corroded with grime and brake dust; on social media, you’ll find a number of people speculating about why the lower halves of robo-taxis look straight out of Mad Max. From personal experience, I know that the interiors of the autonomous vehicles can be downright squalid. Once, in a Waymo, I noticed a mud-colored splotch on the backseat. I got out and entered the car from the opposite side. Another time, I ordered a Waymo from my apartment to LACMA in Mid-Wilshire seven miles away. The car smelled like cigarettes, and there were crumbs all over the seats and the floor pans. I had failed to buckle up properly before starting the ride. When I reached for my seatbelt, I noticed the previous passenger left it outstretched in a tangled mess. It took me a moment to get strapped in and all the while the vehicle beeped incessantly to alert me to my infraction. Once that was settled, I tapped on the passenger screen to turn off the default midtempo hotel lobby music.

Smoking, vaping, and drinking alcohol are not allowed in Waymo cars. Neither is sex, presumably, although it isn’t explicitly forbidden in the terms of service, just alluded to, as the sort of “inappropriate” conduct that could get a user suspended. There are cameras surveilling your every move, but no indication of who or what reviews the footage. When I rolled the windows down for fresh air, I wondered what else a passenger could get away with in here.

If a Waymo is really grubby, my main recourse is to snitch on the previous passengers. Riders are encouraged to report dirty cars “ASAP,” and those found guilty of making a mess will get hit with a $100 cleaning charge. But what happens when a Waymo commits a moving violation or gets in a fender bender? As Marina Watanabe recently reported for LA Taco, “Autonomous vehicles can’t be held accountable if something goes wrong. When a Waymo blows past a stop sign or illegally stops in a red zone, by design, there is no driver present to take responsibility.” The article calls attention to a state law going into effect in 2026, demanding that all AVs have human operators available to talk with emergency response officials over a dedicated telephone line. Still, the core issue of responsibility that Watanabe raises in her piece remains unsettled: When a Waymo screws up, who takes the blame for it?

In response to criticism, Waymo cites its low accident rates, but this data is skewed—unlike human drivers, who traverse through all kinds of obstacles and weather, Waymo robo-taxis do not (yet) drive on freeways, and they stay within geo-fenced districts that the company selected as testing grounds. Meanwhile, this charade of AI obscures how Alphabet, a private company, has over decades acquired unprecedented control over public roads. Google Map sat-nav and geospatial data already commands how traffic flows and how public alerts on wildfires and mudslides are shared, among other facets of city infrastructure. The way it amassed this power, behind the spectacle and novelty of Google Street View and Google Earth, anticipated the present-day rollout of the Waymo AVs.

THAT JUNE EVENING, I continued to follow the Coco robot after it fulfilled its mission. I was curious to see where it had come from. Crowds of pedestrians on Sunset parted to let it pass. Finally, the Coco stopped in front of a massive ghost kitchen complex south of Dodger Stadium. Inside, twenty-six restaurants that exist only on DoorDash and Grubhub cook food for takeout customers in shared facilities.

In our interview, Rash laid out his ideal use case for Coco: Its robots would relieve congestion in strip mall parking lots where “there’s twenty drivers picking up food and the restaurant workers trying to manage both [delivery and dine-in customers].” He insisted that the company collaborated extensively with local establishments, but here at the end of the trail, I found myself at a space that’s the opposite of the sort of Jonathan Gold–approved mom-and-pop that Rash had implied.

Echo Park Eats is part of CloudKitchens, an “optimized” network of “delivery-only concepts” headed by Uber founder Travis Kalanick. The influx of traffic to the location has been a scourge on the neighborhood; residents never anticipated that a de facto distribution center would open on their block. But “from a driver’s perspective, it’s great because you don’t have to worry about getting a ticket or where to park,” said Lili Romero, who has been a gig worker on platforms like Uber Eats. The ghost kitchen compound has a streamlined pickup process: The drivers don’t even need to talk to anyone—delivery bags and boxes are waiting for them in lockers. It’s a setup primed for robots.

In the long run, “I think all of our driving days are numbered,” said Romero, who has also driven for Lyft. She grew up in Salinas, where on-farm robotics has upended the region, and predicts a similar disruption through the mass adoption of robo-taxis and delivery robots. Agricultural companies in the Central Valley, she told me, “haven’t been that vocal coming out against the ICE raids because they’re assuming that they’ll be able to automate farmwork.”

Delivery robots and driverless vehicles emerged from the pandemic, with Coco Robotics founded in 2020, the same year that Waymo launched its robo-taxi service. This is quarantine technology: Sit in the backseat of a contact-free vehicle that will transport you to wherever you need to go. Or don’t leave your home. Order tikka masala from a ghost kitchen; it will materialize at your door with the press of a button on your phone. These products further warp the coronavirus class divide: With machines (however remotely assisted) where essential workers used to be, those who WFH are ever more shielded from strangers beneath their tax bracket. More ghost kitchens are likely to haunt LA, and cash-only taco trucks will become harder to find. Right now, as day laborers, garment workers, fruit vendors, and others have been ripped from their families and communities, the technology is a moving symbol of the city being cleansed of its immigrants, its working class, its life.