Her livestream of honking robotaxis got Waymo to fix them. But that’s not where the story ends

Sophia Tung stood at her living room window in San Francisco’s SoMa neighbourhood, gazing down at the parking lot she has livestreamed for more than a month.

There, far below her 13th floor condo, lives a fleet of Waymo electric robotaxis. Since they first arrived in late July, neighbours like Tung have enjoyed watching the boxy white cars shuttle themselves on and off Second Street. But for a 2 1/2-week stretch last month, the Waymos became a tech nightmare, honking at each other for hours every night.

“The future showed up where I live,” Tung said. “It wasn’t always fun.”

Since then, what started as an attempt to make light of the frustrating situation – dozens of noisy Waymos waking up Tung and her South of Market neighbours in the wee hours – has become something much bigger. Three-plus weeks after Tung’s viral livestream helped pressure Waymo into getting its vehicles to stop their infernal racket, thousands of people spanning the globe still visit her 24/7 feed daily to watch the autonomous cars manoeuvre.

At any given moment, that livestream might have spectators from three or four continents vibing out to soft hip-hop beats while they chat about artificial intelligence, the future of self-driving cars and the feed’s funniest Waymo moments. In a sense, Tung’s livestream offers visitors a bird’s-eye view of modern tech’s growing pains.

Perhaps more importantly, Tung, 28, has fostered an online community for robotaxi enthusiasts who don’t have the luxury of seeing Waymo’s white Jaguar I-Pace vehicles in person. Fifteen years after it was first conceived as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, Waymo provides commercial ride-hailing service in only three cities: San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

“In San Francisco, we’re used to seeing the driverless vehicles,” said Randol White, who lives in the building next to Tung’s. “For the vast number of people that live in this country and abroad, this livestream is a window into these driverless cars.”

The livestream’s popularity also speaks to Tung’s diligence. A former software engineer at Twitter (now X), she has become borderline obsessive about improving her parking lot feed.

Earlier this month, Tung smiled as she showed a reporter the state-of-the-art setup in her living room: two surveillance cameras given to her by a security company and a 55-inch digital whiteboard displaying her livestream and its visitor data. Several moderators monitor the online discussion, dispelling misinformation and quashing any contentious political debates.

In recent weeks, Tung has earned some extra cash charging people US$10 (RM43) apiece to name their own Waymo vehicles. Tung and her team maintain a detailed spreadsheet with those names, activity in the lot, notable screenshots of the livestream, and ideas to make the experience even more entertaining.

“Do you see that?” Tung asked, pointing toward animation in the bottom right corner of the livestream of a goose stealing toilet paper from a portable toilet. “One of my moderators came up with that, and it plays every hour. It’s just fun, you know?”

Such features offer a stark contrast to the livestream’s modest beginnings.

On the morning of July 28, Tung awoke to find Waymo had taken over the parking lot in front of her condo near the corner of Second and Harrison streets. Every day around 2am, dozens of Waymo’s white sedans jolted to life and tried to exit the lot at the same time. As they became gridlocked, they started honking their horns to angle for position. A similar scene unfolded around 4am when the taxis returned.

In early August, after waking several nights in a row to the cacophony, Tung knew she needed to do something. With only a small webcam, an old mini PC and a cereal box to help limit glare, she assembled a 24-hour YouTube feed of the Waymo lot.

In addition to setting the livestream to chill hip-hop beats, she gave it a humorously cumbersome name: “LoFi Waymo Hip Hop Radio Self Driving Taxi Depot Shenanigans to Relax/Study To.” Even if no one else watched it, Tung told herself, at least she would have something to put on in the background when she couldn’t sleep.

Tung was hardly the only SoMa resident desperate for Waymo to end the nightly nuisance. But her next-door neighbour, a former community organiser named Chris Cherry, knew that companies often don’t respond to complaints until the issue gets media attention.

His first TikTok video of the parking lot’s chaotic 4am scene quickly gained millions of views. The Verge, a tech media site, soon posted a story about Tung’s livestream, which rippled through the blogosphere and prompted a prominent German outlet also to cover it. Within a few days, Tung had done interviews with Good Morning America, the New York Times and numerous other big-time media.

That’s when Waymo really seemed to take action. Its director of product and operations, Vishay Nihalani, paid a visit to Tung’s livestream to explain the honking issue – the cars weren’t programmed to recognise other Waymos – and apologise to the parking lot’s neighbours. Days later, after a software update finally ended the late-night honking, Waymo threw an ice-cream party in front of Tung’s building to celebrate.

“More than anything, I think it’s a story about community action,” Cherry said. “With my TikTok going viral and Sophia’s livestream going viral, we were able to put pressure on this big company.”

Tung’s YouTube subscribers have multiplied 30-fold – from about 120 to more than 3,500 – since her feed went live. At the livestream’s peak last month, it often boasted more than 400 viewers at any given time, many from as far away as France and Japan.

It wasn’t hard to see what was hooking them. Lured by the kind of humans-vs-robots story that’s tailor-made for social media, visitors to Tung’s livestream found near-constant reminders that AI remains in its relative infancy.

Even with the honking problem now resolved, those SoMa robotaxis often seem clumsy as they negotiate their movements. The mere sight of a nearby Waymo vehicle could send one of the fleet’s cars awkwardly shuffling backward.

Regular visitors to Tung’s livestream have compared the mesmerising interplay between self-driving taxis to watching a fish tank or a Roomba vacuum. Viewers are lulled into an almost-meditative state, their eyes transfixed as the vehicles decipher patterns and navigate obstacles under the direction of their software algorithms.

“There’s something kind of relaxing about it,” White said.

As Tung sat at her dining table on a recent Thursday afternoon, she leaned back in her chair and stared at her GoogleJamboard. There, in the screen’s top right corner, was that day’s number of unique visitors: 2,953.

Many users keep going back for the community Tung has built, not the robotaxis. After Mauricio Teixeira – a cloud engineer in Raleigh, N.C., and one of Tung’s moderators – discovered the livestream last month, he often spent four hours a day chatting with visitors on other continents.

“It’s really interesting to learn about how all of this stuff is perceived in Europe and other parts of the world,” Teixeira said. “It’s so much better than reading online articles because you can ask people, ‘What is the feeling on the street? What is the feeling of the community over there?’”

Phil Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University and autonomous vehicles expert, said he isn’t surprised to see that Tung’s livestream has generated so much discussion. Waymo’s official tagline – “Most Experienced Driver” – sets such a high standard that the company is ripe for criticism whenever it endures even minor setbacks, such as late-night honking symphonies.

Though Waymo now completes more than 100,000 rides each week in its three test cities, Koopman estimated the company will probably need at least an additional five years before customers can truly gauge the safety of its cars. In the meantime, he said, “Every time there’s a headline or photo of a robotaxi acting stupid, it undercuts their marketing strategy.”

Almost every movement in the SoMa lot is logged in Tung’s spreadsheet, which could make Waymo executives nervous. Another viral robotaxi moment is only one gaffe away.

“I’d like to stay in this unit as long as I can,” said Tung, who has lived in her condo with her boyfriend, Wing Lam, for three years. “But if we do move, I might have to make sure we have a clause ensuring that whoever moves in after us doesn’t touch the livestream.” – The San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service