Splat!

In and around Phoenix Arizona, Waymo’s self-driving vehicles still aren’t exactly popular.

The autonomous vehicle (AV) developer, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has been using Phoenix as its for years now — where the self-driving minivans have been the subject of eggings, shouting matches, and other spats with locals, the . Maybe it’s just road rage, but , those locals might be heroes might also be viewed as launching pre-emptive strikes to quell a future robot uprising.

Classic Prank

The Phoenix New Times lists several accounts of anti-AV violence, including one guy driving around in a black car egging several of Waymo’s vehicles. Another person threw an ice-cream cone through a Waymo van’s open window.

Yet another ran up to scream at the driver and break the van’s mirror — though to be fair, that person have thought Waymo was responsible for hitting a dog that was already in the street.

Insider Scoop

Back in 2019, Futurism who periodically used Waymo’s robot taxi service, Waymo One. They detailed similar anti-robot sentiments, like drivers refusing to let the self-driving van merge into lanes or succumbing to disproportionate levels of road rage against the occasionally buggy system’s shortcomings.

That is to say that these anti-robot sentiments aren’t new, nor are they necessarily isolated incidents. And, as that Waymo One passenger put it, “people are dicks.”

READ MORE: [Jalopnik]

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